November 11 – Traveling With Burning Mouth Syndrome

By Kalí Rourke

(c) Can Stock Photo / gvictoria

I have written posts about Burning Mouth Syndrome for this blog in the past, and if you do not suffer from it or other chronic pain, this may be of no interest to you. But if you do, or if you know or love someone who does, take a minute and join me in my Burning Journey.

My husband and I like to travel, and we have always dreamed of going to New Zealand. The timing is right (We have the resources but aren’t too old or infirm to enjoy the activities!) and so we have planned an adventure-filled excursion. We will deal with a 15-hour flight there and back, crossing the International Dateline, and a time zone change beyond what I have ever experienced.

The question arises…How do you stay on top of Burning Mouth Syndrome or other chronic pain under these circumstances? 

Plan, my friends, and plan well.

Make sure you have enough of whatever medicine works for you and keep it on your person. If there is lost or delayed luggage, you don’t want it to have your meds in it. Plan your coping strategies and then be sure you are keeping those with you as well. In my case, I will have a large bottle of water to sip on and xylitol gum to chew sparingly as needed. Stay hydrated. Avoid alcohol and keep your coffee and tea intake at your normal level since it can be dehydrating if you have too much. You know what your triggers are, so avoid them and care for yourself like any person with a chronic illness should.

Think about the time differences and be sure to stay on your medication schedule so you don’t unintentionally under or overdose yourself.

Stress, lack of sleep, lack of control over your diet and other factors may cause a flare of your burning or other pain. Sometimes this is inevitable and you just have to get through the flare to the other side, so mentally prepare for that and nap when you can. Stretching and deep breathing are also great ways to relieve the physical stress of travel so I will be doing that as much as I can!

Relax as much as you can and allow as much distraction and fun as you are able. 

That’s my plan!

Do you have some other travel tips for BMS or other chronic pain sufferers? Share them in the comments! You never know when something you think is basic information is very helpful to someone else.

Kalí Rourke is a wife, mother, writer, singer, and active volunteer. She is a Seedling Mentor and serves as a Mentor for the Young Women’s Alliance. Kalí is a philanthropist with Impact Austin,  Austin Community Foundation Women’s Fund and serves as a Social Venture Partner with Mission Capital.

She blogs at Kalí’s Musings and at A Burning Journey – One Woman’s Experience with Burning Mouth Syndrome where a version of this post also appears.

October 28 – Maui Sunrise

by Linda C. Wisniewski

I had forgotten light arrives before the sunrise, that the sun sends beams in advance of its peek above the horizon, so slowly there is no single moment when darkness turns to light. Dawn is a gradual process, like my sons growing up before my eyes.

I saw it coming when they ran long-legged like colts in the spring. I glimpsed their adult bodies when they stood before me clean-shaven in jackets and ties, their little boy faces still there somewhere, if I squinted hard.

I saw it coming as we stood together at the summit of Mt. Haleakala, the clouds parting and green treetops appearing below us in the growing light. The younger one had driven us there in his rental car, three hours in predawn darkness on a winding road, higher and higher, the lights of Maui like glimmering jewels falling far below.

When he was four, he sat in the back of a gray Toyota as it climbed to the top of New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington. While his father drove, I read the warning sign aloud: “If you have a fear of heights, you may not appreciate this driving experience.” He begged us to stop, and we turned around as soon as it was safe, secretly relieved. Now he was the one reassuring me as I imagined the symptoms of altitude sickness.

At the top of the peak, safe and slightly short of breath, I gazed at my boys with pride and wonder. They have called me for advice when choosing an apartment, a job, a new car. But at twenty-nine and forty-two, they can do these things without me and we all know it. They have jobs I barely understand using tools that didn’t exist when I was young.

Once they were sullen-faced teenagers who chafed at my words. Now they end our phone calls with “Love you!” They cried when I left them with a babysitter. I cried when they left home for college. Now they have homes of their own.

The older one brought me a blanket and wrapped it around me as I shivered in the wind. Once I zipped his jacket, put on his mittens, wiped his runny nose. I was freezing now, waiting for the sun. His brother said to let them know when I wanted to call it. Now I was the protected one. My two boys stood taller than I, their precious heads back-lit by the sunrise we all knew would come.

Linda C. Wisniewski shares an empty nest with her retired scientist husband in Bucks County, PA. Her memoir, Off Kilter, was published by Pearlsong Press. Linda has been a member of Story Circle Network for many years and a longer version of this blog appears on her personal website. She blogs at www.lindawis.com.

