Prepare For Surgery:: Heal Faster by Peggy Huddleston

Getting Ready for the BIG DAY!

You would think I was preparing for open heart surgery, but no, it is only day surgery which will repair my psoas tendon and right hip labrectomy, which rids me of all the floating cartilage inside the joint itself. It has been nearly 3 years since my last rotto-rooter, so I am glad this is happening now. With any luck at all this will be the last surgery I will need for a while. Yay!! It is also quite ironic that doctors say:: Yah, you'll just need a couple of days rest and no crutches and you'll be up and ready to rumble. RIIGGHHTTT. They are sticking an enormous scope into my hip joint in three places, hoisting my leg in the air to get at the joint itself and they're telling me I should be back on my feet in a matter of minutes. Why is that? Why do we always want to believe that surgery is no big deal? It is an enormous shock to our bodies, yet we treat it like we've just gone to the ball park and over eaten a few hot dogs. I don't get it at all!

I do think that there is a big difference between the intensities of each of the surgeries. Meaning, open heart is much more scary and life threatening to me than what I am doing, but it still illicits the same amount of anxiety and negative emotion. Hence, I am doing the steps in the book, Prepare for Surgery :: Heal Faster by Peggy Huddleston. Her book on learning how to relax, calm down, is said to allow us to recover faster, have less pain after surgery, and strengthens our immune systems after surgery. I thought this completely profound and something worth exploring. The wonderful Julia brought the book to my attention and loaned it to me to read prior to Tuesday. I sometimes feel like a complete wimp. I am merely having a small rip in a tendon fixed and then my hip joint cleaned out. However, they do this with an enormous scope sticking out of my hip in three places and please, let's remember, one persons pain is another's no big deal. My body takes on pain at three times that of another person. I recall a conversation with my dear friend, Jeanine Ferguson from junior high school about how differently people experience pain. I experience pain at a very high and intense level which makes me a candidate for a high level of anxiety prior to and after surgery. Anything that I can do to calm myself down that does not require more medication is a very good thing.

So, I am learning Ms Huddleston's five step method at relaxation and what to do prior to having surgery. I thought one was very interesting. It was meeting your anesthesiologist. How often do we even consider knowing the name of the person who will be responsible for monitoring the amount of sedation medication it will require to keep us asleep during our surgery? It is mind blowing that of all of my different surgeries there are only two anesthesiologists names I know. I don't know any of the nurses names, which is sad, but I may even explore changing how this is conducted. I may just do a mass group hug prior to my surgery so I know who everyone is. Sounds strange, but how many people would you allow to work on your innards without knowing them? Like a:: 'hey buddy' wave to the dude across the street. 'Come on over here and operate on me! We need an extra person to help stitch me up. Wanna help?' We wouldn't conceive of doing something like this, but we do when we don't know the very people who surround us in the OR.

So, my goal is to know Matt Larson, my anesthesiologist, at least one half hour prior to my surgery (as indicated in the book). And request calming medication be run in my IV prior to my surgery. I absolutely can't stand sitting there waiting on the surgical staff to get things organized and me sitting outside anxious as hell, waiting for them. Now that I can help myself relax and drift into a calm mindfulness, I can use the benefits of the calming medication to assist me in this process and my body is less rigid, less uptight, less high strung. It allows me to remove my shoulders from my ears and just be. I think this will be or can be a very, very healthy process and idea. I wonder if hospitals have ever thought of this as an idea for all of their surgical patients. This assists me in helping myself calm down and relax, so that I can get in the 'zone' so to speak. I love the entire notion of it.

Today, I am going to read the other portion of the book. Like what to do after you've had the surgery and what do you do to best heal? I think this is extremely interesting and helpful in how I can best help my own body. No one has ever taught me how to treat my body with dignity, love and respect with love being the most important thing. According to Huddleston, love is the most amazing healing tool of all. Finding divine love in the healing process is an even more important part of the tool kit.

I will let you know what I find out, however, in the mean time, I would appreciate prayers. Prayer works. Period. And I love and appreciate and respect them.

As part of my relaxation steps from Huddleston's book, I am taking myself for a walk in the woods today at one of my favorite parks in Stillwater. Walking in the woods is THE most wonderful thing I do for myself and I can't do it very much in the winter because of the snow and the fear of falling and blowing out my $40K hip. Now that the snow is melting and we are set for a gorgeous day, I am going to walk and listen to the birds arriving, breathe in the spring air, and open myself up to love and be loved.

I invite you to do the same.

