evolution in green

my writing lately has been completely selfish. sort of like burping on the page in the key of G. hopefully i'll evolve out of this but it's feeling pretty good and sort of like my own personal therapy session.

luck in a pot

ever have days that just feel like they popped up out of a treasure chest and everything you experience is exactly as you've designed through your hard efforts at work or play? today was one of those days. everything went right and it felt expressively good, so much so that I'm almost confused by it. I'm fully riding some wooden rollercoaster that I never chose to get on.

I've been placed in the cath lab to start soon which I've been begging to gain experience in for ages and am about to begin a research project in the cardio department with a fellow who feels my passion for the field and eagerness to jump ahead despite my "a few years removed from fresh of the boat" greeny anglo embarrassment of immigrantness. I've been trying to foster a good relationship with the director of the cardiology department through various initiatives that I've started up. I don't want him to forget about me when it comes to that long desired for day when i'll apply for my fellowship in interventional and will need his enthusiastically supportive letter ( more so than from internal). Each and every department head and specialist that I approached to join our editorial pool joined on and so i had overwhelming feedback to give on my afternoon conference call. The only unfortunate part of the day was that I had to call in on my cell from work to meet my other job's obligations for a last minute conference call and my direct boss was in the U.S. meeting his requirements to maintain his board certification as an internist so I will have crazy long distance charges. Maybe I'll claim it as an expense at the end of this month. I'm not entirely sure how to imput these type of expenses on the EZlabour format that we use, but it's probably worth a dress from the august fashion fair in tel aviv... so I definitely ought to claim it back :-)

Jazzy Razzy Birthday Blowup

Unbelievable! This one goes down as one of my favourite birthdays ever! My friends are absolutely amazing and incomparable! Have I used enough exclamation marks yet?!!!!
It's about 530am and I'm just getting ready to start my training late today but I fell asleep not too long ago. I hardly wanted the day to end. It began with a kidnapping and a whisking away to be immersed in the mud and hot spring feeling of the dead sea waters on one of the hottest days of this summer by far. It was so fitting to my personality. The heat and the earth and the waters and everything in total confluence towards bringing me back together. Back in Tel Aviv, a friend had taken the liberty of organizing something special on my return...and there was only one person who i missed at the dead sea and it wasn't my ex!! :-) Small things can make such a difference in our lives.

Happy Un-Birthday

My birthday has made it's way round on the calender again today. It looks like despite the fact that I thought I might keel over and drop dead after my ex's last email to me and would surely be demonstrating rigor mortis by now, I am in fact alive and reasonably well.

Additional to that,despite my best efforts to resist any celebration, it looks like my close friends have planned to whisk me to the dead sea to recharge my batteries by the healing waters.

Last year at this time my ex refused to celebrate my birthday because my hebrew pronunciation wasnt improving as quickly as he would have liked. It was quite hard to learn pronunciation from a newspaper or book. So he avoided me all day and then in the evening spent 2 hours with me mostly yelling at me for being terrified to speak hebrew in front of him. Then he had me cancel my plans to celebrate and have ice cream with friends because he was tired and had to work the next day. All I wanted was to be embraced by him and have him throw me to the ground and make mad passionate love to me. I'm so messed up that my happiest moments were in his arms and all I wanted was his embrace and intimate attentions. It was not to be.

He had already satisfied himself for the day and his cowper glands were now resting, his pudental nerve long asleep.

no more

I don't know how anyone could be so vile and cruel and viscous. I feel like i'm going to dies. Seriously. He continues to knife away at me after 7 months. i think surely i'm going to die from this pain.

love as a pathology

It sneaks up on us insidiously, and weaves it's way into our neurochemistry so that whether we invite it in or not, the choice quickly becomes no longer our own.
I thought of the love that i was afflicted with as a parasite, making me physically sick and siphoning off my energies, but my understanding of what I let happen to me has changed and I no longer see it as such. Even better... I see it as a full on disease process. Love is a pathology. Even if the relationship was horrid, if love was involved the withdrawal is like coming off cocaine. It's a damn good thing that I don't do drugs and never have.

even plato seemed to believe way back when that love was a serious mental disorder. I don't really need to get into the actual neurotransmitters and/or hormones involved like oxytocin and vasopressin and the similarities between those suffering from hypomania and those afflicted with love or loss of love. It affects us like a raging disease running rampant on our brains with it's messed up circuitry masquerading as pleasure when we have it and pain when we lose it. Symptoms of sleep and eating disturbances come out of nowhere as the gremlins of illusion build themselves into willful personality disorders. Love is a personality disorder. All that oxytocin even allows us to overlook our lovers worst qualities because we see everything with rainbows superimposed on our retinas.

I thought I had takotsubo syndrome. Takutsubo is a type of cardiomyopathy. It's otherwise known as octopus heart syndrome. I was sure I had it. It happens when you experience so much grief over a loss that your heart responds with apical ballooning basically so it looks like an octopus squirting ink or like an octupus trap used in japan. The myocardial tissue becomes over fatigued and acts as though it's paralyzed preventing proper function although conductivity remains normal. The interesting aspect is that it even occurs in the absence of arterial disease or coronary blockage. It's possible to die or recover from it and women in general are the most at risk, although I have to admit it is fairly uncommon and I haven't even seen it ever in my clinical experience. But I was convinced that I had it. The extreme pain in my chest, the overwhelming fatigue, the shortness of breath.. I literally convinced myself that I was surely going to keel over any minute because my heart was turning into a live octupus. When did I turn into a grade A hypochondriac?

what we never get back

somethings will never be returned or repaired. Broken hearts or souls in heartwrenching disrepair may lay for years without healing attentions. I will never get back the pieces of myself that were scattered in the winter winds and i'm a differant person for it. But, sometimes we do find what was lost or stolen. This morning I got a call from the police.

I had two of my racing bikes stolen from my apartment with the metal locks completely severed, several months ago. A policewomen just called to tell me that they recovered one of the bikes and can return it to me today! It's a ten thousand dollar racing bike that my sponsor couldn't afford to replace for me and it wasn't covered by insurance.

I don't know what condition it's in but it was returned. I lost it around the same time that I lost my best friend, my lover, the batterer of my heart. This was an epic winter of loss. But a week away from my birthday, I'm given an early birthday present with the return of my bike.