At twenty-eight weeks, she fell.  She hit the baby.  Intraventricular hemorrhage.  Whatever that meant, it couldn’t be good. …might lose the baby.…she could be born brain dead.

She was born.  She was a living, breathing beauty. 

Hydrocephalus… the blood prevented the cerebrospinal fluid from exiting the ventricles as it’s supposed to.  Brain surgery… a shunt.  It’s not that dramatic of an ordeal.  A shunt, to drain the fluid from her brain.  She’ll be okay.  Only a few weeks given to live.  Better make it a good two weeks. 

After the shunt was placed, her parents loved her SO much. Two weeks isn’t long enough.  Couldn’t we please just make it two months?  Please, god, two months. Two months.  She’s not a normal baby.  There are delays.  Her shunt’s not working properly.  Could be a shunt malfunction. Is she brain damaged?  A little.  Not much longer to live, though.  Just love her.  Love her and hold her.

Four months old now.  She’s so beautiful.  She may not be progressing like a normal four month old, but she’s so pretty.  She’s responsive.  She’s not a vegetable.  She can move.  She can smile.  She knows mommy’s voice.  She looks in daddy’s direction when he comes home.  Just a little longer… please, just a few more weeks.

Today I spoke with the family. Surgery?  Or Hospice care? What do YOU decide?Before you answer, I need you to remember something… If we save her… if we prolong the inevitable… what happens if she dies at five months old?  What about ten months old?  What if she beats all odds and lives– but is only ever a vegetable?  She might never be potty trained.  Her body can grow and her brain continues to deteriorate.  She’s not even baseline.  In fact, her white matter keeps growing smaller and smaller. Now what do we decide?

Don’t be too quick to make a judgment.   

springtime, spelltime, here I am,
was gone for only a minute!
the air is warm, the sun it shines,
and life is on full throttleLook out.  I think I just won on a scratch ticket. 

I had an interesting day yesterday.  The culmination of some recent mistakes left me reeling from the moment I took my first sip of coffee.  I love my coffee in the morning.  I like mine thick, dark, and creamy.  I like the smells of the wet grounds and the sound of the hissing, steaming frothy goodness that comes spewing from my machine, the one that sits waiting on my desk, eager for me to smile at it. *pets her coffee maker*

The first sip is always bliss.  But I was interrupted with some information about a few things I had made mistakes on– not by virtue of an angry boss, but by crying parents, sobbing mothers, and my office mate saying, “hey that surgery that was cancelled, well…”  Anyway, it was a pretty hellacious morning. I learned something about myself throughout the experience though.  First of all, I’m impressed with my honest and my immediacy in taking responsibility for the errors, and then scrambling to do whatever was necessary to fix them.  I got my boss involved.  Her boss, too.  I discussed with the nurses.  I apologized, and I did it with passion and integrity.   I like me for this. I also realized just how much I beat myself up over making mistakes.  I am one of those people who won’t let it go for a bit.  I constantly re-play in my head the key parts where I dropped the ball, re-enacting, figuring how I might do better in the future.  I learned how to talk myself down, calm myself, and accept that I’m human, and I make mistakes sometimes.  Ultimately, it’s better to make mistakes early on in the experience rather than never make mistakes at all and thus never learn from them. So, this really turned out to be a good experience for me.  I learned from it, and I’m learning more about the job, and getting better at it.  A greater understanding is always something that benefits me– reminds me why I’m doing something, etc. Anyway, so the moral of the story is this: It’s okay to make mistakes–even HUGE ones.  It’s okay to be human, and it’s okay to not necessarily get it right the first time.

• “The best managers are the ones who make mistakes and then figure out how to fix them…”  -Sheila

Yet another thing I learned from the former job from hell. Huh. *nods* It’s always perfect, isn’t it!

At the risk of sounding like an utter nutjob, I am going to share with you how I feel about something very intimate to me.

Okay, so you know how I buy into the law of attraction, right?  Like, how I believe that we create everything in our reality, and how we can have whatever we want, yada yada yada….? Well, I’m getting extremely good at manifesting what I want.  I’m getting good at it, and very quickly.  It’s almost, how shall I say… well, it’s strange.  My life is SO magical, that sometimes I wonder if I’m not dreaming.  Sometimes I wonder if I’m not part of this bigger experiment.  I know, here’s where I sound like a kooky paranoid schizophrenic personality, but for the reals, life is almost surreal.

Some of the most magical extraordinary PERFECT things have been coming my way… everything is paying off.  All of my dreams are coming into an alignment… I’m accomplishing the things I put my mind and heart into. Crazy.  Like an experiment crazy.  You know that movie, where Jim Carey is the center of a sitcom?  Yeah, like that.  Only it’s about me, and my life.  And a big part of that is through you all.  You’re my sounding board… you’re my witnesses to my creative expression… you’re watching it all come together with me.

Did I mention the surreal feeling?  Yes. Perhaps I do have some sort of personality disorder… I pick… narcissistic personality disorder?  Maybe?  (heh) Or maybe that’s just a good sense of self. Anyway, life is delightful.  Truly, really, superbly delightful.  I’m still in a dream mode– a lucid one where I’m controlling everything that happens.  And my good goddess, it’s beautiful!!!! …I can hear the comments now!  “We already knew you were a nutjob, Ash, but you’re such a loveable nutjob.”