Namaste.

Robin

Never Ending Hip Issues :: Volume One

Psoas Tendon Tear, Part One

Here we go again. I am back at the ortho today. Over the weekend I could put no weight on my right hip joint which made walking a tad difficult, I must say! Then no inward lateral movement or you would hear a deafening scream from me. This is not a negative however. Or at least I am not taking it that way. This is a wonderful positive thing taking place in my body. I haven't been doing all this mind/body/spirit work for nothing and so this is one area of my body that seems to be needing some adjustment or some healing to take place and one way to do this is to tell me when it is ready or time to do something about the situation. For me, this awakening is through pain and immobility. So, my wonderful ortho people got me in a week early and I am ready to roll!!

I swear, I single handedly keep those people in business. If I need a little scope surgery it will be my seventh hip surgery in a little over five years. This area of my body is definitely my weak area. I can manage, however, actually I can do more than manage, I can flourish, what a wonderful change of attitude.

This morning upon waking, I went into our bathroom to check the wall clock for the time. The clock said 5 am. This is our wake up time around here so that's what time I thought it was. Well, yesterday the wall clock fell off the wall and did something wacky and sure enough, I went downstairs thinking it was 5 and I would make my husband his morning coffee when it was really 4am. Good grief. Oh, well. One can never take wall clocks at face value. I left the husband in bed and the dogs and cat and I all went downstairs to begin the coffee and Kong routine we've all come to know and love. We all have wonderful morning routines don't we? Anyway, I digress....again....

So, what I can see of the weather is rain and yuck. Today, in lovely Minnesota, it is to begin with rain, then move to sleet, then move to snow with snow coming down all night and into tomorrow morning. Nothing beats a good midwestern spring. Yuck! But, right around the corner is April which always makes me feel better. However, if you suffer from any type of arthritic issues like I do, 30-50 degree rainy conditions makes my body feel like a slug. A hurting slug. Argh. But, I shall flourish away.

Watch for the next installment of the hip issue blog, coming soon to your local blogspot. Hah! I just heard my husband's alarm go off upstairs in the loft, which by the way looks absolutely gorgeous. The last wardrobe went up over the weekend and it is some kind of fabulous. I will begin taking pictures and placing them on this site so that you can see them first hand.

Cheers people and have a wonderful day where ever you are!

Robin

Amendment

Yesterday's Blog Adjustment

+

Major Hip Issues That Require Ortho Appt Today!

Yikes. I certainly did not mean for my blog yesterday to create hard feelings with the very people that I hold dear. The blog was more about me and less about the person I was directing my anger towards, so I hope I can settle that score immediately. It is always about me and my shortcomings and rarely about a person I think is the one creating the problem. It is up to me to set things right with the other person. Plus, she is so far in my past that I hardly think I need to do a thing, except it really bothers me that I can not stand up for myself in this regard and that's what I need to work on. Not the other person. So I apologize for any unnecessary worry with the people that I find incredible and extremely helpful in my life. Now, with that being said, I am going to address this issue in my life and after I do I will let you all know how it went.

Today's blog is all about my hip issues. On both sides wouldn't you know. Thank heaven's I have a really good relationship with my ortho people. The nursing staff work hard at getting me in to see DP or Dr. Palmer ( I call him DP and feel like I can since I have endured 6 hip surgeries with him) this morning at 8am. Which is quite a feat considering I live in St. Paul and he is in Stillwater. Nonetheless I am making the trip with two dogs in the car with me for support. No husband this time as he is in Dallas with JC Penney. Now that is a company to watch, but I digress....

My last set of xrays indicated that the cap on my titanium side was loosened when I did my near acrobatic fall on the ice a few weeks ago. That is creating quite a bit of pain on that side and also my IT band is loose and getting looser, which is not good. I keep at my PT hoping to get stronger --meaning strengthening the muscles around the IT band and cap need to be as strong as I can get them for their stability component. I must say after a round of PT I am a sore unit! Yikes.

Then my right side is shot. I have no idea what is going on-- on that side but it doesn't feel good I can tell you that! I can't lift my leg when it is bent, which means a possible psoas tendon tear. But, I can tell you right now that they can go right ahead and amputate it hurts that bad. So, I think as I have worked so hard at moving negative energy out of my body these are the areas where that energy is literally going to get cut out of me. Of course, this is me playing arm chair MD, which I love doing, but suffice to say that I am really tired of the pain that both of these hips are creating for me. I was doing really well in that department and now I am back to having severe pain again. However, not everything is lost! I am staying close to my loving God and I am going to keep working on guided visualization and guiding that negative energy and pain right out of my body and resting in the peace of knowing that by moving out the negative energy will make room for all of God's positive energy to move back into my body replacing the negative. I just love that image in my mind.

