Finding Balance

Things are starting to settle down and settle into a routine this semester. We are now five weeks down, eight weeks to go, and I can hardly believe the semester is almost half over (ish). It has taken some time to get back into the swing of things after having a relatively slow summer, work wise, and I still feel like I'm trying to figure out how to balance everything.

Last fall, Jeff and I had a fairly strict routine out of necessity. This fall, there is a bit more wiggle room with things, because I am much more independent. In a way, this makes things harder. There is more that I can do, more options, and therefore more pressures and choices about how I spend my time. At work, how much time do I spend on teaching versus research? On any individual task versus the many other tasks I have to choose from? And then, the question of how much time do I spend working? What counts as time spent working? If I am at home, reading news stories on my phone, and then happen to get and respond to a work-related email, is that work? Not really, but perhaps it's not exactly relaxing either. And when it comes to allocating my limited energy, how much should be spent on physically demanding tasks like focused exercise and how much should be saved to keep a reserve?

I am finding this last question to be the hardest in some ways. The other things I have practice with, years worth of practice going back to the beginning of grad school, and as is the case with many other things that one practices a lot it is getting easier. For example, two weeks ago I realized I was seriously overdoing it just with regard to how my Mondays were structured with teaching, and I have effectively implemented a plan that seems to be working. But in the past, it has always been the case that choosing exercise over couch-potatoing ended up leading to more energy and feeling better. Now, a certain amount of exercise will lead to feeling better, but too much exercise will lead to exhaustion and the deterioration of some of my physical abilities.

For the past six months or so, my physical therapist has been encouraging me to be careful about overdoing it with regard to exercise, work, and in general with how I fill my time. I have been taking her suggestions to heart, and part of this has meant spending a lot less time on focused exercise (by which I mean everything from doing an ab work out at home, to riding a stationary bike at the gym, to going for a bike ride outside). But now I'm starting to think that I need to get back into a regular exercise routine, because I think I can handle a little bit more than I could have a few months ago. At the same time, there is no way to really know what the limit is except to cross it, so upping my activity level will undoubtedly mean some days of overdoing it. Again, it's the problem of trying to hit a moving target.

But that's just life, isn't it? I doubt I know one person who never has these kinds of problems. The specific content or focus may change, but the general problem seems to remain, no matter what the circumstances. I hope that somehow by putting so much effort into regaining my physical balance, somehow the things I learn will help me to manage this metaphorical balance as well :)

Harvest time

This weekend we got to see the payoff for all the hard work that went into setting up the garden. We spent most of yesterday harvesting most of what was remaining - Jeff dug the potatoes, while I dug carrots and beets.  

Then we both spent a good amount of time brushing dirt off of potatoes and preparing them to be boxed up for storage. All in all, we ended up with almost 60 pounds of potatoes, 9 pounds of carrots, and 7 pounds of beets, not counting the four bags of beet greens.

Today I spent the afternoon cleaning some of the beets, cooking them, and pickling and canning them. Unfortunately, I was trying to do too many things at once, and the sugar-vinegar-spice mixture for pickling boiled over and got all over the stove and floor. Jeff came home about one minute later to see the kitchen in a total state of entropy, and by that time I was so tired from all the work that I had done that I really wasn't any use in cleaning it up. So Jeff cleaned while I ordered pizza. There is something kind of funny about spending an entire weekend harvesting food we had grown ourselves, and preserving it so that we can enjoy it for months to come, only to end up ordering pizza  :-)

Making the most of what you've got

Yesterday Jeff and I went out hiking at a recreation site about a half an hour out of town called Wascana Trails. Not long ago, I would not have called what we did going for a walk, let alone hiking. I had the idea that to really be "hiking" a person needed to be on fairly rugged terrain. And to be "going for a walk" things ought to be fairly carefree. For either, a person ought to be headed out for a reasonable distance, at least a couple of miles, otherwise the activity might better be just called "walking." What I am currently able to do I previously would have labeled "staggering" or "hobbling," and that only with assistance. Partly for this reason, we had not previously ventured to Wascana Trails, despite having been told numerous times that it's a nice area.

I sometimes avoid going places that remind me of what I wish I could do, because it makes me sad that I can't do it. That mostly it doesn't work – I am reminded of the things I wish I could do anyway, and get sad anyway, without the benefit of visiting somewhere nice. So with that in mind, and in the spirit of exploring, on a whim we decided to go check it out. It is not especially rugged terrain, but rugged enough that it was quite challenging for me, even with Jeff holding my left hand and my trekking pole in my right. We probably walked for about an hour and went nearly a mile, and I'm so glad we did. Even if I can't do the kind of hiking that I used to do, it is much better to try to approximate it in whatever way I can than to not try at all.

Exploring

I have been saying for a while that I think it takes about a year to start to feel settled in a place. Because things have been so crazy for our first year in Regina, I decided a while ago that our second year here would be the year to do the kind of things that lead to feeling more settled. So with that in mind, I am making a commitment to do more to explore this city.

Right at the end of August I joined a club called The Regina Newcomers Club, which is a nonprofit organization with the goal of "welcoming newcomers to the community, to introduce them to activities in Regina and to help them make new friends." It is a club for women of all ages (so Jeff doesn't get to join), and so far I've been out to dinner and out to coffee, and met about 25 women (some just by introduction, some I've actually spoken with) ranging in age from mid-20s to retirees. It is an interesting club, and I will at the very least have the opportunity to try out new restaurants, and I'm hopeful that I might end up making some friends as well. It is too early to tell how that will go.

