Storming Heaven

Friends, today is the first day of the novena for our beloved Susan (aka Whymommy). Starting tonight, and continuing for a full nine days, we will be storming heaven with our prayer for Susan's complete and total healing. We are told that all we need to do is to ask for all we need. Well, we are asking. The link to the novena prayers and readings, suitable for printing at home, is here. This novena is adapted from one I found on the web which was written by a priest at Texas A&M.

Fighting Together, with Prayer

In my posting on Lymphedema Sleeves, I talked about my friend, Susan Niebur aka Whymommy, who is currently participating in a clinical trial to battle a locally metastatic cancer, her fourth cancer in as many years. Susan is an amazing person. She shines with love. She radiates joy. She makes you want to be a better person. In the short time she has been part of our church community, she has drawn so many people to her, just like moths to a flame. It might be her cheery smile and her ability to see the goodness in life; it might be her obvious love for her husband and children; it might be her wit, her intelligence, her kindness, her gentleness. I'm not sure.

What I am sure of, however, is that many people have expressed to me the desire to pray as a community for Susan. And, as a result, we are joining together starting next Monday, January 31, to say a novena (communal or private prayer, said over nine days or hours). We will say the novena in our church chapel and we are inviting those who cannot be there in person to pray with us between the hours of 8 and 9, every night from January 31 through February 8.

If you are not the formal prayer type, we invite you to send all positive thoughts and vibes, expressions of caring and love, and aspirations of hope out to the Unknowable Universe over this period. We also invite you to pray formally in the style of your own tradition for this intention if you are more comfortable doing that.

We will be praying through the intercession of Blessed John Paul II -- intercessory prayer is like asking a beloved older brother or sister to talk to Dad (intercede) for us. It is a type of prayer that has a long history in Catholicism, and which makes perfect sense if you believe, as Catholics do, in the Communion of Saints -- that is, in the spiritual unity of all in the Christian Church, those on earth and those who are with God. All members of the Communion of Saints are members of a Mystical Body, with Christ as the Head, in which all members contribute to the good of all and share in the welfare of all.

We are working on the details right now -- when we are finished, I intend to post the novena prayers here so that anyone who wishes to can pray the novena with us. If you do so, please let me know so that we can let Susan know the breadth and depth of love for her, both here in her immediate community and around the world.

Surrendering Hunger

Have I told you about my fantastic sister, L? L. is older than me by 18 months and 2 weeks. All of my life, I've looked up to her as a trailblazer and a leader. We never went through much of the sisterly anguish that many people do (aside from the time I smeared black fingerpaint all over her beautiful picture in kindergarten (I was attending with her for the day). But hey, she wouldn't let me play with her and her friend, Sherry, so she deserved what she got, right?)

Last year, L. decided to lose weight. And guess what? She did. She, an aunt of ours, and I used a book called Your Whole Life to try to address some of the reasons that we were overweight. My sister threw herself in whole heartedly into this new way of looking at being overweight. She went from "Couch Potato to 5K" and, by the summer, was running an hour every other day. Today, L. is stronger than ever. She radiates good health and vigor. She gave me a book called Surrendering Hunger, which is a companion to the Your Whole Life book. The idea is that, after the initial 12 week program, Surrendering Hunger will provide a year's worth of meditations to help you persevere in your attempts to lose weight. I haven't opened it yet. But I will.

There are a few things I've learned over the past year, after quitting Weight Watchers and going through Your Whole Life, and joining a gym:

Finding a way through being overweight is my personal cross to bear. No one else developed the habits of eating and of (non) exercising that have led to this condition. No one else can help me change those habits.

My huge (no pun intended) problem is that I don't pay enough attention. I am not organized enough. I can't figure out a way to integrate the life I want into the life I actually have. Maybe I'm too distracted. Maybe I'm too lazy. I'm not sure. It just struck me this weekend that I haven't had my hair cut or colored in almost a year. Most days I pull it into a ponytail and forget about it. That seems to me to be emblematic of the problem I have.