Maureen from Wings of Freedom asked me to give a color to healing energy in my mind. Well, being the color maven that I am, that was a super easy thing to do. So, I had my color and told her so. After that she asked me to literally paint that healing color all over the pain that I was experiencing so that it would cover over the pain and replace it with this new softer more fluid color. It is fascinating how this works, but within minutes my hips felt less tight. So, when I have severe pain, like right now, I visualize that color and paint it over where I am experiencing the worst of my pain, and voila! It helps ease the pain by settling my mind down. It really is about calming down my internal anxiousness around the pain. I must remember anxiousness and pain go hand-in-hand. One can not exist without the other. I slept really well last night despite the fact that I had taken a two hour nap yesterday afternoon. This is what my body wants so that is what it gets. I figure, if my body didn't need the rest I wouldn't be sleeping nor would I have the ability to sleep. So there.

Yesterday when I was at the dog park a woman came walking in with her dog. I have seen her before and she is an amazing person. She was born with no structure or cartilage in her joints. So, by the time she was five she had undergone quite a few extensive surgeries. My point is to say that she walked into the dog park she wasn't on crutches or on an electric cart nor was she labeling herself handicapped. As a matter of fact, she went ballistic at the mere mention of being called handicapped. She said she could accept being called limited but certainly not handicapped and I really, really liked the difference between those two words. She gave me an enormous sense of hope and she needed a new ortho guy. So, our meeting was no coincidence, I was able to give her my ortho guy and she was able to give me a sense of being limited and not handicapped.

The difference for me is that I am only limited by what I can or cannot do. I am not handicapped by what I can or cannot do. There's a big difference and I would rather be limited. Plus, Katharine has marvelous light in her eyes that radiate energy and enthusiasm. After all that she has n

Inner Confidence/Self Assurance

Being True To Yourself

Have you ever had a friend in your life who suddenly decides that he/she knows what's best for you in any given circumstance and then proceeds to inform you of their opinion(s) on what you should do. I have my own answers and I do not need anyone else giving me theirs and so it is quite bothersome when another person spews out their opinions while totally dismissing the fact that I might know my self better than they think they know me, period.

Well, I have a situation brewing like this and I know what to do, I just don't want to do it. I want to say, I love you as my friend, but you need to back off trying to be my parent, I already have one of those. I don't need you telling me what to do because I already know what to do. I don't need you to do anything except be my friend and have fun with me when we go out and do things together. I don't do a lot of talking about myself and my situations in life because I chose to keep some things close to the vest and only tell a few select people, who are deeply close to me, what is going on in my life. And, if I need help in matters I reach out to these people, not to people that I don't know as well. The people I turn to I have known for well over 15 years and these women are my rocks. I trust them with my life, literally.

I know this person is thinking that they are helping, but it doesn't work that way. Opinions freely given are not acceptable. When requested they are acceptable. Interesting how that works. So, I must voice my concern and hopefully develop a better relationship as a result by telling the truth to a friend. When this happens friendships grow or they go. One of the two. We shall see what happens.

I am finding my voice and my voice comes from within me and is powerful. This is a fantastic thing.

Now, on another note, my home is coming together just beautifully and I will need to start attaching pictures onto my blog so you can see just what has been taking place here. It is amazing as I find emotional strength my home becomes my sanctuary. Just as I had hoped it would. Thank you, God! What a wonderful blessing.

xxxooo Robin

Pink + Green = Healing

Who Knew Pink + Green Were The Colors of a Healing Heart?

A couple of weeks ago I went back to see Maureen Higgins from Wings of Freedom, a body/mind therapist and body healer. I had seen her several months ago and at that time she informed me of blockages in my hip area (no kidding), well, actually, lets start at the beginning. Maureen's process is talk then chakra work on the table. While I was laying on the table, Maureen went through each one of my chakras and told me specifically what was wrong with each of them and what I could do about moving the negative energy out of my body to make way for the new positive healing energy that would take its place. She wrote the entire process down on paper and gave me guidelines and homework to do to help myself and my body do some much needed healing and moving of blocked energy.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. During my sessions with Julia it became very apparent that I needed another session with Maureen to remove some additional blockages that I could now feel surrounding my hips. This is always were I store negative, anxious, toxic energy and as it builds I am now in tune enough with my body to know when I need to move that energy out of my body and how to do that effectively using tools Maureen provided for me. I made another appointment with her and was excited for the day to arrive.