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October 21 – Walking Backward

by Sara Etgen-Baker

As a small child, I loved walking backward and did so every chance I got. One
day, I even challenged myself and walked backward almost the entire distance from my house to my elementary school. I’d walked forward along that route hundreds of times. But when I walked it backward, suddenly everyone and everything looked different somehow—a difference I didn’t understand or couldn’t quite explain.

Something shifted inside me, too,—something that made me different from the other kids. The following year I entered junior high and gave up on being different and on walking backward, quickly forgetting the perspective that moving backward gave me.

Now I’m 67 years old and find myself walking backward through my life. My friends call this walking backward my life review. Life review isn’t simply about assembling the details of my past. It’s about finding meaning in even some of the
ordinary events. Suddenly everyone I knew and everything I experienced looks different somehow. I re-experience the emotions—the joys and sorrows—that accompanied many of the events of my life. I face some of the people with whom I interacted and become acutely aware of the kind acts I committed as well as the pain I inflicted on others. I soon realize that every word, thought, and action—no matter how small—affected everyone and everything.

Sometimes I ponder, Would it make a difference in the way I lived life if I lived my life in reverse? Suppose I was Benjamin Button, old first and then young again. Would I enjoy the fact that I could do mundane, everyday chores because I knew what it was like to watch others sweep the floors from my own nursing home bed? Would I visit elderly family members and neighbors more
often, especially those who are housebound or in a nursing home? Or just send a card or letter?

Postage isn’t all that high when I realize how important mail is to a lonely person. Would I stop my morning walk long enough to talk with my neighbor, the mother of five boys, knowing she yearns for adult conversation? Would I resist the ugly urge to retaliate…insult for insult… after one of my husband’s cutting remarks? Would I look past my stepdaughter’s edginess and recognize the pain and fear behind it? Would I put myself in the other person’s shoes, especially when I have a complaint about a product that didn’t perform as I expected it to? Do I really have to be nasty to the person I am relaying my dissatisfaction to? Would I respect and honor somebody else’s truth as much as I do my own?

But I’m not Benjamin Button, and I can’t live life backward. Yet, the past is always there to look back upon, to remember the joys and the sorrows of my life, and to reflect upon how I lived my life. And I can mindfully live in the present, applying the lessons I’ve learned from walking backward.

A teacher’s unexpected whisper, “You’ve got writing talent,” ignited Sara’s writing desire. Sara ignored that whisper and pursued a different career but eventually, she re-discovered her inner writer and began writing. 

Her manuscripts have been published in anthologies and magazines including Chicken Soup for the Soul, Guideposts, Times They Were A Changing, and Wisdom Has a Voice.

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October 14 – The Sound of Silence

by Ariela Zucker

”The flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence.” ~Simon and Garfunkel.

It is Yom Kippur today, but when I wake up in the morning, the world is going about its regular activities. The hum of the cars on the street as noisy as every other morning, the phone is ringing, people come into our motel lobby for breakfast. It is difficult to remember that this is a special day. For one minute, I close my eyes and try to reconstruct that old feeling I remember so well from my childhood, the sense of touching the sound of silence.

Yom Kippur, when I was a kid growing up in Jerusalem, was always about the quiet. No one drove, and the streets were empty. No music, or TV or phone calls to shatter the silence. It always seemed as if the whole country was holding its breath, and in this quiet, one could hear its own breathing, its deepest thoughts.

I remember the sharp split on both sides of the day. One minute the world was full of noise, then precisely on the declared hour, the noise ceased, and the stillness reigned. The same was the quick change the minute the day was over.

A solemn and weighty day as if in this complete silence, without any noise, one became more visible. As if words had to be chosen with care, and movements carefully match the importance of the day.

The heaviness of the day had a whimsical face to it that as kids, we waited all year for it. Since no one was allowed to drive on Yom Kippur, there were no cars on the road. We could walk in the middle of the street and knew we were safe. The adults spent the day in the synagogue, going over all their bad deeds and asking for forgiveness, while we were free to cruise the streets with our friends. That strange mixture between the sternness of observing the religious rules, versus the freedom that the day gave us children never seemed to create confusion. One thing did not overstep the other.

Until the Yom Kippur of 1973 when all the lines were ruptured.

