My AAA aneurysm

When I lie down on my back and reach across my abdomen a bit to the left side, I am able to detect my heart beat quite easily. In February of 2023 I found out that I can do this so easily because I have a Triple-A aneurysm there -- an Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm. This is a ballooning of the aorta that comes down from the heart on its way to the legs and the lower body. Because it is rather large as such things go, we know that it is old and likely growing pretty fast now. Of course, the problem with balloons ballooning is that they burst.

Since looking at that likely near future entails its own problems, I have been rather preoccupied by those since February and have only now, in early March of 2023, come to a personally peaceful resolution of the problems. One problem for me is just letting others know what's happening with me, and so I'm starting the blog to do that, and to offer those who are interested in knowing more a chance to find out by reading as much as they like of the posts I intend to make subsequent to this first one.

AAA Options

Following up and Moving on

     At eighty-nine now I'm a lot closer to my place of rest than I was back with Grandmother in nineteen thirty-six or seven. In that childhood west of Joplin then I can still hear my grandmother crooning soothing lullaby to me as she walks around the house holding me in her arms. The last and still lingering with me remnants of the cocoon.

     My other memories mostly center around the imaginal process of the dissolving caterpillar creating its own butterfly. An early instance has me careening down a big hill on my new, first bike -- imagining a Superman sort of takeoff soon but discovering that a bike without coaster brakes spins those pedals mighty fast on the way down a steep hill. The spill on that hill corrected my imagining smartly without doing much damage to my limber young body, and it also set the pattern for my future imaginings in the absence of a father's minding presence.

This young lad is about to discover that the heavy door before him swings inward.

    We construct our lives out of discoveries like that, and certainly we all run into doors that open the wrong way. It makes a difference to be in a chrysalis rather than a cocoon, and just what kind of either we are in nourishes and shapes the stories we grow into. So does the fierceness and inventive flexibility of our intentionality. I have a lot of hope for the guy.

     I photographed him and his father at Prescott's Wild Iris Cafe sometime in the early 2020's. I would go there often for the ambiance, as we say, for the connectedness and windings in with others that arise to envelop us from time to time while still leaving us free to read our paper or chat with our friends. And I still do, but this musing is not a memoir, nor do I want it to be an endless mulling over of the last lines of Milton's Paradise Lost. So I'll finish up for now by quoting them from this source and emphasizing a line or two myself.

                                                .... whereat

In either hand the hastning Angel caught

Our lingring Parents, and to th' Eastern Gate

Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast

To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer'd. 

They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld

Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,

Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate

With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes: 

Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;

The World was all before them, where to choose

Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,

Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

Metamorphosis without cocoon

I am writing this on paper with a pen at the Century Lounge on Cortez Street in Prescott, Arizona in late February of 2025.

It is a cafe I visit from time to time, but I had to get up and go look at the door to recall the name. This is what it's like when you make your metamorphosis without a cocoon.

    The cocoon, as I understand it from friend Brenda Lin, who says she heard it from her mother at a young age, is spun by silk worms out of themselves as one long strand of wrapping up into the cocoon.

    She talks about strands and wrappers and umbilical cords in an engaging essay on connectedness in family that is filled with texture, textiles, and the baby's shove of shoulders in the womb. Across four generations.

    That's why I'm writing with a pen on paper -- there is a feel and a drag to it. Tactile. The sort of thing that links and connects in small ways that are important in large ways not usually seen, which is what Brenda writes about.

    Thinking about my own links and connections, I see that I am more like the Monarch flutterby. Not in the way of regal, of course, but for sure in the way of the imaginal.

That's the name the lepidopterists give to the mysterious soup the caterpillar dissolves into after it hangs itself up on a milkweed somewhere and grows its hard-shell chrysalis. Inside that womb, the caterpillar dissolves into a soup of good stuff and its imaginal cells, who figure out just what butterfly they want to make out of this stuff, and then after some shoulder pushing, out they come as the Monarch.

    The tricky part for me, all wrapped up in this metaphor, is to get back home again. We know that the butterfly has a pretty tough time of it, traveling for three or four months as much as three thousand miles down to its great-grandmother's home tree in Mexico, a place she left half a year ago, but where it's never been before.

    My dissolution came in the Great Depression, in 1936 or '37, when I was a year old and my father's still persisting ice-cream shop in Joplin, Missouri dissolved into nothing he owned anymore, and he and my mother decided to head out for Phoenix to look for work. They left me in the care of my mother's mother, whose husband had just passed away, over the state line in Galena, Kansas. This left me without imaginals and I had to make do with my imagination.

