Meet your mind! or mine, actually...

Hi, Before we start just a big thank you to the now over 1000 hits on the blog.  Glad you stop by.

Okay, now take a look at this:

This is my brain, or the back half anyway, courtesy of my most recent MRI at Samaritan Hospital in Troy, NY (props for the hometown!).  In the previous blog I wrote about using reiki to help some of my bipolar symptoms, and to dig around at the sadness tearing me apart.  I said that I'd stopped using reiki as a treatment once the MS made itself known, as the person helping me at that time touched the back of my head in a normal reiki matter, that generated nights of terror in my brain.  The reason I have got the picture here is to show you the physical reasons.  Look about one inch to the right of center of the picture.  See that little white dot?  That's an MS lesion.  Also looking down toward the right hand corner of the picture, you see a small .indentation in the outline of the head.  See that?  (You know I wish Blogger had more little tools to use, like a pointer, or an arrow.) That's where a reiki user places his or her fingers to send healing through that area.  Reiki + lesion = Bad thing.  At least for me.

My neuro as noted told me I had 50-100 lesions in my brain.  One of them just showed up right there in the picture (at the very tip of the occipital lobe), and perhaps there's another near where my eyes take in light and sight (also in the occipital lobe) and that ones playing around, too, whiuch may be why light is so bright and color so brilliant.

Here's a brain diagram so you can see the whole thing:

 

 

Brains are normally not this colorful. Ask any zombie, though that's hard as they don't say much except "naaaaaghhhhhhh", and if you're close enough to ask, you're close enough to be eaten. 

 

I'm not a doctor, I just got the disease(s), and I'm just trying to deal with them.  But it did get me thinking.  If a person is trying to help heal your body by laying her/his hands on you, using prayer or not, or just being open to the universe to bring that energy to you, and you think this will help you as you take that energy in, no matter what you think of it, doesn't get one to ponder that there is Something Else?

 

My body is breaking down.  My brain is full of lesions and chemical imbalances that only handfuls of pills can keep straight.  My mind, however, the real me, is having a great time taking this all in, watching this, writing it down and sharing it with you.  As long as the hands keep working, of course.

 

So there's me (Tom the guy), and there's Me.  Want to try it yourself? Think of a favorite movie, or TV show. Now close your eyes and watch it in your private movie theater.  Your order goes out to the hippocampus in the brain where "memories" are stored and the movie starts, and it seems like you can see it on the inside of the middle of your forehead.  That's where you go to see the film. Your private movie theater. Popcorn?

 

What we're dealing with is a three way battle. Your body, the brain, and You (what a Buddhist might call your mind, or others faiths call your soul).  The three of you have to get along for about 70-75 years or more if you're lucky.  Then the body dies, the brain stops functioning, and You, well, that's up to whatever belief system you may ascribe to.  But you are seperate from your brain and body. You can receive, from Some Source, healing. Perhaps you become that healing energy.  I don't know.

 

You would think that once the body is attacked by disease, that the three parts (body,brain and Me) would rally, and this happens sometimes.  There's a lady in my physical therapy class whose come back from stage 4 cancer...twice.  But with diseases like MS and bipolar disorder, the brain kind of flies off by itself and plots with the diseases against the body, and all You can do is remain vigilant as you watch yourself do dumb things, or do nothing at all.

 

It always will come down to the Me in You.  Pills help, therapy helps, support networks help. But it's still up to the Me in You.  That's who takes command. Stand up. Move. Therapy. Laugh. Hug. Live.

 

You can spread that energy (whatever you got left) from (whatever) Some Source to others.  You don't need reiki, a smile will do for a start.

 

More to come.  Thanks for reading.