So, I'll go home (I'm currently in an airport in the great American Southwest, coming home after attending the funeral of a dear friend's father) and pick up Surrendering Hunger and Your Whole Life and I'll try to figure out how to translate the words on the page into action in my life. Again.

Lymphedema Sleeves

My dear friend and cancer survivor Susan of ToddlerPlanet has posted today about a new effort to help breast cancer survivors who have had a mastectomy or axillary dissection of the lymph nodes due to breast cancer. Many of these women develop lymphedema, or swelling of one or both arms, as a result of surgery. In order to help deal with this condition, they need to wear lymphedema sleeves, which are like compression stockings for the arms. However, this pricey and medically necessary "medical device" is not covered under Medicare or most insurance plans. Women who cannot afford the $200 to $500 for the two sets of compression sleeves and gauntlets can now apply to a nonprofit organization founded to help breast cancer survivors. Please read Susan's blog post to find out more, and to donate if you can.

And while you are there, please say a prayer for Susan, who today is seeing her oncologist about some hot spots that showed up on a recent PET scan. They're in the middle of her chest and may indicate a recurrence. Susan is a fantastic woman, the mother of two small boys, the wife of a lovely man, and a space scientist who works on contract to NASA and promotes the idea of women in the sciences with her blog Women in Planetary Science. She is also a three time cancer survivor, and an advocate for others who have had cancer through her blogs, ToddlerPlanet and Mothers with Cancer. Please say a prayer for her and for her family.

Resumation

It's been so long. I've done nothing on this blog for months and months and, truthfully, I wouldn't be writing now if I didn't have a a whopping sinus headache that won't let me sleep. I've been THINKING, yes thinking, of many things to write about over the months, but I have been so discouraged and so focussed in a completely different direction than I had expected that I didn't have the heart to put my thoughts out there.

So, let's catch up. First of all, I have not lost any weight. Fine news for a weight loss blog, you say. And you are right. My journey is not linear at all, and I really didn't expect that. When I began writing, I thought that I would see a line graph that consistently trended down -- probably not quickly, probably not easily, but down. Instead, my line graph looks like the EKG of someone who's coded. Flatline. A pound here or there -- one banner month, I lost 8 pounds and was super excited. That was the month I started taking Phentermine on the recommendation of a good friend who has lost quite a bit of weight. However, after the initial "I think this is going to work for me" happy thought, it stopped working. And I thought, "I'm not taking some drug that is not even working for me every day." And I stopped taking it and stopped weighing myself or dieting at all. I'm happy to say that I haven't gained weight, but sad to say also that I haven't lost.

All summer I struggled with incredible pain in my left leg -- pain that would wake me up at night writhing and crying. Charley horses that wouldn't go away. Throbbing, aching, hellish pain that would not let me sleep and prevented me from functioning. The doctor I was seeing who gave me the Phentermine enjoined me to walk one hour every day. I thought, "are you kidding me? I can't walk across the room. I can't go grocery shopping. I can't clean my house. I can't do anything. And you expect me to WALK for distance?" Needless to say, I didn't heed that admonition.

Over the summer, I met with friends every week for School of Community, and I remember talking to one of them who is a physical therapist. I said to her that the pain was so bad that I thought it would be better to have my leg amputated at the hip. With her encouragement and that of another dear PT friend, I actually made an appointment with an orthopedist early in the fall. I explained my history and my symptoms, and he took X-rays of my entire left side. His conclusion? There is nothing orthopedic involved -- get thee to physical therapy. When I showed my two PT friends his order for PT, they both burst out laughing -- he basically had said that I was inflamed from my hip to my ankle. Every item on the diagnosis (and the list was long) ended with "-itis". I began seeing a physical therapist, whom I love, and the work has begun.

