When Pigs Take Flight Blog
A Prescription for Laughter
There are many moments in this crazy thing called life that are wrought with hilarity – when circumstance and happenstance collide in perfect comedic timing to deliver a small moment of unadulterated joy. In these precious moments, we smile, giggle, chuckle and laugh for a number of reasons. But ultimately, we laugh because, for the most part, LIFE is fricking FUNNY. Sometimes it’s funny-ironic, sometimes it’s funny-peculiar and sometimes it’s funny-ha-ha.
And, sometimes, life is not funny at all, and yet, we STILL laugh – as a way to cope or escape, as a distraction or to hide more intense emotions. Sometimes we laugh simply to keep ourselves from crying. We laugh in the face of adversity because on some days, it’s all the emotion we have left.
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The Mirror has Two Faces
I recently visited my hometown in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The brief trip was a welcome respite from life as I currently know it and, if only for a short time, it allowed me to escape back to a time and place that I’ve always considered the “good ol’ days.” During the visit, I caught up with long-time friends at one of my old favorite hangouts. Simply spending time around people and places that feature so prominently in my cherished memories of the time BEFORE any hints of illness existed was good for my soul.
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Anti NMDA Receptor Encephalitis: How I Learned to Love the Name
I used to HATE the words Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis (ANMDAre)! The name, similar to the disease it represents, is complicated and mysterious. It offers no insight to what the disease entails, unless you are a physician and, even then, you may not have ever heard of this illness, only recently identified in 2007, by Dr. J. Dalmau.
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The Missing Pieces
Three years ago, in the year 2013, I “misplaced” approximately 175 days of my life. I suppose my body decided that all of my life’s energy during that time was better spent on battling the monsters in my mind than retaining cognitive memory. My recollection of that time period disappears (quite conveniently) nearly the exact same time I was rushed to the emergency room — almost to the hour, in fact. It vanished rather abruptly, like a power outage; all of a sudden there was just blackness. And, in stark contrast, when conscious awareness finally returned, it was more akin to the dawning of a new day in winter; it came back slowly, a little at a time and never to its full strength.
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The Perception of Pain
For just a moment, imagine three young friends on the school playground having an in-depth conversation about the color purple. One of the adolescents was born blind and the other two are trying to describe what the color looks like to an individual who has never seen a flower, an eggplant, a crayon, or even a sunset. Imagine that of the two friends with sight, one sees the color purple and is reminded of a big silly dinosaur they grew up watching on TV and the other simply recalls the fresh grapes they ate last summer on a relative’s vineyard. Both are picturing the color purple and both are correct, but they have two very different perceptions of what purple appears to be, based on the input of their other senses. How can these friends describe a sensation or feeling to their blind friend? What does purple feel like or taste like?
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Autoimmune Disease: Lessons from the Inside
Living with an autoimmune disease means living with many uncertainties. But there are many things you come to realize in time, that – had you known before – may have provided some small comfort along the way. And, let’s be honest, upon initial diagnosis when the whole world seems to have shifted and the life you had planned has been forever changed, we’ll take all the comfort we can get.
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On the Soundtrack to Sanity
I’ve always been able to escape through music. music. No matter what I was struggling with, I could always find a song to help me cope or relate. I firmly believe that music has saved me from myself on more than one occasion. And even as I found myself drowning in the sea of encephalitis, I relied on the sweet escape of melody and lyrics to bring me through. I fell asleep listening to it, found comfort in it and even used it to communicate when my own words failed me
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The Real Test of Time
We, as humans, have contemplated, deliberated and sought to understand the concept of time, since, well… the beginning of time. The inevitability of its passing and the ensuing impact of its very existence on human lives has been a source of constant wonder in our ever-increasingly hectic lives. Each and every moment seems to be dictated (directly or indirectly) by the omnipresent ticking away of seconds, minutes, and hours.
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Sleeping with the Enemy
I have an ongoing love-hate relationship with sleep. I used to have a t-shirt that read “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” That was, of course, back when my daily stamina seemed limitless and I couldn’t stand the thought of missing out on a single moment (a chaotic and, fortunately brief, side effect of young adulthood, to be sure). But I have always loved to sleep- and frankly, I was good at it!
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