 

 



Eyes of the World

It's morning on September 11, 2012.  I'm sitting at the kitchen table, listening to Bob Dylan's newest album, just released today.  Outside its a beautiful blue sky, in the background of the pine trees, and other plants man or nature provided, all green.  My car , the big white elephant, in the driveway and its awaiting yet another adventure.  There's a grey gas meter near the side of the garage attached by a red pipe into the side wall (burgundy).  To the gas meter's left is its cohort, the electric meter, painted a quiet brown, except for its tell all face, a dance of dials.  A small cable router sits in the electric box's shadow, pedestrian grey, not even the challenging colorof the gas meter, but from its innards dangle wires of orange and black that dig into the ground and are hidden by the black mulch, used to cover a multitude of poorly planted sins.

I love the color.

The MS is getting to my eyes.  Now its nowhere near blindness, and I'm not sure what category it goes, but I can tell you this.  Color is more powerful. And light, both inside and outside, has been turned down and away from.  It just hurts.

Last week the water maintenance classes started up for the fall season.  What that means for me is I get a corner of the nice warm pool and I exercise using all kinds of devices for one hour.  What I've always enjoyed more is seeing other folks in the pool struggling, some a lot more than me, but making the best of it all.  They are ably handled by the physical therapist, Ms. Y.

I bring up Ms. Y because, while doctors have come and gone, she has stayed.  She was my physical therapist right after my diagnosis, and we established the exercise regimens I do most days.  One area we talked about was Reiki.  The International Center for Reiki Training defines Reiki as:   

     

   "Reiki is a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation that also promotes healing. It is administered by "laying on hands" and is based on the idea that an unseen "life force energy" flows through us and is what causes us to be alive."

 



I can attest that Reiki does have some benefit.  During my "just bipolar" era, an experienced Reiki Master took me through some tough times, leaving me one time a crying helpless slug.  But it had been the first time I had cried, I mean really cried, not the tender tear he-man wipe, but blubbering away since my dog died in 1976.  And then I felt better.  Some of the monsters within were dispensed with, but not all.  They are still here, but know where the closet is.

I studied Reiki with that Master for some years and became  Reiki level II.  I could use my hands  to heal, and did. Then MS came, and so did the lesions and the Reiki went away, or as I like to say, the Reiki is helping with the MS, the spirit of healing is busy just  keeping me up and moving.  So now I try and help other ways.

All right, back to Ms. Y.  We decided to try and see how Reiki handled MS and it took only a few sessions to see that MS didn't give two hoots about Reiki.  It did its "I am incurable neurological disease (with moves like Jagger)" strut.  We abandoned the idea, though please consider Reiki as an option.  Remember there 500,000 different MS cases in the USA, and what did not work for me may work for you. 

Here's the interesting part.  While visiting with my new neurologist, I looked at my MRIs on a far better computer than Albany Med.  He told me there may be anywhere from 50-100 lesions in my brain, and one is sitting....

 

right in the temporal lobe, the area that handles or has a part in dream development.  That's a whole other blog column.  Anyway, certain neurotransmitters become involved in the sleep/dream cycle, and Reiki can stimulate blood flow and other healing agents, and when you put the two of them together on a guy with MS, you get a chain reaction that results in darker dreams that Stephen King (as proved by this one person writing a blog so take it as gospel truth).  Ms. Y placed her healing hands right on the edge of the back of my skull (temporal), and left them there for about five minutes.  And something got the message inside.

 

Result: Nightmares galore and an admonition that we could leave that particular area alone next time.  We did and the nightmares faded.  Reiki itself was over.

 

Sometime we'll get to other non-medical (so called) treatments.

 

Meantime, any lesions that have settled into the Occipital area of my brain are diddling with my eyesight.  There's a small optometrist in there going "Is it better this way or that way? A or B? Does the green appear brighter? Good, it'll stay that way, or maybe we'll just turn it off."

 

Always something.  But I do appreciate the beauty of the colors.

 

Next: Meet the mind!

 

Thanks for reading. The blogspot counter notes that we're heading to 1000 visits, and I do appreciate it. Hope this is enjoyable.