To explain -- I was born extremely premature -- my mother's original due date was some time in May and I was born in mid-March. In 1966, that was no joke, and it's a wonder I survived. It was the only time in my life I've been underweight, in fact -- 2.25 pounds. One of the problems I had was that I was born without a hip socket on my left side. This is called "Developmental Dysplasia of the Hip". I had an operation when I was stable and strong enough to survive it to construct a socket and to pin the head of the femur into place. I was in a hard body cast until I was about 18 months old. Later, the pins were removed -- as a result I have a 12 inch scar on the front of my hip and a 6 inch one on the back.

All through my childhood, I saw the orthopedic surgeon who worked on me -- Liebe Diamond. She is an amazing woman -- please read her entry at the link above -- she is in the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame. She scared the crap out of me as a child, but I am so grateful to her. She allowed me to live a pretty normal childhood. However, one result of the deformity and the surgery is that, over the years, I developed a bad habit -- it felt "normal" to me to stand, walk, climb stairs, etc., with my feet pointed slightly outward. My kneecaps also point slightly outward, not towards the front (this probably contributed to the traumatic knee dislocation I experienced last year). And, over the years, as a result of this bad habit, all the muscles on the outside of my legs -- particularly my left leg -- became so tight that they pulled my feet even more out of whack (technical medical term alert). I started to walk with a pronated gait -- thus ensuring that all the weight of my body was concentrated on a tiny little area of my left foot where the Posterior Tibial Tendon attaches. In fact, when I was diagnosed with plantar fascitis FOUR YEARS AGO (misdiagnosed, according to my physical therapist), that was the beginning of all this trouble coming home to roost. As the pain from the PTTD (PTT Dysfunction) became more pronounced, the other problems -- walking with my toes pointed outward, pronated gait -- also became more pronounced as I tried to escape the pain. As a result, the muscles on the outside of my left calf and in my ankle became so inflamed and so tight that, as the PT told me, "it feels like you have an extra tibia in your leg". The muscle is as hard as bone.

In order to fix this problem, I have been going to physical therapy three times a week since the beginning of November. There goes all my free time. I drop off Chickadee #2 at preschool, go directly to PT, spend one and a half to two hours there, being massaged, stretched, stuck with needles, having ultrasound and electricity run through the muscle, undergoing pressure point therapy, enduring ice massage and ice packs, and doing exercises, then I rush out to pick the chickadees up from school. It is exhausting and discouraging to see how much work is needed to correct this problem. But, we have to get through the point where pain prevents me from moving (I was walking as if my left leg were made of wood on many days -- not bending my knee, not flexing my ankle). After that, we can start to teach my muscles to work in the proper way. It's going to be a long haul. But I think and hope it will be worth it. Recently, I have started to experience a diminution of pain in the PTT. I've bought a brace that's supposed to help -- I was wearing it incorrectly, so I have to see tomorrow when I take the chickadees to the Maryland Science Center if a correctly worn brace is gong to help me.

So that, writ large, is what I've been working on instead of losing weight. I am hoping that fixing this problem will help me fix that problem. Pray for me!

The Shape of Evil

Ever since September 11, 2001, the shape of evil for me has been those billowing clouds of pulverized concrete, metal, paper, carpet, asbestos, glass, and, God help us, human beings that whipped through the streets of lower Manhattan on a sunny and beautiful Tuesday morning. Every year, I make myself watch news footage from that date. I listen to music like Alan Jackson's Where Were You and Mozart's Requiem and cry and have skin-crawling flashbacks to the panic and sadness of that day.

