Occupational Hazard

I received a call recently from the husband of one of my regular clients.  I hadn't seen her in a while, and since I knew she was battling an aggressive cancer, I suspected the worst.  When I saw her name come up on my caller ID, I had a momentary flutter of hope.  Cured! Or at least stronger! This one would beat the odds!

Then I heard her husband's voice, high-pitched, sing-songy, clearly desperate to keep it together.  He told me that his wife had "taken a turn," and that she was pretty much bed bound.  I couldn't picture it.  This lively, funny woman who used her entire body to punctuate her sentences lying still? No way.

Her husband remembered that I had offered to come to their house and give her a massage.  He wondered if I could still do this.  I answered before he finished his sentence.  Yes.  For her, yes.  Always.  Tell me when and I will be there.  I don't care that it's snowing and you live about an hour's drive away.  The answer is yes.

He thanked me, told me he would have to check and see when the parade of visitors would let up so she could relax into her massage.  He tried to massage her legs himself, he said, but she said he was just too rough.  And here his voice broke.  He sobbed into the phone, still maintaining a normal conversation.  He talked to me about dates and times and when he could call me back, all through heaving sobs that I could almost feel in my own body.

I checked my urge to say "it's okay," because it wasn't.  I just said, "I'm sorry," and "I will come to see her.  I want to come to see her," and "Thank you for calling me." He recovered just enough to end the conversation with grace and all those polite expressions we use when saying goodbye to someone we don't know very well.

I thought I had gotten better at this, after three of my former clients died in the space of a week last month.  I thought, as I calmly went back to my book after the phone call, I have found my balance of professional and compassionate.  Then I cried into my hands for twenty minutes, thinking of the grief of a husband watching his adored wife waste away before his eyes.  This is my occupational hazard.

In Waves

My client is an artist.  She regularly shows and sells her work at galleries in the nearby suburb.  She also has Parkinson's, so I'm not sure if she is creating new work.  She tells me she used to receive massage every week when she was younger, but that she hasn't had a massage in over 12 years.  She has forgotten that I massaged her once a month for a time last year, but I let that go.  

She speaks clearly and with deep intelligence, but her cadence is stilted.  Her speech pattern resembles a particularly adept computer voice simulation.  Unconsciously, unnecessarily, I slow down my own speech.

She climbs onto the table, and I hold her in my arms like a child to help her gently lie down.  Once we have pillows in place and she is comfortable, she closes her small, piercing blue eyes and goes right to sleep.  I give her a gentle massage, slow and still with respect to her thinning skin.  I am struck by her arms.  Her upper arms are soft, fleshy.  Her forearms, however, are wiry and dense.  I can feel in her muscles the years of holding a paintbrush, moving canvases and mixing colors. 

She falls deeply asleep during the 30-minute session.  She is my last client of the night, so when I wake her to tell her the session is over, I tell her she can lie there until she feels ready to sit up.  She is grateful, and asks for a few minutes.  I sit in a chair in the corner of the room, while she rests on the table.  While I sit quietly, watching to make sure she is in no distress, I start to catch and match the pattern of her breath -- or maybe she catches mine.  I feel a warm surge traveling around the room.  A wave.  A cotton sheet in a summer breeze.  The first touch of brush on canvas.  In the few minutes after the massage is done and before she is ready to get up, I find utter stillness.  I reconnect to my purpose.  

Swim, Dammit.

A couple of the teachers have started affectionately referring to this class as "our girls."  It is a very small class, all young women.  They lost a pretty high percentage of their classmates in the first couple of terms, so the remaining "girls" have grown pretty close.  When they set up to do hands-on work, there are only 3 tables, maximum.  No matter what the size of the room, they set up their tables so close together that they are guaranteed to bump into one another at some point.  I teased them about this one day, running the length of the empty classroom with my arms outstretched, saying "Look at all this room for awesome body mechanics!"  They laughed, and one of them said, "But we've lost so many people.  We have separation anxiety."  She smiled when she said it, but I saw real loss and fear in her eyes.

A group this small, this closely knit, can be beautiful for teachers to work with.  At the end of last term, they all gave presentations about their challenges and experiences with self care.  Every one of them had a meaningful insight, more impressive than I ever hoped for.  Every one of them said something about being positive, being optimistic, being overwhelmed but excited about their future careers.  Our girls were an inspiration, a shining light to look forward to.

Then came this term.  My colleague and I had a throw-up-your-hands moment in the faculty lounge.  Our girls were missing so many classes.  Our girls were not turning in their work, they were failing tests that should have been easy for them.  Our girls were expressing doubt about continuing in the program, with only 15 weeks to go before they graduate.

Tomorrow, I have our girls for class.  All my preparation for this class has been about getting them back to that optimistic group of students who could handle anything.  I see them sinking.  There are so few of them, I feel like I should be able to gather them all in my arms and pull them up.  I could be that strong.  But then I remember this: lifeguards are taught to try every possible method of rescuing a drowning person before they go in the water themselves.  This is because a drowning person could push a lifeguard under in their struggle for air.

So I have to think, have I tried every possible method?  Is it really time to cast myself into the water in an attempt to save them?  I don't know.  I just know, looking at my grade book and attendance sheets, our girls are in trouble.  I know, looking at their faces, our girls are overwhelmed, and they have lost the excitement.  Somehow, between now and tomorrow, I have to find enough excitement, and enough life preservers for all of us.

Your Science is in my Art! No, Your Art is in my Science!