*grin*

In a swirl of smoke,
my soul is gone…
whispering in his ear, “wake up.”
I’m so tired I think
I collapsed, left
my body behind
weeks ago, excited
my spirit has jumped
out of my bones,
so spent that I am
successful in every aspect
that is Ash…This marathon,
it leaves me
dark circles under my eyes a smile so blinding
that my reflection
only reflects Bright. I’m so close can
taste. These first days
the rest of my life,
the summer sun
and dirt
and sex
and smells…
the adventures,
the stories, the… I am in love, I am
at peace, I am 
type A bursting at her seams,
full throttle,
run-you-over kind of pace…
magnitude, momentum,
enthalpy, entropy,
it’s all a piece
of everything, everyone
ME

Hello, my beloveds, Change is happening. I am much like a butterfly pushing my way out of a crusty cocoon. I don’t know how long this will take, but I am eager to learn how to fly.

I awake, my head spinning.

I am curled up, my knees against my breast, my chin against my knees, my arms wrapped around my legs.  I cannot move.

I am in a fog, and am unsure of where I am.  I cannot stretch my legs, in fact, I cannot move.  I am inside of a box.  I try to wiggle. There’s not much room around me to move at all.  I can pull my arms into me, but I cannot lift my head.  There is wall against my back, above my head, and at my feet.  My elbows don’t have room to bend, so my attempts to feel my way around the structure are hindered.  I pierce the skin on my right index finger on something. 

Fuck. It’s dark.  I’m trying to decide if my eyes are open and it’s really that dark inside of my enclosure, or if I haven’t figured out how to open my eyes yet. I keep trying to lift my head from my knees, but I keep running into something. (more…)

Day two of meditation.

I lost my body.  It’s not sleeping.  It’s a very aware state.  It’s just… almost out of body, really.  It’s very grounding, peaceful, clearing…. I came out of my meditation very comfortable with me.  It was as though something had moved inside of me– flipped a switch maybe, that changed my “I need to be this way” into “This is me.” I really like this sense of… comfort?  Is that the right word?

Before I was born, my mother and my father ran this business, “Float to Relax.”  It was a place containing a number of sensory deprivation tanks, that people would pay to come in and float in for set amounts of time– half hour, hour, etc.  In my mind, it reminds me of a tanning salon: that in and out, that time for silence… But it was likely more to it than that.  In the late seventies, these tanks were inciting out of body experiences– hallucinations of sorts.  They were a craze that no one really talks about much any more.

Honestly, I’m not uncertain that this meditation business isn’t somewhat similar.  I can see why it offers health benefits– it’s rather important that we all take some time out every day to just BE… to let go of the other things in our experience, to give ourselves time to process, to rejuvenate.  Many people I know struggle to sleep, even.  This, to me, would be a super helpful means of assisting the mind-processes in order to speed up the process for when it’s time to actually nap.  Interesting. I only did it for half an hour.  I feel like I slept an entire extra night’s worth of sleep.  This could be good.  Very, very good. Now… off to study for another chemistry exam.  I can do this!  *grin*

Have you ever personally tried to get to know yourself?

Honestly, in going through this experience of getting to know so many people, I have sometimes forgotten that I need to also know who I am, what I bring into the experience, too. I think it’s a priceless exercise!  I have been in the dating world since I was seventeen-ish, and I’ve repeated some pretty curious behaviors over the last *gasp* ten years. I go through the process of getting to know a person, then for one reason or another– whether it be on my part or his, we have come to know each other well enough– and then we moved onto our next victim(s).   *grin*In all this time, I’ve slowly been getting to know myself– to know my wants and desires.  I’ll try one thing, give it a whirl, and then depending on how it turns out, learn from the experience and essentially move along. Eventually, in time, I’m quite certain that I will know what I truly want from companionship and partnership. It seems, though, that because I haven’t truly made an effort to get to know ME, then I would expect that perhaps what I know of myself isn’t truly enough to aim for what I really want.  You see what I’m saying here?

So, in observing this pattern, I have decided to make it a priority for me to know me purely– in as many experiences as necessary for me to really know what I want. (heh heh heh)I’ve been doing a lot of things by myself recently.  I’ve been going clothes shopping, out to eat, for walks around the reservoir, hanging out studying, spending time at home by myself.  I’ve been able to watch the things that I do, and am feeling that I am spending enough time to at least know me a little better.  And you know what?  I dig me.  Like, really dig me. (Even though I type the word “like” probably more than is necessary, it’s all good.) (more…)

I had a moment of clarity.  I’ve been trying to put it into words since I realized it this morning.  I have posted a few non-sensible blogs in hopes to be inspired when my fingers started typing in my box-o-comfort that looks like a blog posting box. The problem is that I’m suddenly presented with a writers block. Suddenly, I’m concerned about putting it down in type. Suddenly, I am uncertain of things from behind and yet at the same time, things before me look brilliant. How shall I put this….?

So.  This blog is a diary for me, so to speak.  I don’t put everything in it– but I put a lot of soul, a lot of spirit, a lot of my thoughts down here.  I’ve recently met someone– erk, not met, but re-connected with– someone who reads my blogs, now.  I was wondering how it was that this person could know me… could really know me, if a good portion of their exposure to me is primarily through my writing. So, out of sheer curiosity, I wanted to go back and read my blogs.  I wanted to see what it was that I’m putting out there– what it looks like from your perspective… how you pick up with I put down… you know what I mean. (more…)

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