Hearing

Agility Test

Evelyn Herwitz · September 20, 2016 · 6 Comments

It’s getting harder and harder to keep a positive attitude these days. This past weekend’s bombings in NYC and New Jersey, the stabbing in Minnesota, the hateful, cynical rhetoric of this presidential election campaign—I’ve had more than my share of insomnia recently. One day last week I had trouble focusing on my work. I know I need to turn off the news, but I can’t seem to break away from it all. My fight or flight instincts are on overdrive—not a good state of mind, with real potential to impact my health.

So I was glad for a great diversion on Monday that gave some renewed perspective. I took the day off from work to drive up to New Hampshire (even as I was listening to updates on the NYC bomber manhunt) for the Bearded Collie Club of America’s National Specialty Agility Trial. A good friend of mine has two beardies—bright, exuberant, long-haired dogs with herding instincts and personality plus—and she is seriously involved in championship competitions.

I’ve never been to a dog competition, let alone one in agility, which involves leading the beardie through a course of hurdles, fabric tunnels, bridges, obstacles and teeter-totters. The rules and scoring are complicated. Preparation requires hours and hours of practice and an ocean of patience. The dogs are very smart and clearly have minds of their own. While they can run with amazing speed and precision, they can also zoom around in circles, run off to the side of the arena to explore, sniff the judge standing in the middle of the course, jump up on hind legs in excitement and bark like crazy.

Such was my friend’s experience when she ran her dog, Mac, through his first event. Despite many perfect practice sessions in recent months, as well as past successes on the ladder to championship ranking, this morning Mac decided to create his own version of the course. He ran this way and that, refused to run the course in order, skipped some of the hurdles, all the while jumping and barking his commentary. A discouraging experience, to say the least.

Plenty of the other dogs did their own thing, too. “How do you get another creature to do what you want?” I mused. “When I figure that one out, I’ll let you know,” quipped my friend. Watching everyone else’s mishaps—even at the national championship level, these dogs are a challenge to control and can be quite comical—we had some good laughs, and she regained her sense of humor and perspective.

And, I’m happy to report, Mac redeemed himself. Later in the afternoon, he ran an event that involved jumping over a lot of hurdles, running over a teeter-totter and threading through a “weaving” obstacle (running back and forth through a row of poles, like a slalom, but on level ground) so perfectly that he took the blue ribbon.

Clearly, we agreed, he could do it if he wanted to. It was all a matter of focus and his emotional reaction to the situation at hand.

It’s no wonder that the dog-trainer relationship is such an intimate partnership. We have so much in common.

On my drive home, as I caught up with the latest political news, I thought about how the narrative we tell ourselves has such an impact on our ability to stay on track and handle life’s many hurdles and obstacles. It’s all so easy to fall prey to the doomsaying that dominates the news media. There are real, substantive reasons for concern and even worry about what’s happening and what will happen next. But the future, by definition, is always an unknown.

We can choose to believe the worst and let our fears run us in circles. Or we can choose to believe that whatever comes, we will confront it with focus, courage and commitment to stay the course of living a life true to our values and all we hold dear.

I’m going to do my best to remember that as Election Day approaches.

Evelyn Herwitz blogs weekly about living fully with chronic disease, the inside of baseballs, turtles and frogs, J.S. Bach, the meaning of life and whatever else she happens to be thinking about at livingwithscleroderma.com.

Exposed

Evelyn Herwitz · September 13, 2016 · 2 Comments

For a couple of days recently, I was down to one bandaged digital ulcer—my right thumb, still healing from surgery in June. Every few years, especially when there’s been a long hot spell, this happens. I can actually see most of my fingertips, a bandage vacation.

It’s very nice while it lasts. I can get going in the morning much more quickly—a couple of minutes, instead of the usual 20, to care for my hands. But it feels very strange. The fingers that have been under wraps for months, sometimes for the entire year, are extremely sensitive to touch. My left thumb, in particular, has some nerve damage that becomes much more pronounced when it goes Full Monty. By the end of the day, it’s tingling almost constantly.

Even still, I’m amazed and glad to be able to take a break from the bandages. Careful as I am to keep my hands clean, they get grubby during the day. The bandages shred at the edges and the adhesive attracts dirt. (I only use fabric bandages, which breathe and remain fairly comfortable, despite daily wear and tear.) Plus, I can’t sense exactly what I’m touching. This is the most frustrating part.

