Army: Afghanistan number 11

Post 11: Week 15
Ok, so I know, it is about dang time that I posted again.  Today, I want to start with a few shout outs of things I have missed back home in the states.  First off, I want to congratulate my sister on completing grad school and heading out to Wyoming to to be the assistant stage manager for a musical called South Pass  that my dad will also be staring in.  I also want to congratulate my brother on his high school graduation.  I know he is waiting expectantly on a couple of job offers and is also looking at going back to school in the fall.  Whatever he chooses to do does not matter to me, because I am very proud of him.  These are just two big moments in my siblings lives that I am unfortunately missing as I sit in the sand box.

But on another note, I am moving to a different base next week.  Our battalion is jumping locations and I am trying to plan/ manage a lot of moving pieces (with a lot of help of course).  But I just got back a couple of days ago from our leader's recon and am feeling pretty comfortable with the plan.  That being said, my next update will not be until I am settled in my new location.  So here is my update:

Physical: So, somewhere along the way, I have lost approximately five pounds in the past couple of weeks.  I am feeling really healthy and good, even though I am noticing several knots reappearing in my neck and shoulders (see old post for reference).  Kevin sent me some peppermint oil though, so hopefully that will help and I can avoid some very painful headaches.  As for PT, I have been mostly focused on push ups and situps but not nearly in the frequency with which I need to be. Now that the highs are in the 100's every day here, I feel like my desire to work out has diminished greatly.  Plus, I really need to get packing so that I am prepared to move next week. Hopefully while I am packing and unpacking, I can find my motivation to work out.  I am sure it is around here somewhere.. it is just a matter of finding it.

Mental: So, now that I am getting farther into Lean Six Sigma and I am understanding the class materials better, I am taking a second look at my data and doing a bit of recapturing.  The jist of what I am doing is trying to take as many trucks off the road as possible and creating efficiency in our movements.  Taking trucks off the roads takes Soldiers off the roads and I think everyone can understand why we would want to do that.  But aside from that, putting trucks on the road costs money, usually to the tune of several thousand dollars for each trip.  So what I am looking at is getting the right stuff, to the right location, the first time.  And I finally feel like all of that is starting to come together.

Emotional:  I don't even know where to start with this one.  Work has been a bit of an emotional roller coaster, but that is hardly surprising given our plate right now.  Relocating a battalion is no simple feat and this one looks like it will be taking a majority of my time for awhile. But at the same time, I have been relaxed.  I am really at a place of comfort in my job.  Nothing I am given feels challenging any more and I have confidence in my success.  I am ready for the next job or task the Army has for me and I look forward to it.  As far as being a wife goes, I am experiencing frustration at living a different life than my husband.  I normally cycle through this every now and again after I process the inevitability of the situation.  There are days when I am very ready to be home and there are days when I am really glad to be here.  I can say that there are a lot of people I look forward to meeting when I get home, to include families and babies.  There are new people in Kevin's life that I am very interested in meeting and some that I have only communicated with online.  And of course, babies are just babies and I look forward to holding them all!!!!

Financial: So, I just sold off another stock today at a 15% profit.  Unfortunately, that leaves me currently stock-less and between trying to get ahead on my Lean Six Sigma project while also preparing to move, I don't think I will be picking any new ones up in the next couple weeks.  But, since earnings reports have lulled, I am not too worried about it.  My overall gain since starting just over 6 weeks ago has averaged to 20% or so and I am good with that.

Spiritual: So, I have been praying and reading my bible every night for the last three months and I am very grateful for how much growth I have seen.  When I look at my prayers from when I first got here, I can see a lot more selfishness and a general brevity.  Along the way, God has taught me to spend more time thinking about him and less time thinking about myself.  And I have learned  a lot of humility in praying for forgiveness of my sins, my shortfalls and my weaknesses.  It has given me a new found love for other people as I realize how much Christ has saved me from myself.  He is made perfect in my weaknesses so why I am not willing to admit all the more that I have so many of them.

Health & Exercise: Learning to Read Your Body

So, this is an odd blog post, but it was something Kevin and I were talking about and he suggested I blog about it.

The photo that brought Vietnam into American homes.

I have always been amazed by some of the worlds most exclusive societies.  Mostly, that of devote monks.  I'm sure you've heard stories of them: those that can control their heartbeat down to almost deathly levels, those that can control their body temperature regardless of the temperature outside, those that walk on hot coals, those that can withstand any pain, etc.  The most infamous in our time would be Thich Quang Duc who set himself on fire (also called self-immolation) to protest the treatment of Buddhist's in South Vietnam by the Catholic government in the middle of a busy town square.

The amount of self-control these people have generated and the degree to which they are in tune with their bodies has always fascinated me.  The ability to manipulate the body with the mind is astounding.  Even something as simple as the placebo effect shows how much power the mind has over the body.

