Time passes.

I'm still here.   I'm still making sense of my heart surgery and now I'm facing a total hip replacement.   I've talked to some people about my experiences flatlining but have basically kept it as a skeleton in my closet to avoid having my ego think I am too special.   Get this.   We all cast off our bodies at some point and all have some kind of experience when we do that.   There is nothing special about it.  

Now if I'd come back with some kind of super power...

So the inflammation in my body after heart surgery seemed to turn on arthritis in my hip and basically ate away all my cartilage there. Adjusting to the pain, I've distorted my posture and messed up my walk.

I was reluctant to accept the surgery because I believe that given enough time, my body could heal.   Time is the question.   I've elected to get my hip fixed now in order to move forward, straighten out my body, and get mobile again.  

The cool thing is that throughout the deterioration of my hip joint I've had to rethink my yoga, my body image, and who I will become.   Now I get to be a beginner again and start that process all over.   I've been given the gift of the "do over".  

Remember when you first discovered yoga and how damn good it felt?   I get to do that again.


Namaste,


Dean

The gift of not knowing

So I step on the mat and sometimes off not knowing if I'm doing the right thing.   Instead of just diving in, I have to take the time to question what is going on with my body, assessing what I did yesterday, and what is happening today.   Then having all that processed with my fluctuating mind and hopefully I come back to the breath---my guide---moving and flowing with change.  Giving thanks that I recognize I don't know what to do and asking help to step back and get out of the way so I can be taught.

I did three weeks strong with my food and then the last week grew tired of it and ate some things not on the plan.   Woke up this morning thinking and wondering where that disciplined energy goes.  I know there are people who say that we have limits to our willpower but I also know that we build habits good and bad and once it is a habit it takes no willpower.   

I know all week that I was hyper-aware of conflicting nutritional information and I seemed to be questioning what I was doing and talking about it to the people around me.   Looking back I was afraid to submit to what I know works for me.  I need to be willing to not know the complete answer and just follow the best I can.   It is okay for me to question what I'm doing but I need to let the questions fly, keep going, and let it work.  I need to remember the reasons I'm eating this way---to make it easier on my heart!

I had a gift last night.   A relative told me they were doing yoga and what they found different about it  was that they didn't think about work or problems during that hour.   They were also doing Zumba and Spin but yoga was the only class they didn't think about work.   Yoga Chitta Vitti Nirodha!

Post Heart Surgery--a year later and a frozen hip

  Over a year later after all the drama of the previous year, I am still here in this body on this earth learning a whole bunch of lessons I would rather not learn the hard way.

Last summer my right hip froze up, both thighs continuously locked up and my knees and ankles were swollen with edema.   Lots of specialists and tests--tested three times for Lupus--but no definitive diagnosis.

It was suggested that I had Frozen Hip and arthritis in my knees that seemed to have flared up.   Another doctor thought I might have FAI Syndrome but couldn't confirm it without an MRI.   I can't have an MRI because I have a pacemaker.  Another doctor suggested it was venous insufficiency which caused the edema and then things basically just got backed up.

I was prescribed a couple of drugs and physical therapy.   I also tried everything I could think of---my yoga practice to begin with, supplemented with Feldenkrais, Acupuncture, Cranial Sacral Therapy, Spiritual Healing, hydrotherapy, and I worked with a Health Coach.  The positive results were frustratingly slow and sometimes it seemed like I was going backward instead of forward. The prognosis for frozen hip whether you do anything for it or not is that it can take up to 19 months for it to resolve.

Things were complicated by my heart doing some weird stuff which meant more tests without a concrete diagnosis. I stopped teaching for a month, my son Luke took over for me, and then I came back to classes---at first with a cane. At the present I still have pretty severe limitations with what I can demonstrate.    I've gotten better at verbal cuing!

Some of what I've learned in the next post...