But walking around with almost bare hands can have some unexpected consequences. On one of the days when my fingers were exposed, I bought some groceries. The young cashier asked with genuine sympathy, “What happened to your hands?” I gave my standard reply about ulcers (sometimes, it’s just too much to explain about scleroderma) and went on my way. Only later did I realize that she wasn’t inquiring about all the bandages—there was just one. She was commenting on my oddly stunted fingers, misshapen by resorption of bones in my fingertips. Usually, no one can see, because of all the dressings.

Scleroderma causes a myriad of hand distortions. The oddest visual aspect of the disease, in my case, is that I barely have any fingernails left. This is actually what the cashier was asking about—it looks as if the tips of my fingers have been chopped off.

A missed opportunity for a teachable moment about this disease, certainly. At the same time, however, talking about a personal, physical disability with a casual stranger is murky territory.

My hands are strikingly different. I’ve had this disease for so many decades that I don’t really blame someone from wondering about them. The cashier was not ridiculing me. She was concerned, merely articulating what most people who meet me for the first time may be thinking.

However, I also don’t always feel like having to explain why my hands look strange. My hands are my hands, they are the only hands I have, and they serve me well, despite all the struggles inherent to this disease. They are certainly a distinctive feature. Enough said.

All of this will be a moot point, soon. The weather changed over the weekend from sultry heat to cool breezes by Sunday evening. I’m back to three bandages, and as it gets colder, I’ll have more. My stubby fingertips (the middle fingers on both hands are the most damaged) will hide under wraps again for the better part of the year. Time to find my gloves and pull out the sweaters.

Flights of Fancy

Evelyn Herwitz · September 6, 2016 · Leave a Comment

What better way to mark the official end of summer this Labor Day than to surround yourself with butterflies? That’s what Emily and I decided to do Monday afternoon after a hectic weekend of social events that included hosting a large, agreeable dog for a young couple who were getting married, friends of Mindi, who was home for the festivities and a big move to a new apartment.

The fall transition is most certainly upon us. But inside The Butterfly Place in Westford, Mass., it was a precious ahhh moment. Enjoy, Dear Reader . . .

Speak for Yourself

Evelyn Herwitz · August 23, 2016 · 2 Comments

One evening last week, during a seemingly endless stretch of hot, muggy days, I was reading at the dining room table with the widows wide open when I heard a cat crying outside.

Our neighbors have two cats, and they often prowl around our back yard now that Ginger is gone. I looked out the window and saw the yellow tabby curled contentedly in their upstairs window, enjoying the meager breeze, silent.

Mrroww, mrroww, mrowww, cried the mystery cat.

Where could it be? This didn’t sound like your ordinary cat commentary. I went out the kitchen door and looked around. No cat.

Mrroww, mrroww, mrowww, cried the mystery cat.

I walked up the path to our front drive. No cat. I walked back to the kitchen door. No cat.

Mrroww, mrroww, mrowww, cried the mystery cat.

Then I realized that the cry seemed to be coming from our garage. I opened the back door. There was our neighbor’s white cat, hiding among my older daughter’s furniture, in storage until she moves to a new apartment in September.

It did not take much to coax the cat out of its self-imposed prison. I have absolutely no idea how it got in, since I’m not parking in the garage while the furniture is there. A mystery, indeed.

The cat ran back home, and I was quite thankful that I’d been around to hear its cry.

So, you may wonder, what does this have to do with living with scleroderma? Well, Dear Reader, it’s all about speaking out when you need help. That kitty knew how to get attention (how long it waited to complain, I have no idea—it probably snuck inside somehow to escape the heat) and kept asking for attention until someone paid attention.

Speaking up for yourself when you need help, without any shame or embarrassment, is a crucial skill when you live with any kind of disability, including the physical limitations that are part and parcel of scleroderma. In this Sunday’s New York Times, Rosemarie Garland Thomson articulates it beautifully in her essay, “Becoming Disabled”:

As we manage our bodies in environments not built for them, the social barriers can sometimes be more awkward than the physical ones. Confused responses to racial or gender categories can provoke the question “What are you?” Whereas disability interrogations are “What’s wrong with you?” Before I learned about disability rights and disability pride, which I came to by way of the women’s movement, I always squirmed out a shame-filled, “I was born this way.” Now I’m likely to begin one of these uncomfortable encounters with, “And these are the accommodations I need.” This is a claim to inclusion and right to access resources. . . .

