RIP Etta

My mother-in-law died this afternoon.

Rob has gone down to help out his father. His brother is flying in tomorrow. We still have no idea what was actually wrong with her, so there will be an autopsy. If it turns out to be something simple and/or curable that simply wasn't found because her doctors weren't willing to put in the time for someone on Medicare, I am going to be pissed.

She spent most of her "treatment time" waiting for one or another doctor's appointment. Her PCP referred her to an internist (1 week wait), who referred her to a gastroenterologist (2 week wait), who sent her for tests, which were cancelled because she was in too poor a shape to tolerate them (another week). He referred her to a hematologist/oncologist (2 week wait), who set up some more tests, which were again cancelled for the same reason. He then opined that whatever it was it wasn't cancer, and referred her to a neurologist.

That last visit with the hematologist/oncologist was Monday. Her neurologist's appointment was for next Thursday.

Waiting for an appointment is not treatment. A referral is not treatment. Ignoring the effects of the symptoms because you haven't found the cause is going to kill your patient. Learn it. Remember it.

Because It Is Hard

Why do I take karate? For some reason it's a question I've been getting a lot lately. "Because it's hard" is my usual answer. Which gets a lot of blinks, but it really truly is the answer.

Before karate, challenges in my life mostly came in two flavors. There were the things that were easy, and the things that were impossible. Standard schoolwork was easy. There were a few classes in college that I floundered in, but for some reason (that I couldn't figure out at the time) they all ran to impossible, rather than merely difficult. As it turns out, the two classes I did flounder in were classes I was woefully unprepared for without knowing it - such that in order to actually understand what was going on, I would have needed to take an entire other class first - in one instance, two other classes. There was really no such thing as challenging, but still doable. When in physics I was top of the class by some improbable number, I envied the lady who was #2 - because I was where I was by fluke. She was where she was because she earned every point of her average. She went to both sections of class and both sections of lab. She studied her heart out. After the first test she asked me to tutor her, and we met for an hour twice a week from there on out. She hadn't been in school in twenty years and she had no aptitude for physics, but she worked and pushed and stretched her limits until she was top of the class - except for me. So I envied her - and I felt guilty, because she had earned that #1 slot, but she didn't get it.

Outside of schoolwork, life frequently ran to the impossible. Cope with the predatory teacher? Impossible. Dealing with depression. Impossible (funny how that pretty much disappeared when my metabolism got straightened out). Getting myself organized? Impossible (still haven't figured that one out).

But karate isn't any of that. Karate is hard. I have to show up to classes and bust my butt to learn it. My brain may pick up on the ideas quickly, but that doesn't translate to what my body does. Only hard, repetative work puts karate in my muscles and bones instead of just in my head. It's a challenge to concentrate on where every finger and toe is. It's a challenge to push my body and reflexes to be quicker than they want to be. It's a challenge to stop analyzing my fights in the middle and relax into mushin. Karate challenges me every day. It makes me work. It makes me stretch my limits. Where I am and what I become in karate isn't a fluke, not of genetics, nor of experience. What I am in the dojo, I earned.

And that's why I take karate.

Good class - mostly

Had an interesting karate class today. Both Robbie and Aaron say they want to start karate (Robbie again, Aaron for the first time). However, when we actually went to class, Robbie decided to sit it out and work on his comic strip - he's starting a cartooning class at the local college in a week - while Aaron put on the gi and started, but jammed a finger (doing toe-touching) about ten minutes into class and abandoned ship. I'm not quite sure what to do here. Both boys insist that they want to do karate - except when actually in class, when they seem to want to be anywhere but there. I signed Aaron up for a two-week stint, which may allow him to make up his mind (I suspect it's going to be a not yet), without having to shell out too much money. Robbie, on the other hand, is a yellow belt. He's not eligeable for introductory periods, but he's just as flaky as Aaron about taking class and paying attention.

Other than the Aaron incident, though, class went pretty well. We went over tournament tactics with me as the demonstration dummy - lots of kicks to the ribs, fun! And then Sensei looked over a couple of the kids who are getting ready for belt tests while Sensei Don had the rest of us matching up for kumite. Our newest adult has suddenly lit up in kumite recently. She's gone from being a typical adult woman beginner - overthinking and a bit timid - to a serious danger. She's got some really good kicks and a lot of snap, though she needs to work on not leading with her face (like I can talk).

We ended up the class with a two-on-one bout between me and two of the young-teen boys, which was a ton of fun. They kept me running the entire time, but I scored some hits I'm really proud of (one front kick/side kick combo really came off well), and by the general reaction, I think I held my own. I love two-on-one fighting, there's no time to overthink and no time to take a break, and this is the first time I've done it since my last dojo. I'm hoping we get to do it again sometime.

It's going to be a lonely weekend. My MIL is going downhill again and we still don't know what's wrong, which sort of limits the doctors to treating symptoms. So Rob is going down tomorrow and spending the weekend helping out. She's got a new symptom now - her hemoglobin count keeps dropping. She's had five transfusions in the last week, but none of them help her count for long, so she just keeps getting more. There's been blood in her stool pretty steadily, but not near enough to account for this kind of low count. So either she's bleeding quite a lot somewhere they haven't spotted (I.e. internally), or her bone marrow is shutting down production. Neither of which is exactly encouraging.

She sees an oncologist today, though, and a hemotologist next week, so maybe one of them will have a brilliant idea. At least they should have some things to test that don't involve laxatives or exploratory surgery, neither of which is possible because she's not strong enough to tolerate them.

The rest of life progresses on. Aaron is liking his weekly PT, and has asked to start karate with me, so we're signing him up for a trial period on Thursday. Of course in his first class he managed to hit himself in the eye with his knee, so the coordination issue may be a problem.