 

 

That's me, not long out of the cocoon. My mother and the ice-cream store are in the background, and my life lies all before me, where to find my place of rest.

Why it feels so good to be as good as dead

(I wrote this back in March of 23 when I first got my AAA diagnosis. I update its date so that it appears now as the first thing readers see when they come here.)

The thing is you suddenly feel utterly free from all the fix'em/get'em thoughts.

Fix what you did wrong and fix what or who did you wrong or others or the world.

Suddenly  you have Beginner's Mind. You see that thing that happened, but you are someone looking at it (regarding, as Ekhart Tolle says, your pain body from a higher place). You see it less personally. You see it as that thing those people suffered or you suffered, and you who did that thing or suffered that thing are one of the people there.

This is a freeing perspective, seeing how you felt and how they felt, and not feeling shame or anger. You just see it with a certain sympathetic resonance.

And something like that perspective carries over to where you are now. You can feel that way not just for the happy toddler, say, but for the guy sitting across the table from you or anguishing by himself across the room. Or the gal. It's nice.

Tara Brach calls this attitude loving awareness, and it looks to me very much the same as what Ram Dass calls coming to the world with loving attention.

up-date

A persistent minor ache in the shoulder led me last evening to do both a Bemer treatment with shoulder focus and a DMSO rub on the area.

As before the DMSO appeared to work an almost immediate reduction, and no doubt the Bemer also helped.

This morning it's like nothing had ever happened.

My gut tells me it was mostly the DMSO. But I have had many very successful treatments for minor stuff with the Bemer only. DMSO is a new arrival in my house.

Here's something to post about, for a change.

Around 5.30 pm today as I was preparing to wash up a very few dishes, I noticed a sudden odd sort of pain in my left arm. New to me. A hurt and minor tingling from the shoulder down through the upper arm and somewhat into the forearm. As it continued instead of disappearing, I became concerned. Thought, Oh, this may be the start of my AAA bursting, but wait, I don't want to die on the floor of the kitchen. And of course I shook it around a bit, but the pain, which was minor but real, remained.

So I quickly grabbed my cell phone and moved upstairs to my nice big, warm bedroom with the rose carpet there and in the bathroom. Much better. And then I thought, Well, no, not the AAA but more likely an embolism or a heart attack. Probably a clot forming, not a heart attack because no chest pain or strain. Good thing it's the left arm, not the right.

Off to the bathroom then to do something. Took off my clothes and decided to paint with my wife's large paint brush (for Chinese water color, not very big) some DMSO all over the shoulder, upper arm and some of the lower. Oddly, that did not itch much at all, but it had a practically immediate effect of lessening the pain. Not much tingling going on. Then I thought to take a pill of lumbrokinase. Dr. Mercola's. He thinks it's better than nattokinase. Maybe I can insert a photo later.

So back to bedroom to lie down and wait, to rest the arm. I lay on my right side and wrapped around a nice pillow there. Good feeling. Pain persisted. I ran nice images through my head of the Dr. William Bengston kind that I have used before, sometimes successfully.

But then I remembered that I had my Bemer pads just on the other side of the bed, and I should definitely use those. But they were on top of the covers. Didn't want to get up and move around. Stayed maybe ten minutes and then did get up to give that a try, 20 minutes at a 3 setting, the highest. But I've done this setting before. Wrapped my upper left arm with it. Maybe it helped.

Now, feeling better, I thought to go back downstairs and retrieve my various items for spending the rest of the evening upstairs. Laptop, some warm coffee.

Then I thought it would be great to take a hot shower. Did that. It did feel good. Now the pain is down maybe to only 10% of what it was. But it persists. And I am writing this blog. I started at about 8 pm.

Just testing how this works after a year

 Hello, this is pretty straight-forward.

Well, I've been watching The Telepathy Tapes by Ky Dickens. Here's a link to her podcast:

https://www.youtube.com/@TheTelepathyTapes

I chose to listen to the ten items in order from 1 to 10. Afterwords I decided to purchase access to some video of the non-speakers' testing from Dickens' website.

The effect of careful listening was to draw me in very close to what was happening. The sense of personal closeness with the people making the documentary and the people being documented was quite strong. This way things seemed real rather than reported.