I made it to my appointed day and time and delivered the first half of our session with talk therapy and told her specifically were I was physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I told her a bit about some of the work I had been doing with Julia and that I felt like I had some blocks that was hindering my ability to move and that I had also taken a near fall on some ice a couple of days prior to my appointment with her, which had lead to a loosened hip cap on my titanium side. We are watching this area to see if it tightens up on its own or if I have done some permanent damage. What I do know is that if I am on my feet too long that hip joint becomes extremely unstable and I have no choice but to get off of it. So, with all of this information she puts me on the massage table and proceeds with the physical portion of our session.

As she moves her hands over each of my chakras she has much to say about each, this time extremely positive. Much of the negative energy that so effected me at my first session has left my body or is on its way out. Her exact words were "the old baggage is moving out right now and you are healing." I was thrilled. Remember when I mentioned that during the first session she had seen holes in my heart where the painful mistakes and issues of the past were still weighing heavily on my spirit and my physical body making me severely depressed and full of negative energy? Well, at this session she said those holes had healed completely and that I had done a beautiful job of helping myself heal spiritually since the heart is so associated with God. And get this::

I am not exactly sure if I mentioned this in a past blog or not but I have been obsessed with the colors pink and green. I thought this was due to my mother because they were her favorite colors, however, this was not the case it was purely mine. I went looking for pink shades of nail polish, and lipstick. Blouses, skirts, scarves. I even purchased at $60 a crack, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics in the two different pink palettes. They are gorgeous by the way! And I even went so far as to find a pair of glasses that have pink frames where the glass is and green sides that wrap to the ear. I was determined to see my 2011 through rose colored glasses and finding those glasses was nothing short of a miracle in my book.

But the astonishing and miraculous reward of my inner yearning for pink and green is what those colors are associated with in the body. Pink is the color of emotional healing of the heart and green is the color of physical healing of the heart. So, getting better in these two areas kindled my inner desire for those two colors. We both could not get over this fact and my action to get as much pink and green around me as possible. Now, how amazing is that, I ask you? My heart has healed and my wardrobe has never been so pink! Hah!! Eventually I will probably get over my need for all this pink and green and balance myself out, but for right now, I call this a miracle of the spirit and a God-thing. My glasses I will never give up because they give me immense joy in wearing them daily. I see my world in pink and I love every minute of it.

So, this is my story of healing mind and body and spirit today. I am going to hope that I purchase no more pinks or greens today because I am ready to release my need for them and honor my ability to heal. I have done a great job of trusting God and accepting exactly where I am today with no more fighting about it. The boxing gloves came off and I relaxed. Through that process I learned how to trust God completely and for everything, especially healing of my broken heart. I am making progress that I never dreamed possible and am doing so at God's pace not mine. I am exactly where I am supposed to be today. Thank you God!

Blessings during this Lenten season.

Robin

PPSS

My Beautiful Mother!!

PS

It is my mother's birthday on March 4th. I have been celebrating her birthday for over 23 years since her death in 1987.

In my last birthday card to her I told her I would always celebrate her birthday and that is what I have done no matter where I am or who I am with I always sing her Happy Birthday and blow out a candle in her honor.

Please feel free to join me. This year I will be celebrating her birthday in the Keys of Florida, hopefully watching a gorgeous sunset and thinking about how much I love her still.

Robin

No Homestead Yet, But More Health Stuff

A Revelation of Sorts...

Well, now I can't seem to stay awake past 4am. What is up with that I wonder? Perimenopause? Prednisone? No need to sleep a good 8 any longer? My dear mother-in-law once mentioned to me that getting older was not for wimps and I have come to believe her whole heartedly. But then I hear that lovely British screen writer at the Academy Awards (don't actors love to give themselves lots of awards?) of the movie The King's Speech, written while he was in his seventies and calling himself a late bloomer and I think there's hope that I don't get too depressed with the broken body and instead begin using my mind and creativity more than ever before. I think that is what that wonderful gentleman was eluding to. He might be old but he's far from useless. I loved that entire group of people and the humbleness they exuded while delivering their acceptance speeches. No foul language or stray f-bombs like that woman who won best supporting actress. I mean come on, is that really the best she can do. I heard she was horrified, and well should she be. Apologize profusely, I say!! If one has command of the English language there is absolutely no reason to swear, period.

