Validation
Over the xmas season I conversed via facebook messenger, with my cousin Tina in England. She sent me a lovely silver bracelet engraved with the words, "Love without limits, Dream without fear". In our conversations she mentioned that her mother (my aunt Mary whom I've mentioned) always worried about me. She said her mom (knowing she could get away with it 'cos she was the favourite sister) even told my mother off a couple of times with regards to the way she treated me. She also told me that when she and her first husband emmigrated to Canada and were living with us, they too witnessed my mothers treatment of me. And it was the reason they moved out. They couldn't bare to be around it.

　


Self Nurturing/Nourishing
This week at the trauma group (week 4) the topic was self nourishing. I'm having difficulty with the concept of self nourishing/nurturing. Different people mentioned different things but the things people listed as self nourishing seem to me to be things we have to do anyway ..... bathing, hair cuts, driving places, cooking, research, etc.

I suppose walking for no reason, without purposeful intent to get from A to B could be considered self nurturing. I used to enjoy hiking the dogs on the forest trails but now I haven't the energy to hike them to the end of the driveway! And as much as I enjoyed those walks and being in nature, it wasn't something I was doing for myself. I was doing it for the dogs. For their enjoyment. For their quality of life. I was just along for the ride. Perhaps when spring arrives I can find the energy to re-visit those walks, but this time for 'me', with the dog along for the ride.

Watching television I suppose could fall into the category of self nourishing. Relaxing. Taking it easy. But at the moment for it's just passing time. There's nothing I feel passionate about watching or find 'enjoyable'. When Dad was alive and when we still had the satellite for multiple channels, we used to love watching Dancing With The Stars & I would arrange work hours to ensure we would get home in time to see it. The satellite made it available in different time zones so we were able to see it at different times. Our other favourites were Murdoch Mysteries and Heartland and we were passionate about not missing "our shows". Blue Bloods was my dads favourite show & another that we enjoyed watching together. But now I've lost the enjoyment. I don't see any of those shows anymore because I no longer have the satellite and the HD attenna only brings in one channel. But even if I had the channels ..... the interest is gone. Now television just passes the time. Other human voices in a house devoid of conversation.

　


Freestyle Workshop
At xmastime my friend gave me a gift certificate to attend a two day freestyle workshop with my dog Paige. It took place last weekend. It was a fun weekend and it felt good to be 'normal' for a couple of days. I guess you could say I was 'in the window'. At one point I commented to my friend that Paige was having a lot of fun and she commented, "so are you!" And strangely, my response was, "Am I ?" Questioning. Strange that I was unaware that I was having fun until someone pointed it out to me. I was so focused on Paige that I didn't even notice myself. It was a good weekend. I did enjoy it, even to hte point of feeling a desire to sign up for classes when they are offered in the spring.

When Monday rolled around I found myself feeling sad and weepy and confused as to why I wasn't feeling content and happy (?) following a pleasant weekend. Sean explained the phenomenon as my being 'depleted'. If I understood correctly it's about the dopamine that my brain isn't used to experiencing. So a weekend (or event) that causes a dopamine spike uses up my resources, resulting in the 'emotional crash' I feel in the following days.

I'm still having difficulty with resting to replenish. I mean, I am resting because I have no energy to function, but I don't feel 'at home' with the idea. My 'homework' this week is to take the time to rest and feel okay with it.



　

Trauma's Witnessed and/or Experienced
When I started in the trauma group I was given a few questionaires to fill out. One of them asked about trauma's witnessed and /or experienced. There wasn't much rooom for much to be listed and I listed what came to mind in the moment, but have since been thinking about the various traumatic events that have peppered my life experience.

Obviously with an abundance of animals there comes an abundance of loss. Sometimes it seems I am just getting past one loss when another takes place. Some have been peaceful at home. Others peaceful with medical assistance (euthanasia). And others have been tragic and traumatic.

