He Came, We Saw, He Conquered

Daniel arrived on August 2 and stayed through September 2. His six month birthday was Aug. 26.

He had learned to smile, laugh, raise his head and chest off the floor, and roll over during the months he was in Norway. While he was with us he changed day by day. After a week a tooth poked out! He ate baby food. He got his first test ride in his jogging stroller. He grabs at anything nearby. When we eat food, he wants some. If he is in your lap, he will lunge for it. He can cross a room by rolling to get where he wants.

Now he is back in Norway. I am checking air fares to Africa. Lord willing we want to see a lot more of this young man. I remember how quickly our children grew up. I can only imagine how fast grandchildren must grow up!

May God bless Viggo, Julia, and Daniel.

My Family August 2007

I don't think it is nuclear (see http://kentslife.blogspot.com/2007/05/nuclear-family.html ) anymore. So what is it?

Schnake Family Vacation August 2007

Barbara has a gift that I admire. She sees an opening for a terrific family occasion of some sort and she provides enough motivation to get us moving and planning and joining in. She does it gently but with great strength and perserverance. Eventually the rest of us catch the vision and help with the preparation. I thank God for his gift to Barbara.

We realized a few months back that all of our children would be at home in early August, including our son-in-law Viggo and our grandson Daniel. Coordinating a trip was challenging. It is likely to become even more difficult in the years to come. Therefore we are very grateful to have had this opportunity.

We really savored this trip. The weather, the cars, ferries, and our health all went well. The rental house, our food planning, and the local scenery and points of interest were excellent.

However, by far the very best was the abundance of love that each showed to each throughout the trip. It is a test of sorts to see how eight people in a rather isolated (albeit beautiful and well equipped) cabin will work through the inevitable bits of friction and differences of opinion. It was a joy to see my family showing love for one another in all sorts of ways. It was a joy to be loved by them. The scenery, the cabin, the travel , the locals, and many other things were very nice indeed. But each act of loving kindness transcended even that beautiful setting and filled us with joy and thankfullness. This is a memory that I will cherish all the days of my life.

Here is a link to a few photos in a web album: http://picasaweb.google.com/kschnake/August2007SchnakeFamilyGathering

Gathering

There was a time, not so many years ago, when the six of us gathered often. No place cards were necessary. Seated at the head of the table I reached out my left hand and touched Barbara. I had to reach quickly, though, since she popped up and down all dinner long, serving us. My right hand would fall upon Charles, generally at a modest velocity. Julia and Pamela, always good friends as well as sisters, sat across from one another. Sam enjoyed his perch at the far end of the table. Sometimes he had to repeat himself several times to be heard, but he learned great patience and persistence. We learned to listen to him for some of the funniest quips at any given meal.
It had taken more than a decade since Julia's birth for all the members of the family to arrive and lay claim to their special spot. Now, as each of the children has grown into adults, they are moving on to other tables in other places all over the world. Soon, however, we will gather all six of us plus Viggo and baby Daniel. I cannot help but wonder when the next such gathering might occur. The distances we must travel, the complexity of the calendars we must reconcile, and the number of us to be included, all continue to grow. Even so, I know that we will strive to gather from time to time. The wonderful knowledge of our membership in this family always seems greatest when we are gathered around the table. The store of memories we share will grow and grow. We will recount our new adventures as well. They grow ever more astounding. Educations and careers unfolding. Places visited. New friends and loved ones added to the circle.

Of course the day will come, when we can no longer gather together in this life. How sweet it will be then, when we gather in the next life with God in our midst.

Six Weeks Later

Forty two days ago I paid several people about $40,000 to drug me, cut my leg wide open, and saw the ends of my femur and tibia off. They installed some replacement bearing surfaces and sewed me shut. The medical establishment always makes it very clear that such a procedure will involve "some discomfort". It appears that the term "some discomfort" is specifically crafted to avoid giving one the slightest idea of just how bad the pain will really be. I suppose it is necessary to play down such things. I was already quite fearful going into the surgery. Imagine if the doctor had said: "You may writhe, cry, and wish for death while we try to find the right amount of narcotics that will ease your pain without causing your respiration to cease. However, don't think about it much, because fear will greatly amplify your suffering." I'm guessing we don't really want to know that. There are times when the truth is best left alone.

Now six weeks later, I am able to rise from a chair, I can step in and out of a bath tub, I can get in and out of a car. I can walk. I sometimes sleep for six or seven hours before the aching in my knee wakes me. It is true that it still requires about 350 milligrams of oxycodone each day to feed the drug habit that enabled me to endure the pain. 1 milligram of oxycodone is considered equivalent to one milligram of morphine. However, I would have to crush my sustained release capsules and snort them if I wanted to equal the rush from a strong dose of heroin.

The combination of the pain and the drugs addled my mind to the point where reading and writing became laborius. I now feel the haze slowly dissipating. I may be able to express myself well again before too long.

Meanwhile, it occurred to me that not all my posts can be as thoughtful as I would like. Sometimes I just need to record the basics.