The morning of October 6th, 1973 was when for the first time in my life, I opened the radio on Yom-Kippur. The silence was interrupted by the announcer on the radio reading in a metallic voice, lists of passwords. All army units that were called in. Two hours later, I was on a bus going north, and at dusk, I saw the first tanks of my armored unit grinding the road with their chains on their way to the Golan Heights.

After that Yom Kippur was never the same.

Ariela Zucker was born in Israel. She and her husband left sixteen years ago and now reside in Ellsworth Maine where they run a Mom and Pop motel. This post originally appeared on her blog at Paper Dragon.

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October 7 – Remembering the Landline

by Sara Etgen-Baker

Pexels Photo by Pixabay

 

Though landline phones may be on the endangered species list, in the 1950s and before, they were the lifeline of communities. For nearly 100 years, the landline was how we talked with someone who wasn’t in the room with us.

We had only one telephone, a black rotary one, that sat on a built-in phone cubby. There was no caller ID, no robocalls or telemarketers intruding in our lives. So when the phone rang, we were curious. The caller could’ve been anybody, but in truth, the caller was usually one of four or five people who had our telephone number. Morning calls were certain people; probably neighbors and evening calls were relatives. No one called before 9 a.m. or after 10 p.m., and we lived in fear of any call after midnight.

The phone didn’t ring a dozen times a day, and its sound was a kind of minor event. We kids didn’t pick up the phone and answer it, nor did we make a phone call without first asking permission. Father didn’t answer the telephone; answering it fell under the duties of the homemaker. When Mother answered the telephone, we didn’t listen to her conversation, but we knew by her tone whom she was talking with. When we were teenagers, my brothers and I were allowed to make limited telephone calls and answer the telephone.

There’s a wonderous landline moment that doesn’t exist today. The telephone rang after dinner one evening. My brother answered the phone. “Hello,” he said. After a moment, he hollered loud enough to notify the entire household, “Sara, it’s for you; a phrase that is long gone because no one shares a phone anymore. Using his phone etiquette, my brother asked, “Who’s calling?” Then he yelled, “It’s Robert,” a name that had never been said aloud before in our house and the sound of which piqued my parents’ interest. I sprinted to the telephone cubby. “It’s Robert,” he shouted, “that boy from school!” I yanked the phone from him, ignoring his satisfied grin. “Hello,” I said softly. Robert needed to know what time he was picking me up for the sophomore dance. I was tongue-tied and embarrassed, answering him in monosyllables: yes, no, okay, sure, yes. Bye.

Standing at the phone cubby in a household with a landline, the news was now public. I had a crush on Robert, and he was taking me to the dance. The village had been alerted.

There are no such shared moments like these in our homes today. No one stops and listens to the phone ring, wondering who the caller might be. Robocalls, caller ID, and telemarketers have killed our curiosity. Cell phones and instantaneous texting have made the landline extinct. Yet, I yearn for those days of removing the phone’s handset from the cradle, listening for the dial tone, placing my fingers in the number hole, rotating the dial and waiting for that almost magical connection to be made and hearing someone on the other end answer, “Hello.”

A teacher’s unexpected whisper, “You’ve got writing talent,” ignited Sara’s writing desire. Sara ignored that whisper and pursued a different career but eventually, she re-discovered her inner writer and began writing. Her manuscripts have been published in anthologies and magazines including Chicken Soup for the Soul, Guideposts, Times They Were A Changing, and Wisdom Has a Voice.

September 16 – Mom on the Fly

Advice to my Grown Daughter

by Susan Rudnick

photo by BreakingPic at pexels.com

Standing on West 56^th Street in Manhattan, I give myself a moment to look across the street at Carnegie Hall before heading to my dentist’s office to have my mouth numbed.  My cell phone rings, and “#1 daughter” comes up, the way she had jokingly entered her number on my phone.  And she is #1. My only one.

Motherhood came to me late. For so many years I had longed to be one but wasn’t sure I would be able to make it happen. It was a miracle gift when my daughter’s birth mother entrusted her to me and I became a mother through adoption at age 43.  I have loved being a mother through every stage of my daughter’s life.

My daughter is 31 now, and recently married to a lovely man.  We live over an hour away from each other, so it has been through phone calls that we have some of our most meaningful conversations. I have received calls in the gym locker room, in my car just about to go somewhere, at 11:30 in the morning and 9:20 at night. It might be “just saying hi”, or it’s the “do you have time to talk?”   In two seconds, when I know it’s the latter, I have learned to listen, and to weigh in judiciously if given permission.

