479. Encouraging Thoughts

Ed and I flying out of PDX on his birthday, 4.7.14. I like to wear this shirt at the airport to make the TSA people nervous :). 

It is increasingly apparent that I can’t hide things from my people anymore.

1) I can’t keep Trainer D from keeping that ridiculous mental calendar of his that measures the cadence of my physical bumps in the road.

2) Coach R oscillates between calling me out without reservation and asking searchingly during Stretchy Time, How was your run? When I KNOW he saw me limping, or coughing, or walking really slow a few minutes earlier.

3) Gen told me a couple days ago that she could tell by the state of my shoulders that I’ve been doing things I don’t want to do this week. (I’ve been talking about my feelings and my shoulders were up near my ears.)

4) CMD spent a lot of time working on my nausea and digestion points and told me at the end of the session that when I was just talking to her in her office at the beginning she could tell I really wanted to throw up but didn’t.

 

Right…..so about that game face.

 

When I told CMD about the PTSD she was NOT pleased. We were talking and she held one wrist to take my pulse, and then she switched to the other side, just to check. She had been not pleased for a while because she had seen my stress building and my physical situation going down hill.

 

One day, prior to my diagnosis, i.e. before I knew that my distress had a name and could be treated, she broke down the situation for me. I was lying face down on the table – she took my left hand and guided it to the hole in my head and made me feel it.

 

See? She said. It is so much smaller. You should think encouraging thoughts. YOU ARE GETTING BETTER.

 

Good thing I was face down bc I almost burst into tears right then and there. She was offering physical evidence that I should be encouraged and I was moved by her kindness.

 

Still, I was totally grossed out by the hole in the head thing and managed to pat it gingerly and then extract my hand and tuck it back in place as quickly as possible. Some amount of closing was to be expected after they didn’t replace that piece of skull, but CMD wasn’t expecting this much. So now she continues to paint my head with herbs and says she’s “greedy” for more.

 

I go to her (and all of Team Tanimal) because God knew I needed people with extremely high levels of professional expertise and equally strong EQ’s (Emotional Quotients).

 

As I get better I love having the extra margin to do what she did for me – to be a Barnabas and encourage other people. Friends have asked me how I can manage to be interested in other people’s problems when they are so different from mine. My answer is that if you care about a person, you automatically care about their struggles, so it comes naturally. And as the Lord gives me the grace to navigate my own issues, I like to talk about what concerns my friends bc that’s what friends do – we don’t have to soldier on all alone.

 

400. Yield