B-san the Baloon

Adventures with B-san continue.

For those of you who are not (yet) familiar with my stories about dealings with B-san, or as us anime-fans Japan-o-philes might call him, "Mr. Bladder," a brief introduction: I have more familiarity, as you might imagine, with the specific issues of MISTER Bladder rather than MISS Bladder, so that's where we'll be going today.

B-san is basically a balloon. Think of Alan the helium-filled balloon from The Amazing World of Gumball, who tragically enough is in love with a cactus, but that's another story. Anyway, here's Alan:

That's basically the right shape and tensile strength, for a "bladder analog." Imagine for a moment that the string is a catheter, and instead of a knot that ties balloons off, it's actually going to be a sphincter surrounded by the prostate. Because of the process of catheterization, getting things past that prostate-surrounded sphincter, I call it the "pros-gate" rather than "pros-tate." Gotta get it through the gate before the catheter can work as a straw, right?

B-san, for me at least, definitely has Issues. Sometimes he complains loudly and bitterly over not having really all that much to offer, emptying-wise. (What, you have a mercury-bulb-style thermostat? Pee-o-stat? You yelled this loud for 75 cc's of urine? that's all you got? What exactly is setting you off, I wonder.) Sometimes he says nothing and surprises me with the amount he has been holding.

Without complaining. This time. Not like 3:45 this morning, yes 3:34AM,  when he awoke me very insistently, but produced a Really? That's all you got? amount by the end of the process.

I don't get it.

Nonetheless, as my urologist told me about being in the Cath Club, everyone with MS eventually has to go down this road. So if you're stuck on a road, you might as well enjoy the scenery and do your best to avoid the potholes.

First thing that's gotta be ready for accepting the catheter is B-san himself. Although the tubes don't move around that much, the end of the tube can; B-san can twist about into all sorts of un-catheter-friendly positions. When it's psyched to empty, though, everything hangs in precisely the correct position. So if any Cath Club members have issues just getting the cath started... it may be B-san in a poor position. Wait a few minutes, no matter what he says, and try again, you may very well have a significantly easier time of it.

Right catheter makes a huge difference. A friend of mine has been using the same kind of catheter for over eight years, but what he uses is nothing like what I'm currently using. It took a few tries to find the one that really works well for me, but once I found it, catheterization became simplicity itself. Such simplicity that once I found the correct cath, it was very much a "And you thought this was difficult? You were afraid of this?" moment.

And it's B-san's untrustworthiness that makes it ... challenging... yeah, let's go for the nice word, challenging, to leave the house and go to dinners or concerts of whatever. If B-san is in a good mood, I can wait with no problem. Cath before I leave the house, cath upon return. No problem! But if B-san is in a screamy mood, or if something I've had to eat or drink has gone wicked diuretic on me, maybe I might need to cath while I'm still out of the house. Which is difficult; I need a mise en place to help me deal with all my gear, keep everything clean (as best I can, at least), keep liquids where we want them, under control, and guard against "catastrophic containment failures," as my wife the environmentalist has sometimes been known to say.

Cathing is easy. Dealing with all the cath stuff (equipment & related Things) is hard. Especially when you're trying to maintain cleanliness (sterility, I get only when I'm really careful/lucky... but fortunately I haven't gone down the infected-myself route so things, so far, seem to be working well enough).

Now, your milage may vary and all that, and your urologist will tell you what your urologist will tell you. But there are things that only we who are in the Cath Club can share, but we can only share our experiences... and so, there we are.

And if nothing else, imagine B-san with an expressive face, just like Alan pictured above. At worst, you'll get a smile out of it. You will smile. Which, for this world or Gumball's own amazing world, is a pretty good place to hang out.

And really, Gumball fans, better Alan than Tina Rex, the dinosaur... We got enough problems with B-san the Balloon as it is.

Amazing

One thing everyone with, or who lives around someone with, MS sooner or later (often sooner) realizes, is that their sensitivity has gone way, way up.

Sensitivity to... everything.

As one of my doctor's other MS patients told him, the best thing about MS is that it makes you more sensitive to your body. The worst thing about MS is that it makes you more sensitive to your body.

But there's way more to "sensitivity" than just what we're directly wired to, even with bad wiring.

I'm spending time every day, outside and in, or looking over from the back porch, the back garden.

And a lovely place it is, the back garden. But I'm definitely "working my sensitivity" while back out there...

Hallmark tells us when spring happens, on the equinox of course. My kyudo teacher tells me that in the Goode Olde Days in Japan, there were something like 100 or so seasons. Which works out to a new season every four days or so.

And if you actually pay attention to the seasons, and to what natural world you can reach from wherever you are... you'll very quickly see that the Olde Days were right. Season changes all the time. Maybe not the huge "finally, the spring thaw!" big big BIG seasonal changes, but yeah, every four days or so... everything changes.

Well, actually, every DAY everything changes, but I'm not quite there yet. Getting closer, though...

 And what I'm really, really enjoying, is the smell of the air coming off the mountains. My house is at the bottom of a system of hills, and as much as people like going up mountains so they can see ever so much more from that height, looking up the mountain will show you just as much. Or maybe even more.

