Today is Saturday, February 1st, 2003.
It is the beginning of the shortest -yet in some ways the longest-
month of    the year.
Today and yesterday are the first "thaw days" in what seems at least a
        month.  It’s rainy and icy, but mostly sloppy out there. I’ll
probably    stay in today.
Maybe we’ll go out to a movie.

Sitting in my chair right now I cannot tell which side of me is stronger.
I       mean my sides. Sitting up straight, it does not feel like I am
sitting       up straight.

I can tell you which arm is stronger.
I can tell you about my legs: the toes on both feet still move.
My toes and the ball of my foot on my left side still move.
The right side is so much in pain or so numb -but it still moves, but I
cannot       tell you how much.
Sometimes I cannot feel where my foot is. My right foot.
Sometimes it feels like it's standing out straight when it is resting on the
        footrest.
Right now it feels as if it is solidly put on the footrest.

My left foot feels a little freer today. I can lift the toes and feel the
muscles      in my calf, ankle and heel all working to lift the front part
of my        foot.

I cannot lift my heel, try as I might.

        I do that I feel many of the muscles in detail in a way that I
would
        never feel them otherwise. My stomach/abdomen muscles and
my
        lower back muscles, especially, are working hard to keep me up
        straight.

My arms. All along, my right arm has been pretty strong, even
though I’ve        not been able to use it because the right hand is full
of tingliness,      tightness, cramping, numbness and is      effectively
uncoordinated.

My left arm is now becoming very weak. I can barely raise it above
my     shoulder. It is difficult for me to lift anything heavier than a
very    light plastic glass with half a cup of water in it. Anything heavier
is        too much for me to lift.        When I have to drink a full glass of
water I       cannot empty the whole thing in my mouth as I cannot lift
the glass     "bottoms-up".

There are twitches and small cramps and shooting pains and
sometimes prickly pins-and-needles feelings and sometimes hot and
cold –       mostly hot– throughout my arms and legs, though lately
mostly my arms.

Typing on the computer has become a two-index-digit process, but
mostly       one because when I use my right hand if I am not leaning
down on   my elbow, I tend to fall towards the keyboard and the
desk. My pinky finger and my ring finger on the left hand are
particularly       bothersome because I cannot straighten them out
easily. They’re   not yet curled under.

When I am in bed at night the covers are generally too heavy    for
me to lift    off my body myself. It is impossible for me to lift my
pillow to move    it. I can still just barely scoot my head and neck and
shoulders over     a little bit, maybe half an inch at a time. I cannot lift
myself in bed.      My legs and my feet are piled high on two stacks of
pillows; three or four in each pile to help reduce the swelling in my
feet.  Usually a
        full night’s sleep –six hours– helps to move the fluid back up, so
to
        speak, so I can pee it out. But often that does not do enough
and   my right leg especially is still very swollen. The pain increases
        during the day as the leg and foot swell bigger. The medication
I       take for pain has some side effects which cause me to constantly
be
        tampering with the dosage. I do not like feeling loopy and tired
        and I often feel as if I’m fighting against a strong force to keep
my    energy going.

Sometimes it is a hard to tell what comes from tiredness of the day
and          what comes from weakness, new weakness. New loss.
For instance       today I was in the pool, the aquatic pool, doing my
exercises. I         was feeling weak and noticed that I could not do as
much in the        pool as I had the last two weeks. When I started
treading water I  got very bad pain and tiredness in my right arm so I
could not    continue.

Now as I type today, I am finding that my left hand is weaker than it
was   two or three days ago. It is very hard for me to control the
mouse       with my left hand (my usual habit -I am using the voice
recognition         software to dictate, but I also have to use my hands
to correct   mistakes and to guide the mouse).

My breathing is more difficult over the last two months or so. As of
yet I have not had trouble swallowing or chewing, but I do have
trouble     coughing, sneezing and taking deep breaths. I do not have
breath      for coughing so if something gets caught in my throat it
takes a long      time to cough it out. I have been lucky not to get
any colds or flues       this winter. This week I have experienced
more labored breathing.      For the first time I’m starting to feel that
talking is an effort.

The pain has been a constant variable in this illness for me. Since
about        August or September I have had constant pain in my right
leg, foot    and hand. Now it seems also to be traveling through to
my right    side in the ribs and sometimes into the left side as well.

For about three months I steadily increased the pain medication till I
was   taking so much that it made me tired almost all the time. I think
it       also had the effect of making me feel crabby and forgetful,
spacey        and loopy. So now in the last month I have been
reducing the        medication and trying other techniques and herbal
remedies
        instead. I found at first the pain was unbearable. But in the last
        two weeks I’m able to deal with it a lot better.

I do not like to admit it, but is seems that fatigue is something I
struggle      against as well. I have good days and I have days and
weeks when I      am tired and exhausted. I’ve found that teaching
one 45-minute            class in a day exhausts me completely.

People say that the game of baseball is a game of adjustments. And I
like   watching baseball, largely – I should say in part – for that
reason.      (Of course I am very competitive when it comes to the
Boston Red        Sox –and in terms of why I watch the game, my
sense of     competition probably wins out more than my feeling for
the nuance in the game.) But I really enjoy watching a pitcher like
Pedro who makes all kinds of adjustments throughout      game and
throughout
        the year so that he can be as good as he is.

I never really played very much baseball. I was never on an organized
        baseball team. But when I was a kid I did like playing with my
        friends whenever we could get one going.

But I’ll tell you, I think I never had so much appreciation for what true 
        "adjusting to new circumstances" really meant until now…

That is what this illness has been all about for me and so far.
        Adjusting to        the changes I have just listed above.

I wanted to write a little bit about "just the body". I wanted to make
it a    kind of exercise for myself to inform you and remind myself just
        what changes I went through, without putting in all the emotion
or
        all the spiritual work and all the other stuff that goes along with
it.      It is difficult for me to write just about the body because I am so
        much more than that and so much more involved in growing,
        healing, learning and living in ways that involved me deeper
and more expensively than living in "just the body".

But it is important to recognize what the body is going through.
        And the body has been going through a lot. And all that it has
been going         through has required adjustments; adjustments every
month,      every         week, even every day. And sometimes the
scariest part of all        of this is thinking about the adjustments I have
to make in the    future, tomorrow, the next week, the next month.

It works out much better when I am able to make the adjustments as I
go     along, as they are needed, like an ace pitcher does. Then I don’t
        think about the future or the past but I really live in the
moment.

So as they say in baseball, let’s do it, let’s "Play Ball".