Simultaneous with the ordeal of surgery and recovery has been my adjustment to retirement. My concious experience of retirement generally causes me to smile and feel a flush of pleasure when I realize that I seldom need to set my alarm. I suspect that there are greater struggles going on in the unconcious! One clue is my sudden fear that Barbara will find me so incredibly dull that she will dump me and search for Mr. Right. She assures me that she loves me and plans no such change. But the fear creeps in here and there. Another clue was a very vivid dream I had of returning to work. Great crowds of people I knew where very serious and hard at work. They smiled briefly and graciously at me, but clearly had no time to spend with a "non contributor". My hopes were lifted when it was announced that the new corporate dress code would require all employees to wear blue jeans. Surely I would fit in again! Alas, the corporate jeans were stiff and dark blue. They were tailored as a cross between carpenter's jeans and dockers. Sadly, I was still on the outside looking in.

Frankly, my struggle is one that is long overdue. There seldom was anything about my job performance that made me particularly lovable or admired. I have long known that the greatest thing I can do for others is to love them as they are. To listen to them. To serve them. To care about their struggles. Now I must leave the job performance factor out all together. I would have done well to abandon the quest to earn love with my work output long ago.

May God richly bless you all. May you know that you are indeed greatly loved, despite your best efforts to earn it.

Make One Good Choice, Repeat as Necessary

You will choose. Hardly a moment goes by that does not require a choice. Perhaps you will choose passivity. Perhaps you will choose to wait. Nonetheless you will have made a choice. Very quickly you will make another. Because I have chosen to love you, I am eager to see you choose well. The more I care about you, the more I will hope for good choices.

As each of us makes choices, lives are impacted. The impact may be small. The impact may be vast. A good choice should create a good impact. I think that is the best we can hope for. We hope to make choices that bring about good.

We must turn to God for help in assessing our choices. We seldom see the whole impact of our choices. Besides, the impact comes after the choice. We are driving forward while looking in the rear view mirror if we base our next choice on the impact we think the last choice made. We can ask God for the help we need in looking forward to determine what the consequences of our next choice will be.

All too often, I try to make one big choice. However, I would rather make many good choices and keep doing so, rather than try to change the world with one big choice. When I ask God for guidance, the answer is often quite specific and seemingly very limited: forgive him, be patient with her, be generous with them. The choice may be to forgive a simple small slight. I may need to patiently overlook a tiny flaw. My generosity may consist of a small contribution. But the power of each choice has much more to do with how well I hear and obey God than it does with what a big show I make of supposedly wanting to serve him.

I must make one good choice, then repeat as necessary. May God give me the strength to hear and obey the very next bit of guidance that he gives me. May God give me the humility to care more about obeying him than I do about getting recognition for what I have done. May God forgive me for seeking to make a big splash that attracts the world's attention, when he is calling me to make a small ripple that pleases him. May God grant me the joy of growing more like him and caring less about my self.

Perfect Love Casts Out All Fear

I believe it. If I know how perfectly I am loved, it casts out fear. Sadly, I can be a slow learner. Fortunately, God is patient. I've been through some pretty rough sessions of physchological and physical pain. Psychological as in anxiety, depression, fear. Physical as in cuts, bruises, broken bones. It seems that all pain is a mixture of mind and body.

Can I escape all further pain in my life by completely embracing God's perfect love for me? It does not seem possible from where I stand. What does seem possible is that a greater and greater knowledge of his love gives me greater and greater respite from pain. As a practical matter, therefore, I would be wise to pursue a greater knowledge of God. Not just so that I might escape pain, although that would be an adequate reason. I can also create less pain for others as I understand who God is and conform my mind to his.

I cannot compare my own pain or fear to yours. I can pray that you would know greater and greater freedom from pain as you draw closer to God. I cannot compare my own knowledge of God to yours. God is infinite, I am finite. My own knowledge is supsect and subject to further refinement. Nonetheless, I can pray that you would know God more and more. This is not a contest between you and I. This is a race we all must run. May God bless you with the ability to run it well. May God bless me as well. Let us rejoice that we are running without distracting ourselves by trying to decide who is running faster or farther.

The knee pain is still fierce enough to prompt me to continue the narcotics. But I am experiencing healing and comfort. What a joy to feel myself getting better. What a great opportunity for me to learn a bit more compassion. Thank you, Lord.

A New Morning

A fresh start. A new day. It is amazing how much difference one night of sleep can make. Perhaps it was just time in God's plan for me to feel better. Perhaps new supplications were fired off to God by friends and family. Whatever, the reason, I woke up feeling great this morning. My sleep was the usual concatenation of approx 2 hour naps with a bit of medication, food, or reading in between each nap. Nonetheless, I awoke feeling as though the world was new and I have been given another shot at using my time to glorify God and serve others instead of dwelling on my pain.

Pain and Fear

I've dealt with fear most of my life. Chronic fear is called anxiety. The best diagnosis so far for my decades long struggle with anxiety (and sometimes, depression), has been Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Fear exacerbates "real pain" and can even make pain appear in the absence of any organic cause (i.e. the "it's all in your head kind of pain").

