Basically Betty

In honor of my Mom, I'll be going with Jimmy to the Sounders game (Seattle's professional soccer team) at noon and that will be an extra treat because it's sunny today.  We're walking and it's about 4.5 miles one way.  I especially love days when I can get it over 8 miles of hiking and never leave the city.  

After the game, Jimmy and I will watch the Red Sox Rays game at his apartment.  

Thoughts of Mom fill my head, comfort my heart and make me smile.  Happy Mother's Day Mom! 

From April 20th through the 24th, a whole bunch of fabulous teachers from all over the world came to work with me in my Seattle studio and on Wednesday of that week, I took them all into the cadaver lab at a local medical school so they could see and feel the muscles and bones that we work with in our teaching of Pilates. 

I took the course about 4 years ago and absolutely loved it, it has been the single most influential aspect of my education and although contracting with the school was a time consuming hurculean effort, I was delighted to make a cadaver study available to other teachers like me; non-medical, non-scientific, non-everything.  We are lucky in the Seattle area to have a naturopathic school that believes if you have a body, you should be able to study a body.

And with the enormous success of Body Worlds and Bodies, the traveling anatomy shows that have been to a city near you, or are soon to come to one, it's easy to see that most folks are curious about what's inside.

Mom was never curious about what's inside.

She not only was repulsed by the natural workings of our bodies, she tried valiantly to remain ignorant of all such things.  This was one of the most adorable things about her.  She had a gag reflex that would fire if someone in the next country threw up.  Yet, I can remember puking my guts out and her standing behind me, holding my tummy with one hand and with the other, keeping my hair out of my face.  I guess with your own kids, everything's different. 

When I told Mom I took the cadaver class those several years ago, she thought I was nuts.  Which I am, but that's beside the point.

So with Mom's fatal illness being liver and gall bladder cancer, I went into the lab this time with a personal agenda to see as many livers and gall bladders as possible.  We saw 5 of each.

When I did the class the first time, I was especially fascinated by a set of lungs filled with cancer, they'd  caused the death of the gentleman on the table and he was right around the same age Daddy was when he died of lung cancer and it helped me tremendously to be able to see and feel what a cancerous tumor in the lungs is like.  Daddy was full of those; this helped me understand that much more what it must have been like for him to have that illness.

Did you know that the liver is the largest organ in the body if you don't count the skin which we should but hardly anybody does.

Those livers are huge and they weigh a ton!  

In a healthy liver, the edges are crisp.  In a diseased liver (cancer, cirrhosis, etc.) the edges round and become blobby.  I'm pretty sure "blobby" is not a medical term; it should be but it's not.

So after just 6 hours in the lab fronting my own issues at every opportunity, I'm struck by just how heroic Mom was as her metabolic organs were slowly shutting down.  Poogee with her trusty assistant Bill took care of Mom, all by themselves, for the last 10 days of Mom's life and as Mom's pain ramped up, they did a great job of controlling it.  

As you may recall, Mom ended up on morphine every 30 minutes for the last couple of days of her life.  

If you ever get a chance to see inside and to learn a little bit, first person, about what the liver and gall bladder do for us, I hope you'll agree that it's a miracle Mom wasn't in more pain.  I credit not only her stubborn will but also the loving care she was gifted for decades by my sister and her family.

And that definitely does not include me.  I moved away over 30 years ago, have never looked back and have phoned in my life as the primary means of sharing.  Now, I don't even call anymore.  I use this blog.  Which is good enough, at least for me and for Pooge.  

So the message, if there is one - is there? perhaps not! - is to take care of your liver, eat as if you yourself had to pick apart your food and make sense of it, move like you did when you were young so your systems can remain invigorated, you can get back a tremendous amount of what you've lost in terms of health, vitality and vigor.  If there's more of you, much more of you, than there used to be, get busy and change right this very instant.  Leave a few spoonfulls of ice cream in the dish (or if you're me & my family, in the carton!) - little changes matter most.  Big changes are a lie, a set up, a trick.  

When you have bloodwork next time, ask your doctor to run a liver panel just to find out more about how it's going in there.  Ridding the body of toxins is a hell of a job - give your liver a fighting chance!  

You can do anything you want, you can be anything you want, you can change anything you want.  All you need is desire, determination, dedication and of course, the most important thing, to make the decision to do it.  

I believe if Mom could live her life over, she would have eaten a healthier diet and she would have moved more.  She's lost her chance to be a better steward of her health but we're still here andwe have everything to say about such things.  Choose well, dear readers.  It's a sobering thought but the reality is, everything really does matter and it matters a lot.

Love and Prayers From Here to There