In the course of the past few years there have been a staggering number of extremely traumatic events. Dads declining health brought several frightening events such as the stroke that he had while we were driving home from a dog show. He started shaking and shivering and saying that he was cold even though it was August and the temperature scorching. Then his speech started to slur and then he passed out. I drove to the nearest hospital emergency where instead of help, we were faced with a hostile nurse who refused assistance. She said something to the effect of incoherence and passing out being a 'senior' thing. Her attitude was one of utter disdain. Dad was unconcious and unable to be wakened. An orderly came out with a gurney and this bitchy nurse sent him back inside saying, "I can't lift him". And then she told me that unless my dad could get in the doors of the hospital under his own steam, they couldn't help him. Then she marched back inside grumbling something about 'you should have called an ambulance'. Had we been home I would have called 911, but we were already on the road, driving home, so driving to emergency seemed the right thing to do. This nurse did not even think to check Dads vital signs. He could have been dead for all she knew. She left me standing outside the hospital doors with an unconcious man in the front seat of my van. I didn't know whether she had gone for help or just abandoned us. No one came back out to help and as I was about to dial 911 an ambulance pulled into the drive and I ran up to the driver and asked for help. The paramedics jumped into action, taking Dads vital signs, making the assessment that he was having a stroke. They got him out of the van and into the ambulance and took off with lights and sirens, heading to the Hamilton General Hospital (we were at the emerg in Hagersville). Dad was in the hospital in Hamilton for a couple of weeks and although tests were inconclusive, it was deemed a probable stroke.

Another Dad scare was perhaps a year before this , prior to his mobility decline. He was building a shade shelter (shed) for the horses and came inside for lunch. He was in his bedroom and I heard a thud and then Dad calling to me for help. He had fallen and needed assistance to get up. I was helping him to his feet when he started to pass out. His speech started to slur as he sank to the ground and slipped into unconciousness. I was terrified. I thought he'd died right there in front of me. I was screaming, "WAKE UP!!!" as I shook him. I called 911 in a total state of panic. The operator stayed on the line with me while I continued to scream, "DAD!!! WAKE UP!! WAKE UP!!" It's a 15 minute drive to the Six Nations ambulance depot, and a 25 minute drive to the Hagersville station. I'm not sure which station was dispatched but before they arrived, Dad came to. He had been out for a good five minutes.

There were quite a few 'near misses' with Dads health during the last few years of his life. One such time was when he fell and broke his hip. Once at the hospital routine bloodwork revealed that his hemoglobin was so low that had he not fallen and ended up in emergency, he might have only lived a few more days. The doctor told me he was surprised that Dad was even alive with such low blood levels. I think he had two blood transfusions before they were able to operate to repair his hip. He'd been taking blood thinners for almost a year but his GP failed to monitor his blood levels, thus the unknown drop in hemoglobin to fatal levels.

Following the hip surgery Dad experienced a temporary dementia. I was not prepared for this and was terrified by his sudden loss of memory and sense of reality. He didn't know who I was. He was talking gibberish and about people who weren't there. At one point he thought Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory was in his room. Then he started asking questions about my mother who had passed away years earlier. He thought she was still alive. The doctors told me that this transient delusion is common in seniors following major surgeries / general anaesthetic. It's also common with infections, and the following years of Dads life saw several more episodes of this transient dementia.

There were also two violent animal deaths in the past four years. One night I came home to find that a dog that I was fostering for a Toronto rescue had broken out of her crate and mauled/killed my beautiful cat Rosie. I found the dog with her face and legs covered in blood, standing over Rosie's dead body. It was a horrific sight.

Equally horrific was the death of my 16yr old goat, Lucy. I had put all the animals into the barn for the night and Lucy was missing. I went looking for her until darkness fell. No sign of her anywhere. I went into the house, hoping she had hunkered down somewhere and I would find her in the morning. No sooner had I gone inside than the dogs in the yard started barking like crazy. LUCY!, I thought. I grabbed a flashlight and went back outside. I called to her and then my flashlight caught 'eyes' up by the back barn. I called to Lucy as I walked towards the eyes ..... thinking it was Lucy. As I got close I saw the source of the eyes ..... not Lucy ..... a coyote. Standing over Lucy's freshly killed body, her gut torn open, and the blood still flowing. The coyote skulked away leaving me to witness the horror before me. My beautiful Lucy that I loved so much, brutally killed by a coyote. I think she gave her life to save her herd. She was the matriarch of the barn. She wasn't afraid of dogs. Whenever our farm dogs Shep and Tahree would deem them too far from the barn, they would chase them back and once the herd passed her, Lucy would turn to face off the dogs, and they would give up the chase. Job done. Critters back near barn. I believe this scenario played out with the coyote. Lucy would have turned to face the coyote to protect her herd and that action cost her her life. She wouldn't have run. She would have attempted to fight off the coyote.