But I am actually starting to learn that this is far from the realm of only achievable for the extremely devote, it's for anyone. Maybe not at the "set yourself on fire in protest" level, but at the very basic one.  My bouts into massage therapy and yoga have started me on this journey without me realizing.  I'm not going to go into my reasons for needing trigger point massage since I blogged it before (see My Journey into Alternative Therapies) and I know I have blogged a couple of times about my journey into yoga (see Yoga Daily and Yoga Update), but ultimately, these two things have helped me become more in tune with my body and how it feels.  Because of the massage therapy, I am starting to be able to identify which muscles are tight and causing me problems.  I don't know these muscles by name, but i know where they are and where they go (like the muscle that is currently giving me trouble starts in the back of the leg and comes up around my hip towards my abdomen, which, by the way, is very difficult to stretch).  The yoga also helps in this.  While I am stretching, I can actually feel when my muscles aren't opening up and creating circulation properly.  My flexibility has improved, but I am still not fully able to reach each yoga position.  Yet even still, I can tell when my circulation has increased properly in certain muscles, when I need to spend more time in a position and when the stretch needs to go deeper.

I was talking to my massage therapist about this and she told me that this is actually the natural progression for those doing yoga.  (If you are doing yoga and are becoming more flexible  but you aren't more in tune with your body, you are probably doing something wrong.)  But the odd thing was what she told me next.  Parker told me that next I need to work on sending my breath to the areas where I know I need more oxygen rich blood.  Now this is still weird to me, but it is basically identifying which muscles I want to send my breath to, really considering as I breath in and then think about that breath as it enters my body and sort of push it to the area I want.

This is still really odd to me and I haven't really figured it out at all yet, if I even can, but I figured I would give another update and share how far things have come for me.   I will write another update if I manage to figure out how to really direct my breaths and hopefully then I might be able to explain it better.

Health & Exercise: My Journey into Alternative Therapies

I mentioned in my yoga post that I see a massage therapist and thought I would share about the alternative medicine that changed my life.

My pain began probably somewhere between my junior and senior years of college.  I had experienced joint pain in my knees (mostly from running long distances on hard surfaces and years of improper running shoes) before but I started to experience pain in my shoulders, especially when doing push ups.  Slowly the pain grew and I occassionally had painful popping in my right shoulder and then the left.  My treatment... ignore it! Suck it up! Rub some dirt in it! Drink water! And every other terrible piece of Army advice.

Then about a year ago, I started having neck pain.  I thought it was from bad pillows and some lack of sleep.    I tried some Aleve and of course, that did very little.  So I ignored it some more.  Then in January I had the worst headache of my life.  I was sensitive to light, my right hand went numb, and I was slurring my words, when I could find them.  I went to see my doctor after and she was concerned that it was either occipital neuralgia, migraines or a stroke.  I was having lots of what I called residual headaches (basically two weeks of minor headaches constantly) and so she gave me medicine for that.

At this point, I had never considered that the shoulder pain was related to the neck pain was related to the headaches.  So, I kept ignoring it.  Then I had another crazy headache in May.  I took two fast dissolving pills that are over $100 each and it did nothing except make me nauseous and sick the whole next couple of days.  So I went to see my doctor again.  Though still concerned about occipital neuralgia, and about why I wasn't going to the ER about possible strokes, she knew that since I didn't respond to the migraine medicine, it wasn't that.  So she wondered if it was tension headaches.  And, being the best Army doctor I have ever met, she sent me to Acupuncture and a Chiropractor to see if some of the tension in my neck, shoulders and back could be causing the headaches.

Both the chiropractor and acupuncturist believed this to be the case.  My chiro explained it like this: The muscles in the neck and back are connected to the nerves at the base of my skull.  There is so much tension in my back and neck that when it gets too tense my muscles are pulling on those nerves causing terrible headaches.   So I started seeing each of them weekly.  The chiropractor's adjustment helped more than the acupuncturist's needles, but both were only causing temporary relief.  I was still in so much pain and it was really interferring with everything by that point.  The little relief I was getting made it feel that much worse when the pain came back.

My chiropractor then told me that really what I needed was a massage therapist who could specialize in trigger points, because I have so so so many of them.   Unfortunately, massage therapy is one thing that Fort Carson doesn't offer, so it wouldn't be covered by Tricare (the Army's medical insurance), like acupuncture and chiropractor were.  

However, my husband's flexible spending account (FSA) would. Anyway, seeing Parker at The Shade Tree Massage in Colorado Springs changed everything for me. She is a neuromuscular massage therapist and I see her for trigger point massage. It is a very painful type of massage because it goes deep into very tender areas, but Parker helps increase circulation to the areas and always keeps moving around to cause less pain in the trigger points. After all the pain I have been in for months, I am finally reaching a point of being pain free. I am certainly not there yet, but there are many days where I have little to no pain. And most of the time, even when the pain comes back, it isn't as bad as it was before I started massage therapy. I was in so much pain that I pretty much quit doing outdoor activities, couldn't clean my house without pain and headaches, and simple things like laundry became nearly impossible. I needed so much more sleep and rest and I was begining to feel like I couldn't do anything else. But with Parker's help and a lot of trigger point massage, I am truly getting my life back! *For more information about Parker and The Shade Tree please visit her website at theshadetree.massagetherapy.com.