Becoming disabled demands learning how to live effectively as a person with disabilities, not just living as a disabled person trying to become nondisabled. It also demands the awareness and cooperation of others who don’t experience these challenges. Becoming disabled means moving from isolation to community, from ignorance to knowledge about who we are, from exclusion to access, and from shame to pride.

Unlike Garland Thomson, I wasn’t born with my disabilities. I can still remember what it felt like (barely, it’s been so many decades) to have fully functioning hands. It’s taken me many years of living with scleroderma to assert myself with strangers when I need help. But I’m no longer afraid or ashamed to ask. Much as I want to do for myself, I also realize my limitations. It’s good to know, more often than not, there’s someone willing to open that door, pop that tab on a soda can, or hoist that carry-on bag to the overhead luggage rack—who’s glad to be of assistance.

If a cat knows how to get the help it needs, when it needs it, then surely, so can I.

Image: “Cat and Mouse” (1975) by Robert A. Nelson, on exhibit at the Worcester Art Museum

Gold Standard

Evelyn Herwitz · August 16, 2016 · 2 Comments

All those perfect bodies. It’s impossible to watch the Olympics without marveling. Sculpted muscles, tight abs, toned thighs—these premier athletes look every bit like the marble statues we saw everywhere in Italy this summer—except, of course, they are living, breathing humans who accomplish seemingly superhuman feats of strength, coordination, balance, speed, grace.

The Summer Olympics, especially, always set me daydreaming—what would it have been like if I’d had the ability and training to compete as a gymnast when I was that young and healthy? What does it feel like to be Simone Biles, dancing, bounding and twirling through the air, always landing soundly on her feet?

The gold medalists, especially those who’ve distinguished themselves as Biles has in gymnastics with her extraordinary athletic prowess, are walking Rorschach tests for our imaginations—as well as our biases.

There has been plenty of press regarding the ignorant comments by NBC sportscaster Al Trautwig about Biles’s parents—her biological grandparents, who adopted Simone and her sister when they were very young. “They may be mom and dad but they are NOT her parents,” he tweeted last Sunday. Those comments raised a huge furor, rightly so. As an adoptive parent of our older daughter, I found the initial reporting offensive and appalling. I was very glad that Trautwig not only retracted his statements eventually, but also apologized. Shared DNA is not the defining ingredient of parenthood.

But there is another bias projected onto Biles that has not been flagged—and that involves how she is described in terms of height. Like many female gymnasts, Simone Biles is petite. She stands 4-feet-8-inches tall.

For some reason, however, the sportscasters are compelled to describe her as a “4-foot-8-inch giant.” This is intended as high praise—small in stature, but a huge presence. I get it.

However, my younger daughter stands 4-feet-7-inches tall, and over many years, we have discussed the challenges of living in a society that tends to be dismissive of individuals who are shorter than average. Short stature is associated with being childlike, being “cute” (as in not taken seriously), being less capable of leadership. It’s an insidious stereotype that has no more to do with what an individual is capable of than the color of her skin, religion, gender identity, physical limitations or any other distinguishing characteristic.

By describing Biles as a giant, the sports world is underscoring the perceived irony of such a small woman looming so large over other gymnasts. The implied assumption: better-than equals bigger-than. But why isn’t it enough for Simone Biles to be the world’s greatest female gymnast—period? Why does her height have to figure into her sobriquet? Does anyone dwell on swimmer Michael Phelps’s height when describing his amazing 23 gold medal record? Of course not. He’s 6-feet-4-inches tall.

The Olympics are all about achieving athletic perfection. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if those who set the bar for how we talk about these breathtaking accomplishments strived to set a gold-medal standard for appreciating the precious uniqueness of each individual—rather than marveling at how they’ve defied expectations based on stereotypes. Imagine how that might shift dialogue and perception far beyond two weeks every other Olympic year.

Image Credit: Oliver Gruener

Hearing

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