Prior to moving where I am now, we lived up on Georgian Bay and during our last year there we were hounded by a very aggressive and dishonest bylaw officer. This fellow came along one day and tried to solicit protection money from me to "protect" me from "them" (I'm assuming he meant the bylaw office). He said if we came to an aggreement (while gesturing $) he could protect my dogs and I from any bylaw changes. I told him that my dogs were all licenced and grandfathered as we pre-existed the bylaw changes. Well that didn't go over too well and he started hounding us. He threatened my life and the lives of my dogs. He threatened to steal the dogs when I wasn't home. He threatened/suggested that my kennel might burn down one day. He threatened that if our neighbours walked their dog and it 'stepped on' our property, he would charge us with having too many dogs ON the property. He stalked our property by driving slowly by and sometimes parking just across from us, making life extremely stressful. The only time I felt safe was on the weekends. After my mother died my dad and I decided to sell and move somewhere safe and four hourss south for milder winters.

My mothers death was unexpected. She had been in poor health most of her life but in latter years it was heart disease and type II diabetes that plagued her. She had a triple heart bypass about ten years before her death. She had slowed down and slept a lot in her recliner chair in the living room and had a bit of a grey complexion. But she still had mobiliy and walked unassisted. She had a walker for when she went out to the stores since walking longer distances would tire her and make her short of breath. But se was steady on her feet and did not need the walker in the house. There were no signs that her death was impending so it came as a shock when she passed in her sleep one night. I wasn't home. I was in the city for the weekend with the dogs for flyball practice , and teaching dog classes. My dad called me on the Sunday morning to tell me that my mom had died. He had gotten up as usual and made tea, and when went back into the bedroom to wake my mom and bring her tea as he did every morning, he discovered she was dead.

Two months after my mom died, I broke my knee at a flyball tournament. My knee was broken in two places. The fibula and the medial tibial plateau. I had surgery to repair the tibia and to this day have two pins in my knee. Four months after the surgery I had a second surgery to break down scar tissue that had formed and was preventing my knee joint from bending. It was a full year of physio before I could walk unassisted. I went from wheelchair, to crutches, to walker, to cane. And even now, seventeen years later, my knee still bothers me. During my recovery Dad and I started looking at properties and moved to the farm in Norfolk County.

The topic of knees takes me back in time to when I was a teenager and my sister had knee pain that no one seemed able to diagnose. After several doctors consults covering several months, she ended up at the emerg at Sick Kids in Toronto, due to intense pain. The doctor that night saw "something" in her xrays and consulted with a specialist/oncologist and it was determined that she had a tumour in her knee. I'm not sure how they diagnosed it as cancer but the outcome was that she had her leg amputated and was put on chemo, and thus began the two year journey of her demise. The ninth floor of Sick Kids was the cancer floor. We experienced many childrens deaths on that ward. I don't think anyone survived. My sister and parents befriended another girl and her parents at the hospital ..... they were room mates. I can't remember her name now. She had leukemia. Her dad used to bring Alex and her 'donut holes' . She didn't survive. My sister had osteogenic sarcoma. Same thing as Terry Fox but before his time. Despite aggressive chemo, my sister developed tumours in her lungs and had surgeries to remove them. Then she grew tumours on the side of her skull and her wrist, neither of which could be surgically removed as they were in the bone. They eventually had to take her off the methatrexate (sp?) because it was destroying her kidneys, and then everything just went rapidly downhill and she passed away in the hospital. Another casualty of the ninth floor. Such a depressing and death filled place. Alex was fifteen when she died. I was nineteen.