On Friday night Jeff and I went out to a sushi restaurant we had never been to before, and while it was definitely better than the previous sushi we had tried, it was nothing like what Seattle has to offer. But we are starting to realize that going solely off of recommendations of colleagues in picking restaurants, we have made some assumptions that may not be accurate. For example, we were under the impression that there is no such thing as real wasabi in this town (having previously been served something that looked like wasabi but had no taste and no kick whatsoever), but the restaurant we tried on Friday had perfectly good wasabi. We are realizing that we just need to try things out for ourselves.

With that in mind, we took a drive to scout out a restaurant that I want to try in hopes of finding some better Thai food here. We had to scout it out first because the address listed for it didn't really seem like a place that you would find a restaurant, so I wanted to be sure that it actually does exist, and that it doesn't look too sketchy. I found out about this restaurant through a food delivery service similar to Pony Express in Eugene, which has it listed as one of the restaurants they deliver for. I have never heard anyone mention this restaurant, which on the one hand makes me skeptical of it, but on the other hand all the people I have talked to about restaurants like ones that I don't particularly like. So this potential new Thai place turns out to be on the very edge of town, past the sketchy neighborhood, past the car dealerships, in a tiny little strip mall where an industrial area meets open prairie. At this point it almost doesn't matter whether it's particularly good, just finding it was kind of an adventure, and eating there will undoubtedly be another one!

September Is Pain Awareness Month

Things are definitely busier now that school has started back up. I am teaching 2 classes, an undergraduate abnormal psychology class and a 1st year graduate psychopathology class. So far it seems like I have good students, and this is material that I enjoy teaching and have knowledge about that goes beyond what's in textbooks, so both of these are fun classes. My one complaint so far is the classroom that I have to teach my undergrad class in – it is nowhere near "accessible" in that it is a lecture hall with an entrance at the top/back and big steps that go down to the front (where I have to teach) but no handrail. I absolutely cannot safely navigate that. There is a fire exit near the bottom/front, but that door is locked from the outside, so the current solution is to have my students prop the door open for me before class. It is an okay solution, but a better solution would probably be to switch classrooms, which I had not thought of before but will probably look into tomorrow.

I have so quickly become used to the fact that things are not well set up for people with mobility limitations that I sometimes forget there may be an easier way to deal with something (other than to get irritated but just deal with it and make it work). There are so many places that I can't go without assistance, many of them places that would be accessible to me if people were just a little bit more thoughtful (like a restaurant that has 3 steps to get in and no handrail could easily have a ramp and/or even more easily a handrail), or places that are probably legally required to have better accessibility. These are issues I didn't think about much before, but can get very angry about now, and not so much even for myself (because I keep improving, and also often have help) as for others who have greater mobility impairments than I do and less help. I am still sitting with this one, but I imagine that sometime in the future I may start taking action to right these wrongs.

On another advocacy note, I have been informed that September is National Pain Awareness Month in the US. So here are some facts that you may or may not be aware of:
 - About 1 in 5 people in North America experience serious chronic pain and about 1 in 4 suffer from at least moderate chronic pain--  more people than are diagnosed with diabetes, heart disease, and cancer combined.
 - Pain is the number 1 reason for visits to medical providers, and accounts for about three quarters of visits to the emergency room.
 - Chronic pain is associated with having poorer quality of life, increased rates of mental health concerns like depression, and doubles a person's risk for suicide.
 - Although many healthcare providers have a stereotype of the "chronic pain patient" as overly needy, seeking disability payments, and personality disordered, this does not describe most people with chronic pain. Because there are so many individuals living with chronic pain, there will of course be some people with difficult personalities who also have pain, and the fact that pain often cannot be adequately treated leaves many pain sufferers feeling helpless, and trying to find help. People living with pain (and conditions that cause pain, like HIV or cancer) are more likely to be disabled from work. However, the majority of people living with chronic pain continue going about their lives and work in spite of it.
 - A majority of doctors say they do not feel that they have received pain education adequate to deal with the range of patient presentations that they see.

Why does this matter to me? For lots of reasons, including what I see professionally both in clinical practice and research, the fact that I have friends and family members with chronic pain, and most prominently in my mind at the moment the fact that I have had pain since last fall. Ever since I began regaining sensation on my right side, the sensation has not been normal – at first a sort of pins and needles numbness, evolving into a feeling of constant burning that I experience now. I experienced a worsening of this pain until around February, and since then I have really had no change in sensation, either for better or worse. I still have hope that I may regain some useful sensation and/or have reduction in pain, but no one knows whether this will happen. I tend to minimize this, as it is usually most adaptive to do so– if there is nothing that can be done to change it (other than medications I take that make it tolerable to some degree), best learn to live with it. However, this also contributes to lack of awareness of the many different presentations of chronic pain. So I am trying to do my part by sharing my experience with you.

And now, because it is better to turn my attention to something else: today was a lovely late summer day, that included pancakes for breakfast, a little bit of work from home, a breezy bike ride along the creek, and currently a cat sleeping in my lap. In spite of challenges, life is good.