Coming to terms with what "mortality" is all about. Not about the "death" process, of being mortal and all, but about "Well... this is what I have to work with," the reality of the limitations, the capacity, of this fleshy envelope we're inhabiting. For the moment.

Coming to terms with things like elimination. In all its expressions. And issues. And issues with my own anatomy...

Being a member of the Cath Club, I am becoming intensely intimate with (parts of) my own internal plumbing. It's hardly as much fun as discovering how one's genitalia work (c'mon, we all discover that, in our individual ways), but it is certainly... interesting. "Oh my, the catheter seems to be stuck there, but if I partially withdraw it and rotate the catheter and then try to reinsert, it'll slide right past the ... whatever it is... and slide nicely up the ... whatever it is. You know, where it seems to like to stick unless it's oriented properly."

But I have been indulging in very individual physical therapy. Practicing perceiving, and taking control of, internal musculature. Control over which definitely makes catheterizing vastly simpler! So there's an example of physical therapy done my way that helps me. Which seems to be anathema to a lot of physical therapists, but I don't care about that.

Yeah, I guess I do... I guess I'm holding onto resentment about said physical therapists, and medical caregivers in general, not paying any attention to me and whatever state I happen to be in. I talked Saturday with an acupuncturist who told me about how doctors nowadays are trained to keep themselves separated from patients; how they seemed to like clipboards, nowadays, to have something physical that can be interposed between them and the patients they're supposed to be

caring...

for. (Ah, there's the "C" word again...)

Yeah, I can care about my wife on the other side of a wall, but my first preference is to get rid of the damned wall so I can actually touch her and care for her. Hand her a cup of tea, even.

But this is a pattern I have seen all over the place... "Get out of my way so I can solve my problem my way." I'll buy that from a heart surgeon telling someone to get out of the way so they can operate on a heart while surrounded by non-surgeons, but man, if your job, if your primary reason to be there is to make that person better, that person's problems are "your" problems. YOUR problem is to make THEM better. Not to change their statistics, but to make them better.

Why is meeting someone at their point of need such an inconvenience? Admitting that someone else has needs that matter, because they know that how they feel matters.

And this is one of the many logs I have to get out of my own spiritual eye... to look at someone who cares about their own needs above all else, and denies the needs of others, and (what really pisses me off) to deny that meeting their needs at their point of need can be a life-changing gift, and to not even acknowledge my own need to meet others and help them transform themselves, and see how they have transformed and value that transformation...

But I haven't quite brought myself to forgive them for caring about what they care about for their own reasons. For not seeing what I see. Has nothing to do with "not agreeing with me," my own annoyance is at people not seeing what I see.

Oh there's an idea. For me to admit "I don't know everything. There may be something that I don't know, which matters very much. And the people I'm annoyed at may actually know these invisible-to-me things. So they're the right ones, not me."

Amazing things, this MS Journey is showing me, about myself.

Which really is "the THING" about MS, isn't it... teaching you things you never realized, about yourself. Yeah, we concentrate on whadamI-gonna-do about the walking or the wheelchair, the car, the diet, the catheters, the (God preserve me from them) DMDs or whatever else we've been given to take today, the reactions of our loved ones to our own situation, watching ourselves saying farewell to... well, pretty much anything, feels sometimes like "everything," that we have (as we amaze ourselves constantly) grown accustomed to, become reassured by, come to take as a "given" part of what makes me into "me..." It seems to be all about lessons.

Lessons that I didn't think I needed, but are coming my way anyway, and given how hard they are to accept... I guess I did need them, didn't I?

I have often said that "Life teaching you lessons works like this.... First, a tap on the shoulder. Next, a firmer tap. Next, a smack. Then, escalations... something right in the face, something falling out of a buildings, you are definitely gonna get hit big by the lesson life is trying to teach you until you learn it. Then, no new pain! Until the next lesson, that is..."

Well, MS is one hell of a lesson. And one hell of a gift, too...

"Here's your gift... learn this, NOW!"

And, it just keeps coming... the gifts. The demands: "Learn this now, or you're so gonna pay." I wish MS were an actual entity, that I could at least ask...

"Could we maybe try something... different?"

Not an option, I guess. As Super Chicken said in the cartoon days of my youth, something that's quite pertinent to the repercussions of our choice to incarnate in these bodies at this time:

You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.