Not too long after my sisters death .. maybe a year or so .... I started having knee trouble. Lots of pain when bending while weight bearing. I was still dancing at the time and it was aggravated by the activity. There used to be a hospital in Toronto called the Orthapedic and Arthritic Hospital and they had a sports clinic. At first they treated my knee with cortisone injection but it didn't work to alleviate teh pain for more than a short while and it was determined that I needed surgery. An arthroscopic something or other . The surgery went well but about 4 months into physio I needed a second procedure to break down scar tissue that was impeding flexion of the knee (just like years later with the broken knee ..... same knee) Leading up to the first surgery though, was the most traumatic part of the whole experience. Because my sister hae died from bone cancer I had to be screened to make sure my knee pain wasn't due to cancer. I hade to go to a special radiology place where they put dye in my system for some special xray. It was a long time ago so I really don't remember all the clinical terms. I was terrified. I hadn't thought my knee pain could be cancer. A friend came with me for moral support. And I didn't tell my mother about it because I didn't want her to worry. The test was negative. No cancer. Just a bunged up knee.

I seem to be going backwards in time recalling things. Over my lifetime I witnessed many many health issues with my mom. She was not blessed with good health. When I was about two years old she had her thyroid gland removed (although I don't remember this , I just know it happened from being told). During my childhood she was hospitalized for different things including surgery for kidney stones. They removed a huge spiked stone! Later in life she had a triple heart bypass, and hip replacement.
And about a year before she died she had a mild stroke. No permanent damage thankfully, but a scary thing to witness.

Moving back to more recent years Dads health had him in and out of almost every hospital in our general area. He was in Hamilton General when he had the stroke. Brantford General when he broke his hip and a few times for other things. Norfolk General for various things. And Hagersville once. Where you end up depends on where the ambulance takes you. Prior to his major decline in health he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and had radiation treatment and some kind of chemo injections. I drove him to the Juravinski Cancer hospital in Hamilton everyday for three months. I think this was probably the beginning of his overall decline in health even though he recovered from the cancer. But following this, the next few years brought more health challenges and many emergency visits and hospitalizations, infections, loss of mobility, and his eventual passing in February 2019. He spent the last 5mths of his life at Norfolk General.

In October of 2018 I had a car accident. I was changing lanes and as I arrived in my lane the car in front of me slammed on its brakes and I hit it . Crushed the front end of my van and air bags deployed. Van was a write off. I was the only one hurt but I couldn't go to the hospital because .... well you know (if you've read this whole blog). And besides, I was in Burlington, how would I get home? And I had dogs at home so couldn't risk being kept overnight at a hospital. And, my dad was in hospital in Simcoe and I couldn't let him know I'd been in an accident because I couldn't worry him.

Both my shins were cut and bleeding from hitting the lower dash. My right shin had a huge goose egg and was painful beyond belief. I wondered if the bone might have been cracked. It took almost a month for the pain to subside And for months afterwards if anything bumped it I would scream in pain. Even now 15mths later, I still have a mark on my shin and a bump on the bone. The air bag slammed me in the stomach causing a sizeable laceration. It was quite swollen for awhile and my entire torso was bruised in various shades of purple and green. I still have a scar to show.

I didn't want to worry my dad so I kept the accident and my pain , a secret. I told him I was getting a new van because the old one had mechanical issues. He needed to know I was getting a new van just in case they discharged him and he's see the new van.

For awhile after the accident I had nightmares about cars hitting me from all sides and being smashed by air bags

　


Re-Visiting Absence Of Misbehaviour
This week at the trauma group we reviewed the topics of boundaries and self nourishment. I volunteered that reinforcing absence of misbehaviour with regards to people crossing boundaries might be a useful strategy in helping to extinguish that boundary crossing. If we were able to fine small windows of opportunity when someone is not crossing our boundary, and we find a way to reinforce that, perhaps it could help to shape a new and more acceptable behaviour from the offending person. It could also help to set new boundaries. Often by reinforcing absence of misbehaviour we are simultaneously reinforcing a desired behaviour. For example, if a counter surfing dog is one day relaxing on his bed at a time when he would normally be counter surfing and we reinforce him, we are simultaneously reinforcing absence of counter surfing and relaxing on his bed