Yoga with Debi, training with Bernie, travel with mom

October 20, 2023:

Alright, so a lot happened today. I’m just gonna get the photos in here and then talk from them. First things first, I had my meds at 8am. I felt a touch nauseous so I had them with pair of two yogurts, and not the two eggs like I planned. Today I went to go to Jordan’s yoga class, and then realized that my other yoga teacher, Debi, was subbing for her today. I had a good class with her, and also told her some of my big improvements and realizations. I honestly forget which ones I told her, and didn’t write them down.

Afterwards, a VERY cool thing happened. I walked in to the gym and saw the guy Bernie who always quizzes me on capitals and countries. Today he asked me for the three smaller countries at the top of South America, and I did kind of badly. I only knew one of them, and its capital. The one I knew was Suriname (with Paramaribo), and I forgot Guyana and French Guiana. After that, I had the AMAZING experience of working out with him for a few hours. I grabbed one of my extra BeReals with him on the leg press machine too. The really cool thing is that he taught me some new exercises, like the incline press, and he actually showed me how to do a bench press, which I’d never done before. I also asked him if he had a job or was retired, and he basically said "not quite." He still works one day a week as a dentist at Hamline Family Dental, which I had not known at all, not even that he’d been a dentist. At the very end of the time when I was with him, I even told him that my parents had been telling me to be more open to friends of different ages, and he joked that he considers himself “young at heart.” Then, I had time to go take a shower. Putting this in here because today I literally looked back at my photo journal to figure out when the last time I showered was. Taught me that I should generally put stuff like that in here too.

After the gym, mom came over and we finished our packing. I’m in Colorado now, and I’m gonna say that I think we did a really good job packing. I haven’t noticed anything that’s missing yet. While she was over in my house, I messaged both Dr. Go and Dr. Flanagan that my depression had lifted a bit, and I also wasn’t throwing up much anymore. Mom and I also decided that I might go to the 1pm showing of Debi’s musical Nov. 1. After I finished all my packing tasks, mom and I went to the airport. I drove us over with Papa in the car to take my car back. At the airport, I read through a lot of the retreat attendees’ fundraising pages with their stories. Doing that actually helped me to feel a TON better about the situations that everyone will be coming from. Afterwards, mom and I stopped at a place called Stone Arch for a meal, and I got a wild rice soup and part of mom’s cheeseburger. At the restaurant, we were sitting next to this guy named Ceth who actually worked for Delta as a bagage handler, and was on stand-by for the same flight we were taking. We had a stupendous conversation with him, and then once we went to the flight, he actually ended up being able to sit right next to us. We told him all about my cancer and TBI struggles, and he told us which airports he believes are his favorites, and also some personal history about his life. Then, we talked about languages a bit too.

Oh and to summarize, I had my meds at 7:30pm with the almonds I’d packed for that, exactly two hours after I ate lunch. Kirsten picked us up from the airport, and drove us over to her house, with my cousin Bailey in the car too. We also had very nice conversations together. We learned that Bailey worked as a medical assistant at a dermatology clinic, and was just promoted to scribe. We talked about a ton more too, and I don’t think it’s important to recount every single element of conversation we covered. The long story short is that Kirsten took us back to their house, and showed us around. The very interesting thing there was that Kirsten has a mild plant obsession, and she gave us a full tour. That kind of made me think that maybe I could get in to plants in some capacity too, just for something to enjoy, now that I can enjoy things again. That’s definitely a perfect example of something that I would never, ever have thought before the worst of my depression lifted. I’ve also kind of realized that I DON’T want to get back to the place I was at the time of the crash, because that was just me trying to make myself too busy to think about my very real problems, aka the cancer. I still need to kind of define what my real problems were. So in a way, we could look saying that the TBI has actually kind of benefitted me, because I never EVER would have stopped drowning my entire life in work, forever. I don’t even know if I ever would have grown out of that.