Reading, therapy and stuff.

Okay, Sensei asked my belt size tonight. If he's ordering belts, testing is in the offing.

It's been a busy week or so. I'm reading a ton of stuff on bilingual education, specific language impairment (SLI), and related stuff onto tape for A, who's a Ph.D. student. She has a minor reading disability. Her eye tracking is funky, so she has trouble following the words line to line, which makes her reading very slow, particularly when the text is small and/or complicated. It's never really bothered her before, since it doesn't affect her comprehension and she's fanatical about staying ahead of her assignments. But now that she's in the final push for her dissertation, she's supposed to be reading about 200 pages a day of really complicated stuff, and it just wasn't happening.

So now she mails her articles to me to read onto tape. It's working really well for her (and I may even get paid!), but boy howdy does reading that much material aloud each day suck up the time. Plus swim lessons just started, Aaron starts a couple of months of physical therapy this week, and Robbie is now taking guitar. So I've been running from place to place non-stop, except when I'm holed up with an article and the tape recorder.

The physical therapy should be interesting. Aaron's pediatrician was concerned that his balance and self-care skills are still behind the curve, even though his writing and the rest of the stuff the school is working on are improving drastically. So she sent us off for an evaluation. The verdict is that Aaron has a motor planning problem. I.e. when he's learning a new skill (or putting two older skills together), his body can't figure out which muscles to use - so it tends to use all of them, or at least lots.

For example - put him on a half-ball to test his balance and he's fine. Have him toss bean bags at a square and he's fine. Put him on the half-ball and have him throw the bean bags and suddenly they're going in completely random directions.

It explains his first class in karate beautifully. Sensei showed him a front kick, and he plainly understood the motion just fine. But when it came time to actually kick, both legs were thrusting, so he was jumping off the floor every time he kicked - and when Sensei told him to concentrate on stopping that, Aaron fell on his butt every time he actually managed to not jump. He just couldn't isolate the motion to the kicking leg.

I'm a little at a loss as to what exercises a therapist could do to help with this, but she seems confident that she can, and fairly quickly too (she says about 2 months). So I'm very curious.

Annoyed or Flattered?

I was talking with Sensei last night. Though he hasn't mentioned it directly, we're definitely in gear-up mode for my brown belt test. We've practiced punching out candles twice now, he's given me one pre-test run-through of my katas, and we've been discussing various aspects of the test. I feel pretty comfortable about everything on the test except for the candle-punching - which mainly just needs practice. I've managed to put out the candles a couple of times with each hand, but I'm not at all reliable yet. In particular I keep rotating my hips into the punch more when actually punching than when checking my distance, and hitting the candle (an automatic failure). When I try to compensate for this, I end up too short of the candle, and don't put it out. Sigh. More practice, and I'll get it.

Anyway, Sensei and I were discussing the test requirements last night after class, and he commented that he thought perhaps they were too easy, and he should add some stuff. Which I have mixed feelings about. He's the Sensei, whatever he chooses to put on the test is fine. Plus, he's passed a female brown belt before, and apparently didn't think this same test was too easy then for her, so that he thinks it is now for me is sort of flattering. On the other hand, these are the test requirements I've known and been practising for, and it feels a little unfair to have him add more at the final countdown to the test.

In the end though, I think my first thought was the right one. He's my Sensei. He can test me on whatever he chooses to test me on.

Last night's work-out included pushups. Not ordinary pushups. Slow, perfect form pushups. We didn't do a whole lot, really not any more than usual, but my whole upper chest, back, and arms are killing me today. I haven't had muscles this sore in ages.

War & Peace in the closet

First off - sorry to not be posting much. I have a paying knitting project, and a semi-paying (barter) project of reading academic articles onto tape for a Ph.D. student with reading difficulties. I still have an enormous stack of articles to do, but I'm beginning to get into a rhythm which works for me, so the rest of my life is re-emerging.

Now, for the title of this little piece. My sons, Aaron and Robbie are both quite bright, but very different critters. Robbie is academically quite brilliant - and loves everybody to know it. If he learns how to do something, or figures out some obscure thing, he will broadcast it to the world. Nobody is in any doubt of how much Robbie knows.

Aaron is much quieter. A lot of people don't really have any take on how smart Aaron is, because he not only won't broadcast what he knows, but will actually hide it unless directly asked. We didn't find out he knew any of his letters until he knew all of them. By the time I figured out he was a dinosaur nut, he could tell me that a Dimetrodan was not, in fact, a dinosaur, but rather a mammal-like reptile - at 3! The family quote on Aaron comes from his aunt Kelly. "You'll find out Aaron can read when you catch him in the closet with War & Peace."

Well, Aaron can read - and Kelly was damn near right. We knew he could put together short words, and keep up with the reading requirements of his first grade class pretty easily, but that's a far cry from sitting down with a book for enjoyment. I still had him classified in my head as a "learning reader", rather than as an outright reader. But last night after shutting down all the lights, I went upstairs and noticed a light coming out from under the bedroom door. I opened it, and there was a little thump as Aaron dropped what he was holding and looked up with big eyes. "I'm sorry, Mommy. I was just doing a little reading."

Sitting on the floor was "The Pokemon Handbook", which is a book of lists about various things Pokemon. I've had Robbie following me around with it before reading things off. It's cut into short hunks, but it is not an easy-reading book. I would peg the reading difficulty at about chapter-book level, though with fewer big blocks of text.

When the heck did this kid start reading bigger books for fun? I'm not complaining, mind you (far from it), but how did he slip this little development past us?

Do I ever stop getting floored when Aaron trots out some dramatic new ability completely out of the blue? Do I want to?