I do those things because I'm trying to impose meaning, control, and reason onto a situation that is inherently nihilistic, uncontrolled, and unreasoning. Of course, the monsters who murdered almost 3,000 people in cold blood and those that financed them, and those that trained and supported them, and even those who, in their secret heart of hearts, sympathized with them, had their excuses and their rationalizations and their "reasons". It has been fashionable, since the very day when ordinary people living their ordinary lives were so brutally ripped from this world, for some of us in this country and around the world to try to "understand" the "roots of terrorism". For pete's sake, there are some who assert that these privileged sons of doctors, these engineers, and computer programmers, acted as they did because Christian nations 800 to 1000 years ago waged war to recapture cities in the Holy Land that had been conquered by Islamic armies. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

Does that mean that we here in the West should wage war against Turkey to retake Constantinople (now called Istanbul)? That we should murder innocent men, women, and children to "avenge the insult" of Sultan Mehmed II's conversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque --an "insult" that continued from 1453 until 1934 when the Hagia Sophia was secularized and turned into a museum? Should we murder innocent Muslim men at work because Christians cannot freely and openly worship in Saudi Arabia or because they are forbidden to enter Mecca or Medina? Should we riot because Christian converts from Islam must sometimes fear for their lives? Should we defend the principle of free speech and free expression by killing innocent Muslims because these principles are threatened by Islamic radicals who want to kill people and destroy things over movies, cartoons, or books? Should we defend equality between the sexes by bombing Riyadh? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

Look, it's pretty simple. There is a perverse beauty in destruction. This struck me today as I watched footage of September 11. The images of the World Trade Center debris rolling through the canyons of Manhattan filled me with horror and fascination and a disquieting recognition that they were substantial. They looked alive. They looked hungry. They looked purposeful. And they were, as evil always is. Those privileged sons of doctors, those engineers and computer programmers, were in love with evil, in love with destruction, with desecration, with despair. Somehow, somewhere along the line, the Deceiver had convinced them that the way to Paradise was through the blood of innocents and that the power they would gain for their "cause" by the murder of innocents was more important than anything else.

They were deceived.

And I know they were deceived for a reason that might seem mundane to some. You see, I have another reason to remember September 11. It is the day that my second child was born, at four minutes after midnight. When I realized I was in labor on the evening of the 10th, two days in advance of my scheduled c-section and two weeks prior to my due date, I prayed that she would be delivered before the clock rolled over to 9-11. I didn't want to cry every year on my daughter's birthday. I didn't want that joyful day tainted with memories of evil. But God was trying to teach me something as I prayed the Hail Mary throughout the excruciatingly slow procedure, as I begged the Virgin to intercede and make Dr. T's fingers move a bit faster, to make him stop talking to the medical student he was training as my child was coming into this world.

It's taken me four years -- of crying on Chickadee #2's birthday, of feeling that something is not quite right about this day -- to get it. It's also simple, and it's this:

Perfect love

drives out all fear. (I John 4:18).

What happened on September 11 in New York, and Washington, and over the bucolic fields of Western Pennsylvania, proves that. People hurtling to their deaths or trapped above the fire line did not call their wives and mothers and sons and brothers and fathers and friends to express hatred, or anger, or division. They called to express love, concern, caring. The firemen and policemen and Port Authority employees and Emergency Responders didn't run into burning buildings out of fear and hatred, but because of love -- altruistic love -- the hardest kind of love to have because it is untainted with selfishness. People did not take to the streets and riot and call for the heads of their Muslim neighbors and friends on pikes. No one was tarred and feathered. In fact, in the weeks following the attacks, I distinctly remember my roommate and I talking about a family of Muslims who owned a convenience store just outside of our town. While neither of us was in the habit of stopping at that store, both of us independently had decided to start doing so, to make sure that we looked those people in the eye and smiled at them. So they wouldn't be afraid, so they wouldn't feel isolated or singled out.

When I look into my daughter's beautiful face, when I see her smile in delight at the

magnificent fairy cake her aunt created for her, when I hear her belt out tunes in her Ethel

Merman voice, when I receive her sticky sweet kisses and watch her eyelids fluttering as she strives to stay awake on this magical day for just one more minute, I no longer see the shape of evil, but the shape of love.

And I thank God that Dr. T's fingers were just a little slow.