Having total knee replacement supplied plenty of the "real pain" sort of pain. I knew going into the surgery that my pain would be difficult to manage with opiates because I have been using that strongest class of pain medication to daily just to cope with the chronic arthritis pain. Since I had the arthroscopic surgery on March 2 that did not go well, I had been using even more of the opiates.

Tomorrow will be the second week anniversary of my surgery. I spent four days in the hospital right after the surgery and went back for another four or five days after my recovery at home proved too painful and difficult. Here is a description I wrote for a friend:

Stabilizing the pain meant going to ever higher levels of narcotics. A 5 milligram oxycodone tablet would be typical of what you are given following minor surgery such as having your wisdom teeth removed. You might be prescribe one or two tablets every four hours as needed for pain. So you would max out at about 12 tablets/day. That is how much I was taking just before my June 11 surgery.
By the time I was released from the hospital the first time, I was taking the equivalent of 32 tablets each day. However, I never really got control of the pain and became increasingly dysfunctional during my few days at home because the pain made it very difficult to do my physical therapy exercises and to pass the time by reading, etc. I just couldn't concentrate..

Finally the night of Father's day, I barely slept at all. I tossed, turned, moaned, and the minutes ticked by very slowly. I struggled all day Monday, until I found myself writhing in pain and crying out during an afternoon trip to get my blood thinning medication checked. The blood lab nurse insisted that we get me to a doctor right away. It took a couple of hours and a lot of pain, but eventually I was settled into a hospital bed and full of morphine on Monday night, June 18. The doctor adjusted my oral medications until I was able to use them and not use the morphine pump at all. However, now my daily dose is the equivalent of 72 of those 5mg oxycodone tablets each day.

Most of the past couple of weeks my memory and ability to read or write has been all messed up by the pain and the medications. It is just the past few days that have gotten better. So I know that you visited a time or two and please believe me when I say that it meant a lot to me. However, my memory of the visits is sketchy. I know that at times I was falling asleep while folks were talking to me.

The nurses became very alarmed a couple of times when my breathing rate slowed to 6 breaths per minute while resting or sleeping. This is considered to be in danger zone and possibly leading to death. However, an oxymeter was used regularly to check my blood oxygen levels. They were always excellent even during very slow breathing. I have also had trouble with episodes of extreme OCD anxiety symptoms. It made life tough on the nurses and very tough on Barbara. I get all panicky and rigid about small thing like how my books, glasses, medicines, etc. are arranged. The episodes are bad and I think they cause other people to feel like they are walking on egg shells around me.
This deal of retiring and having major surgery simultaneously does complicated things. Too often I strayed into thinking such things as " I worked 33 years to get to this!"
or "Shit, I missed my peak. It is all down hill from here on out.". Kind words from a friend really help me battle off those particular lying spirits.

I am sorry I haven't posted much or commented much lately. I have struggled with poor concentration and blurred vision. Plus I suspect my intellectual capacity is severely impaired.

I am gradually getting better. Assuming I continue to recover, I hope to be writing a lot more soon. Mean while, any and all prayers are appreciated.

Anxiety

It has been very difficult for me to concentrate my thoughts enough to write in recent weeks. Retiring after 33 years at HP has been a fairly big distraction all by itself. I have a few fears about my ability to make a successful transition to a new vocation. I even have a bit of recurring anxiety that perhaps I am falling far behind on all my e-mail or missing deadlines for the latest set of assignments. It is sort of a phantom missing limb pain!

But the big Kahuna is my fear around the surgery I have scheduled for tomorrow. It is almost inconcievable that the surgeon will cut a foot long gash in my leg, pull all the tissue out of the way and then use a power saw to remove then ends of my major leg bones.

I am sorry to say that I have been placing too much trust in modern pharmaceuticals to get me through this. Unfortunately, a little over a week ago the surgeon informed me that I have developed a very high tolerance for morphine like drugs. Consequently he may have trouble controlling my pain without stopping my breathing. I figured that there was something pretty remarkable about the fact that I could take 10 or 12 Vicodin-like tablets every day and still go about my business as if it were no more than a handful of tylenol. It has been especially disturbing that even a dozen major pain killers each day were barely enough to take the edge off the knee pain that I have been suffering.

The good news is that there is no doubt left in my mind that this surgery is necessary.

It is also rather nice to realize that it has been years since I have been this anxious. I struggled with anxiety for decades. Even a business trip or an upcoming presentation for work could be enough to trigger anxiety very much like what I am now having in anticipation of major surgery.

I realize now that my trust in opioids was misplaced. We are very blessed to have the medications that spare us from so much of the pain that our ancestors had to endure as a matter of course. Nonetheless, there will be pain, even very serious pain, in this life. Even if our bones are left intact, our hearts may be broken. Therefore, this is a very good time for me to remember that my trust must be in God and his goodness. He allows me to endure a lot of suffering, but his plan for me is perfect and all of this will be used to work good in my life.

May God bless each of you who may read this. May he give you the faith to believe that all things are being worked to a good purpose in your life. May he give me the ability to be an authentic example of how to trust him.