I have learned to regard these calls as little windows to pass on whatever wisdom I can. Lately, as my 75th birthday approaches, I feel more of an urgency to share whatever wisdom I have.  How much longer will I have to be there for her?  What have I not said that would be helpful?  What does she still need from me?

In the past, there were many calls about whether she should break up with a boyfriend who had addiction issues. “Of course,” I would want to say.  “You deserve better.” But I knew that until she was ready to let go, that wouldn’t work. I chose instead to remind her of all the efforts she had made to help him stop.

Thankfully, we are now past those calls. We are dealing with the trip to Georgia to visit her in-laws or the contractor who walked away without finishing a project for the business she is starting.

I have said these things before, but would it be helpful to say them again?

• Your in-laws are your husband’s parents.
• Listen to your doubts, they have something to say.
• Don’t let anyone talk you out of what you feel is right.
• Try not to take things personally.
• For everyone who disappoints you, there will be an unexpected gift of someone who shows up for you.
• If you decide to become a mother, know it’s for life.
• I will always be in your heart after I’m gone.

I press down the key.

“Mom, do you have a minute to talk?”

“Of course,” I say.

Susan Rudnick is the author of the memoir Edna’s Gift: How My Broken Sister Taught Me To Be Whole.  She is a published haiku poet, and her recent essay appeared in the NY Times: The Power of a Name: My Secret Life With M.R.K.H. She has been a psychotherapist in NYC for the past forty years.

September 9 – Monday Was Wash Day

by Sara Etgen-Baker

Helen Morain Stainbrook

Last Thursday my washer quit spinning, leaving in its wake a tub full of wet, heavy clothes. I grumbled and stared inside the washer, knowing I lacked the arm strength to wring out the excess water in each item of clothing. What I wouldn’t have given at that moment to have my grandmother’s old wringer washer.

I can still picture her standing beside her wringer washer that sat on a little back porch behind her kitchen. Come rain, shine, cold winter days, or hot summer afternoons, she washed clothes EVERY Monday. She rose extra early, built a fire, and heated wash water. She filled the washer and twin rinsing tubs with scalding hot water; hand scrubbed each individual item, using a washboard to remove bad stains. Once clothes were scrubbed, washed, rinsed, and sent through the wringer, Granny hung her laundry to dry on clotheslines strung between two tall posts. As I recall, there were some basic clothesline rules she and women of her time followed.

•       Clotheslines were cleaned before hanging any clothes. She walked the length of the line using a damp cloth, removing dust, dirt, and bird poop.

•       Clothes were hung in a certain order: “Whites” with “whites,” always first.

•       Sheets and towels were hung on the outside lines. “Unmentionables” were in the middle out of public view.

•       Shirts were hung by the shoulders; NEVER by the tail.

•       Socks were hung by the toes, NOT the tops.

•       Pants were hung by the BOTTOM or the cuffs, NOT the waistbands.

•       Hang clothes out to dry on Mondays only. Never on Sunday! For heaven’s sake!

•       After taking down dry clothes, ALWAYS gather up the clothespins. Pins left on the lines look tacky.

Although using a wringer washing machine took a lot of time and required tremendous body strength, my grandmother thought she was lucky to have a wringer washer. At the end of wash day, Granny sat on her stoop occasionally recollecting her youth when she built a wood fire under an iron pot where she washed clothes with lye soap; something she did in the early years of her marriage during WWII when it was impossible to buy a wringer washing machine.

I take a lot for granted these days. I have an automatic washer and can wash clothes any day of the week and at any time of the day or night. I have an electric clothes dryer so I don’t have to tote laundry baskets full of wet clothes outside in all kinds of weather and hang them out to dry. In fact, drying clothes on a line is rarely seen these days.

Granny certainly wouldn’t have much patience with me for complaining about my automatic washer having gone on the fritz. She’d be shocked knowing I’d gone soft, lacking the strength to lift wet clothes out of my washer and wring out the excess water. She’d probably fuss at me, too, saying, “Why the heck are you washing clothes on Thursday anyway? Shame on you!”

A teacher’s unexpected whisper, “You’ve got writing talent,” ignited Sara’s writing desire. Sara ignored that whisper and pursued a different career but eventually, she re-discovered her inner writer and began writing. Her manuscripts have been published in anthologies and magazines including Chicken Soup for the Soul, Guideposts, Times They Were A Changing, and Wisdom Has a Voice.