Anyway, so no sleeping past 4am, great. Okay, I rest in the afternoon and that could be contributing to the early rising. Yesterday my husband had to catch a plane at 6am so we were up at 4. But today is a special day for me so I thought I would share some of it with you all.

Remember a few months ago when I was talking about seeing a woman who is a registered therapist but she takes her talents in a slightly different direction and helps her patients move bound up or blocked energy within the body using both talk therapy and body therapy. She looks to our higher selves through her uncanny ability to intuit her patients higher selves. She can see our selves better sometimes than we see ourselves and it is nothing short of amazing what transpires with her. Her company is called Wings of Freedom and I can certainly see why. After the discussion you are placed on a massage table and her hands go over the areas of your body where you have the most blockages. Mine rest squarely in my hips and in my entire pelvic girdle. It is where balance presides in the body as that is what the hips offer. Since I have had so many hip issues, I have lost my balance in life. And I need to find it again. So, when I left her office after 2 plus hours I felt like a million bucks. I had successfully unblocked some energy that had been blocking ME for a long long time. I am going back today to finish some residual work that needs to be done because I am now so in tune with my body enough that I can OBSERVE the blockages when I have them and do some emotional and physical work to unblock those areas within my body that need to be unhinged, unhooked, un-well-how ever you want to say it.

You begin each session with Maureen by talking about what is going on negativity wise that would necessitate the body to create a block. Emotional negativity is linked with increased pain within the body and that is what I am trying desperately to avoid and remove from my body. The more I can do this for myself the better off I am going to be from a chronic pain point too. It stands to reason doesn't it? Negativity/pain, pain/negativity. I am certainly not in as much pain when I am positive, emotionally grounded and excited about living. My body may still have its moments, but they are not as bad and not as long in duration. I still have pain don't get me wrong, but I am working on not having it has badly by changing my emotions. For instance, when I am writing or dabbling in writing my book I barely notice the nerve impingement in my L5S1 facet joint. I need to move every half hour or so, but it is not nearly as debilitating when I am doing something that brings me positive energy and joy. I am finding joy everywhere!!

As I have stated many times in this blog over these past few months that I had a lot of very negative life situations arise that nearly pulverized my emotions and my spirit. These negative situations culminated in debilitating physical problems and so I had to one by one sort through all of it. Physical, emotional, and spiritual issues so that I could come together again the whole and vibrant woman I am and always have been. I am different now, no doubt about it, but my creativity has never left me, my zest for life has not left me, (although I seriously thought it had at one point, my lowest point for sure),

What I am most happy and excited about is that God has used this time or season of suffering to change me in ways I would or could never have imagined. Sometimes in order to get our attention God needs to stop us cold and that has certainly been my experience. I was really, really mad at first and not accepting of a thing. I told someone the other day that what ever in my life I have been required to let go of has claw marks all over it. I am just not good at Letting Go and Letting God sometimes. Well, okay, most of the time. But I do eventually get with the program and when I do that the blessings and peace that come behind the suffering and the new knowledge that I have gained as a result of this difficult learning curve is nothing short of miraculous, wondrous, and an act of God's love for me that is insurmountable and humbles me to my knees in gratitude. Go figure.

Through pain, I learn humility, through humility I learn I am not God, through learning I am not God, God blessings me with prosperity, creativity, and new ways of looking at my life, but through how he would have me be not who I think I should be. It is the most incredible act of Love that I could ever imagine. Because if I love God in the good times, I had better love and trust Him in the seasons of suffering and his molding me into the person he wants me to be and become. What an amazingly lovingly thing to do to someone so undeserving.

I once heard a therapist or someone say that as people we should not learn to love ourselves. We already do that. Our job is to stop loving ourselves so much and love God and others. I think there's is some truth to this. All I know is that I am seeing Maureen today, and I am going to work on removing more negative energy from my body so that my body, mind, and spirit have a better opportunity to reside in the same vessel God gave me in a way that is more conducive to letting God's positivity into my body and into my life. My goal is to have faith. Faith no matter what my circumstance. Faith in God no matter what my head says to me. Faith in the fact that everything that God does for me is for my good whether I think so or not. That is pure unconditional LOVE.

So, Maureen here I come, open, willing, and ready to get some stuff out of my body so that God's grace can fill me up.

Thank you God for my life and for my broken body. I would never have learned so many wonderful things had I not been slowed down long enough to hear You.

Have a great day all and I will let you know what happens next....

Robin