The Italian Cure

When I was 21, I lived for a semester at the University of Dallas's Rome campus, which was in a fairly dilapidated hotel at 103 Via del Pescaccio off the "Roman Beltway". Who knew that 23 years later, I'd be living in another Beltway community, this one a lot less romantic than the environs of Via del Pescaccio, overlooking, as it did, the ruins of a villa once occupied by a mistress of Mussolini (or so we were told before we hiked up there to drink our $1.50 bottles of spumante).

I've been thinking a lot about those days lately, and it occurred to me that one thing I never worried about in Rome was food, weight, or eating. For one thing, I didn't have a scale. For another, I was poor with a capital "P". I couldn't really afford to be picky and I couldn't really afford chocolate. Things I learned to eat during my Rome semester included basalmic vinegar salad dressing, calamari, octopus, goat, and the bull's nose. I also spent my days either in the classroom reading Sophocles, Herodotus, or Shakespeare or walking through history -- walking A LOT.

Most of our meals were provided on campus. A typical day's menu might consist of:

Breakfast: coffee, tea, or hot chocolate, an apple or orange, and a "moonrock" (a type of hollow, crusty bread roll particular to Rome called a rosette, but which resembled stone after sitting on the tables day after day) with butter and jam (7 to 7:30 am)

Lunch: the biggest meal of the day, consisted of a pasta course (usually penne with tomato sauce) and a meat course (veal medallions with green beans, chicken with some vegetable, etc.), with moonrocks and fruit as desired. (1:30 to 2:00 pm)

Dinner: This meal frequently consisted of either funghi soup (cream of mushroom) or "sweatsock soup" (tortellini in broth), scrambled eggs with provolone cheese, or a salad of bitter greens dressed with balsamic vinegar and olive oil (7:30 - 8:00 pm)

Throughout the day, we could go to the cappuccino bar on campus for coffee and biscotti if we were hungry, and we often slipped a moonrock or a piece of fruit into a pocket for later consumption.

And then, when we were out and about on a walking tour of the city, we could always slip into a "Pizza Rustica" for "mille lire di pizza margharita, per favore."

But the thing about eating in Rome was that it was all good --even if it didn't taste good (we had the worst Italian cook I've ever seen). It was good because it satisfied hunger on so many levels -- eating in the dining room of the hotel satisfied the hunger for camaraderie as well as physical hunger. Running to catch the last 906 bus into Via Boccea to get pizza because we couldn't stand one more night of Franco's sweat sock soup was a twilight adventure that satisfied our need to break free of routine. Ordering our favorite pizza from the Pizza Rustica at the bus transfer area in Largo di Boccea meant we were coming home after a four day weekend trip bunking rough on "Hotel Eurail"-- it fed our need for stability. In short, food was uncomplicated -- it satisfied hunger and provided nourishment for body, mind, and soul.

Fast forward 23 years. My current relationship with food is anything but uncomplicated. In so many ways, I feel as if I'm flailing around, looking for the magic answer -- maybe Weight Watchers, maybe Atkins, maybe Dr. Berg's liver cleanse. Maybe swimming 3 days per week, maybe join a gym. Let's walk every day, let's aspire to walk every day, let's sleep late. Let's pray the weight off, let's talk the weight off -- hell, let's blog the weight off.

When in fact, losing weight is as simple as eating fewer calories than you expend, consistently, day by day. Maybe there IS a magic answer -- maybe it's giving up and taking what I'll call "the Italian Cure" -- I'll eat for nourishment, in every sense of the word. I'll eat with joy and with a sense of cameraderie (hard to do with picky grade schooler (!!!) and preschooler (!!!!!) and husband with newly-diagnosed celiac disease!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, but still). I'll eat for adventure -- trying new things that break free of routine. I'll eat for stability, making sure that I don't consume things that spike my blood sugar and make me cranky.

The Italian Cure. I think I like it.