Sometimes I can smell the creosote coming off the mountain, something that's very prominent the closer you get, or even if you get into or onto the mountain. This smell is a huge part of my childhood /youth memories of golden days spent at Griffith Observatory, watching the "star shows" or, in later years, Laserium.

Ah, but that smell, so many memories are woven into that smell... which I sometimes can catch a whiff of, miles and miles away from the actual mountains that surround the San Gabriel valley.

Laserium is long gone; so are the "star shows." They have a new and amazing projector, in my youth a Zeiss mark 4, but now they're onto a mark 9, which projects so well that if you have a hand lens or other micro-telescope-like thing, you can see projected images better than you can see them with the naked eye. But there's nobody driving the show like they did when they had to do everything by hand, nowadays a computer shows all sorts of cool images but everything's pre-recorded, shows don't change to match whatever's in the night sky (too complicated to do that sort of thing), and cool as the images are... they just don't sing to me the way the "star shows" did from the golden days of my youth. Planetarium seats are WAY better now, but shows aren't to my taste as much as the "by hand" ones were, and although much of the place has been ADA'ed, I think the telescope (dome on the left, in the Laserium photo above) may be closed to me, the last time I was in there I had to walk up several flights of stairs and/or ladders. Which was, believe me, OK, considering what they'd enable you to see. But ... that was then. This is now.

Oh well.

But just sitting in my home's back garden, wheelchair and all, I see and hear and smell things that I never have before. One of my acupuncturist's favorite prescriptions include "get into nature" and "look for something you've never seen before," and that happens to me daily.

I see new buds on my pomegranate tree; every day I see another one. Oh, this tree's gonna be so wonderfully generous.

I see tomatoes flowering, and even tiny tiny tomatoes, just starting. I see new buds on a Greek basil plant. I see very very happy honey bees looking for nectar.

I hear a bird crying at a nest. It's up too high, I can't see what's in it, but whatever it is seems to have upset this poor bird, because she cries very pitifully at the nest. And then she flies away... A woodpecker was very enthusiastic a few weeks ago. It's not there now. Squirrels chatter and pick at the loquats growing in my tree and the neighbors's tree. My cat is clearly very happy with the catnip my Garden Guy planted for her, wanders outside and rubs her face in it very happily. A few days ago a black-and-white cat I'd never seen before (or since) wanders through and invades my cat's catnip. Which did not please my cat at all.

If I feel like it, I pick some lettuce that's growing in the garden. Maybe even add a few herbs.

But no matter what... just breathe. There is a difference about the air coming off the mountains... as my wife calls it, the breath of the mountains.

There's got to be a piece waiting to be written with a title like that... Haven't quite settled on an exact title yet, much less oh yeah, the notes and rests and all that, and music that's ahead of it "in the pipeline" needing--needing--to be written too... but we'll see. A band piece by Joseph Schwantner that I played in college was titled "And the mountains rising nowhere," it's an amazing piece but it's in a very different place than I am right now. But even in Las Vegas, in the middle of the Nevada desert, I can smell the mountains, I can feel the mountains breathe. And if you drive a few minutes north, you can get into an actual Alpine environment. Truly amazing air, there, only a little ways north of Sin City. Photo is from last October... who knows what it might look like, now?

But yes indeed, dear readers: Seasons are changing. Constantly. MS or not: Go outside and breathe. If you're somewhere that's in some way connected to nature, in any form, go outside and breathe today, and the next day, and the next, and the next.

And see how things change.

You'll be amazed.

And then what

Had the usual weekly acupuncturing/MD chat/dharma talk with My Guy. Nothing particularly outstanding, points-worth-reporting wise, although I think (I think) I got a point called "Relax and Joy." Which corresponds with my prescription for the week:

Have fun.

Or, as might be more accurately transcribing what lay underneath his prescription, "Dude, come on, have fun!" Keep out of the dark waters and stay in the sunshine!

I've been reading the blogs of Ram Dass, and as you can imagine, he's very big on "Be here, now"... One recent post, which might be of especial interest to us MSers, was about transforming or transmuting energy.

I'm certainly getting a lot of "Be here, now" messages pretty much right in the face... daily. Hourly. Minute-ly. Remembering the conversation I had with my doctor, years ago, about the wheelchair. Keep out of it as long as you can,  he told me, because if you get in it, you may never get out of it.

Well, I'm in it now. Whether I want to be in it, does not apply. Am I going to stay in it or one day get up and walk away?

My doctor years ago had an MS patient who did just that. A quarter-century in a wheelchair; one day he got better, got up, and walked out of the hospital. Yes, it does happen like that, sometimes. MS being MS and all.

As I often quote Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings, "Who can say?"

As for today... do some "business" things, file some pieces of paper and get them off my desk, enjoy some mochi-centric treats Karen brought us yesterday, maybe have a waffle. Write music. Dunno about that yet... Maybe. Or not. As I'm typing this, I honestly don't know.

Make some tea, I think, is a good place to start. At some point later today I'll go outside and get some sun as well as some air, which here in Pasadena is especially nice today.

iPhone app says it's going to be 90! Or 80! Or something else!

Well, that's the MS highway for you, ain't it? Or, just like life...

We'll see what's going to happen when we get there. And then what?

Be here. Now.

What else do we have?