I tried to pose this earlier, but I think it must have been too complex for wordpress. I’m thinking about how complicated it is to get dressed. I remember when Leda was small, she would create these elaborate outfits to wear, which took a lot of time to even put on her body. What order do things go in? Why are there so many layers? And how complicated are leggings, anyway? Just sitting in front of my suitcase, deciding on what to wear gives me an appreciation for my poor brain being able to figure it out at all! It went better as I thought about how much fun Leda used to have with the process of getting dressed as a little kiddo, and then to go about it with that attitude. I think my priorities are different than hers were – I want to be warm, she wanted complex fashion, but the layering is similar!It sure makes me chuckle, as I think about how much time we spend in this complex world of dressing ourselves up.
- Comment
- Reblog
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Seize Joy 
So good to hear that you are up and getting around enough to think about such things! Your post was very insightful and caused me to reflect on the disdain I have for make up, having to have the “perfect outfit”, and other things that humans do to “live up to” social expectations.
Good one!
Happy, happy, happy that you are healing!
Sorry if this posts twice…just wanted to congratulate you that you’re even thinking about what to wear! Interesting how much we humans take for granted the accomplishment of simple tasks! Not a slam- dunk for many. Glad to hear you’re up & about, enjoying autumn’s spectacle of color!
Loved the fashion news from Boston. If you were in Pullman with the Thrift Shop readily available, you could both layer and have an interesting fashion statement, and for a small fraction of the cost of buying other places!
Hi, there, Sis! You know what our MOM’s helpful hint would be (because I am sure she has given it to every daughter and every grandchild)…”If you are having trouble picking out what to wear, you have too many choices! That can easily be remedied by going to The Thrift Shop and picking out two things.” Not two outfits…two things:)
Hearing from you is the highlight of my day. You are truly remarkable! All my love!
Elizabeth you are surely right about how little empathy mom would get me right now on the dressing issue! And my dilemma related to how you tie a fancy scarf around a head wouund – I think she would just tell me to let everyone deal with the incision! I realize that I have zero ability to figure out how to put a scarf on my head without looking like a pirate, which is the look I’ve been sporting today – Jonathan thinks I’m able to pull it off, but I’m not sure it’s my best look. If I just had a parrot to sit on my shoulder, I think it would work better! I think mom could run a clinic for people who have brain surgery involving “what not to even think about wearing, because it’s too confusing and not really necessary!
On a different note, another friend from Pullman was thinking that maybe we could use my personal confusion to clear up all of the problems created by the Gregorian Calendar that all of those darn Romans created. What do you think?
While my Dad was recovering from his many strokes it was confusing for him to get dressed too. Sometime it would take upwards to half an hour. Helping him took a lot of patience, but because we also turned it into a game, you’ve given me a sweet memory to carry around with me today.
I really like the jumping the chain part. Obviously, the mosy
important parts of your brain are working!
Since we do not live in a clothing-optional society, I think it is a sign of health that you didn’t give up on the whole enterprise of getting dressed and chose to wear nothing! The art of dress is unique to humans, so I applaud your channeling Little Leda. Perhaps she will loan you her lace table cloth as a head wrap.
Kristine:
Your friend and my best friend from college (PLU), Lynn, told me about your blog, which I read with great interest. She said it reminded her of me – and up to the point of the brain surgery, it could have been written about me! I got a little deja vu just ready your blog about “what it’s like to have a seizure”. I, too, have right temporal lobe epilepsy, from having encephalitis as a 10 month old. – therein a miracle in and of itself – I was paralyzed on my left side and comatose for four days, which little hope of recovery. The doctors then had told my parents I would die or be a “vegetable” – the awful term we used in those days for someone with little to no intellectual of physical capacities. Indeed, God had different ideas for me. I went on to graduate cum laude with a degree in organ performance, in spite of having weekly seizures during the entire time I was at PLU. I, like you, had years of thinking I was having something “normal”, in my case, recurrent dreams, which I later learned were seizures that happened just before I awoke. When I was 14 I had my first seizure during the day, which felt very much like the “dreams”, and it was on the day my brother called to tell us he was going to Vietnam, so as I sat in the big rocker in the living room and cried, I was sure my “dreams” had “come true”. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was having deja vu. I kept having these weird episodes, my parents kept taking me to various doctors, who diagnosed everything from migraines (which to complicate the situation, I did have) to bad eyes (which again to complicate the situation, I was at the beginnings of an eye condition affecting my vision) to just patting me on the back and saying, “Honey, you just need to relax – it’s all in your mind”.(more of the latter than the former). So needless to say, the longer they went on, the more I began to believe I was going crazy. Then when I was 17, I began having bouts of severe episodes of depression (crying spells and deep black thoughts, which would go away as quickly as they came, foilowed by a rush of abdominal pain. Again, how would any of us have known in the early 1970s that this could possibly be my brain misfiring in the seat of the emotions, causing those “spells”. Then during the episodes of deja vu I began smelling burning rubber – I REALLY thought I was going crazy then!!! The doctors still just kept patting me on the back and telling me it was all in my head. Well, yeah, it WAS all in my head, but not the way they thought! I also started having visual hallucinations during the episodes – all of this, as you probably know, is so common with temporal lobe seizures, but of course, nobody had even heard of that type of seizure back then, save the neurologists, and we had no clue to even go to one! Finally my senior year at PLU I kept track of them and found they came more often during my monthly cycle (very common for women with epilepsy), so off I went ot an OB-GYN, thinking it was hormonal. What a creep I got – he yelled at me and said, “What makes you think I can help you!?” Again, that brought a rush of “He knows I’m crazy -why did I come here?” BUT, he was the first doctor to ask about my full history and the minute I told him about my encephalitis he said, I think you have a seizure disorder. Of course, I thought he was crazy, because I had never heard of temporal lobe epilepsy, but sure enough, with an EEG, I was diagnosed. It took another 20 years to control them, and it was because another idiot doctor thought I was making up my seizures and sent me to the Swedish Hospital Epilepsy Center to prove that I didn’t have epilepsy that I actually finally got on a regimen that is controlling the seizures for the first time in 56 years! Hallelujah!.
Anyway, my best wishes to you in your recovery. God bless you!
-Laurie
I hope I have the opportunity to meet you sometime. There are so many things about your journey that are similar to mine (For exaple, I know those terrifying seizures that happen when you sleep – for me, those are the worst ones, for some reason). It’s kind of interesting as they do the pathology on the angioma that was the abnormality that is at the source of my seizures, which they are still doing right now. As I understand it, and I will get this wrong, it was a little thing in my brain that had its own blood flow, but that probably also made it more easily influenced by my menstrual cycle and hormones in general, which has certainly part of my own experience with this for the past fifteen years. So I think there is a little hope that they may learn a bit more about this by studying the thing that came out of my brain, and that it might help them them to be able to do some new types of early diagnostics for others, down the line. There is so much that they are still in the process of coming to understand about epilepsy. It does make me feel better about going through what I’ve gone through if it can help the next person, down the road. Even helping families and people with epilepsy understand that neurosurgery is actually not the “end of the world” but a very important option to explore and finding the right team of doctors that can held you think that option through.