I've been reading a few blog posts lately about the science/art conflict in massage therapy.  I remain confused about why there is conflict at all.  I look at science and art together as the Reese's cup of the idea world -- good apart, but addictively delicious when combined.  Two great thoughts that think great together.

This came to mind again today when I saw a few Facebook posts showing results of some right-brained/left-brained quiz.  As I am a sucker for a good quiz, I took it, and found my results were exactly in the middle.  Unscientific, but every time I have taken one of these quizzes, it comes out the same.  Exactly in the middle.  Maybe I can't favor art or science because my brain abhors extremes.

Or maybe science and art are more delicious together than separate.  I call myself a "science monkey," I warn my students against talking about toxins, I have multiple Google Scholar alerts.  And yet -- Every time I lay my hands on someone I think to myself: "This is (name.) She needs (compassion/peace/comfort/whatever.)" If I don't do this the massage suffers.  When I am in the middle of a massage, especially an oncology massage, I feel a tight circle around myself and my client which physically blocks outside noises, thoughts and feelings.  I describe it as that TV blurry fade, only it just fades out background chatter.

I want to live in my Reese's cup world, where creative combination is the way to practice, not willful exclusion.  Open, but not gullible.  This is how we create new ideas, new methodologies, new relationships.  Let's sit in a balcony and let those chocolate bars fall.

Big Girl Trousers

What do you do when the right decision for you is also the one that causes the most panic?  If you're me, normally you ignore it and hunker down with the safest choice instead. Then, maybe, something happens to split open your life, and all the usual choices are blown to bits. So, what do you do?

If you're me, you take ten steps back, then run directly into the panic, waving your arms and screaming "Towanda!"

A full time faculty position recently opened up at the school. It would be that rare unicorn among MTs -- a job with a consistent salary, regular hours, and benefits. Benefits! I had those when I worked in corporatetown. They were soooo . . . . safe.

I sent in my resume for the job. The salary and benefits would go a long way to eliminate the things I worry about. But, I just started a practice that could be a beautiful expression of my work. I am getting more involved with teaching oncology massage, and I just signed a preliminary contract to provide massage at a nursing home. None of these things have benefits beyond feeding my passion and making me excited to wake up every day. None of these things have security beyond that of knowing I am doing what I was meant to do.

Benefits, though, and the hypnotic charms of financial security. I interviewed for the position, and they wanted me. They hoped I would apply before they posted the job. They saw me doing well in the job. To tell the truth, so did I.

Today, I turned them down. I will still remain as part time faculty, because the teaching makes me a better therapist, and because I do need some consistent income.  I decided to take on this new independent adulthood, and move towards the things I am best at, even if they aren't exactly secure right now. I am running towards the panic, arms outstretched.  Maybe some of you think I've made the wrong decision, and I'm okay with that.  Maybe you're right, and I'm okay with that too.  Maybe I will stumble, fall, crash and even burn.  But I'll be happier for it.

Towanda.

I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own

We humans are born storytellers, aren't we?  We can make waiting in line to buy gum into a full narrative with a dramatic arc, heroes, villains, possibly even a quest and the revelation of unknown truth.  As a way to connect with each other and make sense of our lives and motives, stories are powerful beyond understanding.  But we are also easily trapped into common narratives that oversimplify our experience, making it less rich.

As we learn to listen to and understand stories, we also learn that every story has a good guy and bad guy.  At some point in the story, these guys will confront each other, and thus the central conflict arises.  When we are very young, the good guys always win.  As we get older, we tell ourselves more sophisticated stories where sometimes the bad guy wins, but the good guy learns a valuable truth.

Lately, though, I am trying to storytell my way out of the good guy / bad guy dichotomy.  What if the stories were rewritten so that no one was bad?  Mistaken.  Conflicted. Confused. Possibly even delusional -- but not bad.

Isn't this what is meant by unconditional positive regard?  That we approach every human without judgement, and without placing them in opposition to ourselves and our fellow questers?  Here it is, the fourth time I've taught one particular Ethics class, and I am discovering that it's not so much about creating a therapeutic persona as it is about changing the story structure altogether.  It's about learning to construct a compelling story without the benefit of a bad guy to despise.  I know this can be done because Ann Patchett has done it in every book she's ever written.

Maybe it's not so surprising for a Lit geek like me that eventually everything goes back to narrative.

Living It

I have been thinking a lot about the idea of "flow," and how to structure my career so I can find it more often.  As part of this, I have been doing some writing exercises from the book Bliss by Katherine Ramsland.  Here is what I wrote today about a recent session with a new client:

As I entered the room, I felt like I was stepping into a higher version of myself.  I felt my pulse moving and yet I was completely relaxed.  My mind was not thinking forward or backward.  I felt like the nerve connections between my touch and the interpreting parts of my brain had been widened and cleared of debris.  Everything I did was a sun salutation, with movements happening at the rhythm of breath.  I was pre-verbal, able to communicate through gesture and intention alone.  It wasn't that training, knowledge and science didn't matter.  It was that those things were so completely absorbed into my being and doing that I didn't need to actively reference them --- the way you don't need to reference the contractions of the cardiac muscle in order to have a pulse.  The session was a deep and meaningful conversation, conducted in total silence. I used my body, I worked hard, but I didn't notice until I stepped out of the room at the end of the session.  Even the sore quads and fatigued hands felt like gifts that were oddly energizing to my mind and spirit.  It was the experience of feeling and doing two totally opposite things at once, where the logic brain gets so confused it taps out and the art brain takes over.