Kimberly Hirsh

My mom’s leukemia is in remission.

It IS great news that’s my mom’s leukemia is in remission. It’s important to me to remember that there is a long road ahead, with monthly inpatient chemo and other treatment. Thank you everyone for your kind words.

I am scared and overwhelmed. Here’s what I’m doing about it:

1. Making sure I take my meds and supplements
2. Reading and following the Gaslit Nation Action Guide
3. Planning to spend some time today crafting

Please listen to Gaslit Nation, where Sarah Kendzior & Andrea Chalupa “take a deep dive on the news, skipping outrage to deliver analysis, history, context, and sharp insight on global affairs.”

My sense of routine and timing and goal-setting has been completely exploded over the past month or so. The routines I put in place to help me cope in the face of my mom’s illness weren’t really doable last week because M was home from school Wednesday through Friday for a teacher workday and conferences. Just today am I beginning to claw some of that structure back.

Today I did morning pages. I did a tarot reading for Pisces season. (The overall gist was one of recognizing abundance, not worrying where it would come from, and letting go of the need to try to create a perfect balance.) I had a smoothie. I filled one of my three medicine cases. (Two more to go!)

I cleared several small items off my to-do list. Soon, I will get down to work-work, continuing to analyze the documentation that’s going to help us develop a typology of the challenges library staff face when implementing connected learning.

I’ve had headaches almost continuously for a few weeks, partly due to hormone shifts, but maybe also partly due to stress. I had two cycles where I thought my body had sorted out my PCOS a little bit but here we are on Day 44, no new cycle in sight (a normal menstrual cycle is 40 or fewer days long from the beginning of one period to the beginning of the next). This is fine, or rather, not catastrophic. But disappointing.

I spoke with my doctor the other day. My Hemoglobin A1C is high - that’s the number that says how my blood sugar has been over the course of the past few months, as opposed to the glucose measurement that really only tells you about the past 24 hours or so. (That one was high-normal.) My LDL cholesterol was high, too - but total and triglycerides were good, so let’s celebrate that!

My doctor recommended two new supplements and I asked about a third. One of the ones she recommended was corn silk for kidney function. When I eat things with whole corn, corn flour, or corn meal in them, I get joint pain. I’m going to try the corn silk and see how it goes, but am prepared to stop it quickly if it causes pain and ask her for other possibilities.

She also recommended berberine for cholesterol and blood sugar, and agreed with me that it would be good to try GABA to improve the quality of my sleep. And she said it was smart of me to up my l-tyrosine when I noticed clinical signs of declining thyroid function (increased fatigue and decreased body temperature).

I write about these things because my life is a constant set of calculations relating to how to handle different conditions and the fact that my health will never be “fixed.” Chronic illness is not a problem to be solved; it is a condition to be managed.

I bought this Art Oracles card deck at the North Carolina Museum of Art when we were there to see the Mucha exhibit in December and I keep the Frida Kahlo card pinned on my corkboard because it says, “Convalescence lasts a lifetime” and that is something I need to keep in mind.

I don’t expect I’ll ever get a tattoo, but inspired by both my own experiences with chronic illness and having recently read Ninth House, if I ever did, I think it would be the tarot Wheel of Fortune, and probably the Wayhome Tarot version.

(That picture is from the Everyday Magic website.)

The thing is, wherever you are on the Wheel, three things are true:

1. At some point, things will be better than they are now.
2. At some point, things will be worse than they are now.
3. You will be back here again.

It would be good for me to keep these truths in mind at all times.

That feeling when your new job pays you to work through the professional development curriculum you created as part of your old job.

Working through Project READY and I wrote an “I am” poem [PDF]. I don’t want to share the whole thing but in case you’re wondering how I define myself, the first line/refrain is:

I am smart and loving

Not sure what my dream casting for most of the roles in Ninth House would be, but @may_wise Mary Wiseman for Pamela Dawes please, okay bye.

Finished reading: Ninth House (Alex Stern Book 1) by Leigh Bardugo 📚

So good. It puts the academia in dark academia.

🔖 Read More contagious version of omicron spreads in U.S., fueling worries.

This. The lifting of mask mandates. The expansion of what counts as high-risk.

Sigh.

I did the seven stories exercise & put everything into a word cloud, combining related words & eliminating irrelevant words & ended up with this word cloud. I can’t make good alt text but contact me if you want the CSV word list.

Me: I was so psyched about the topic and methods of my dissertation when I defended my proposal in February 2020, but I find it hard to get psyched about that stuff right now. What happened? A personal failing, probably.

Also me: A pandemic and your mom got leukemia.

Me: Oh yeah.

🔖 Not their first rodeo: How Black riders are reclaiming their place in cowboy culture

This is so cool and the pictures are phenomenal.

Scene: Today’s Micro.blog Meetup

Them: I have writer’s block and was hoping to get ideas for how to bust through it.

Me: Let me tell you about my TNG fanfic where Data teaches Geordi improv.

🖖🏻📝

I was going to ask what the best career path was for an insufferable know-it-all and then realized I should qualify the question with aside from academia.

No YOU just ordered a Mini Tarot de Marseille.

I’m RSVPing to IndieWeb Create Day on March 5, 2022. This might show up as a yes but it’s actually a maybe.

Me to W: I need to go be in the dark and quiet for a little while now because I’m overstimulated. There were so many people outside when M was playing.

Narrator: There were 4 people outside.

I am thisclose to posting a vibe shift reading list.

I get annoyed at the voice in my head that, when I’m stressed, offers an oh-so-helpful list of all the stress-relieving things I’m not doing, implying that I could make the stress go away but I just must not want to badly enough.

Today’s vibe: driving home from my fasting bloodwork appointment listening to “Surface Pressure” on repeat-1 while basically inhaling a Panera cinnamon roll.

I just heard my neck crack. I am really over everything. Everything except crafting and my job. And loving my kid. I guess I’m over stuff that I’m not doing impacting me, really.

I’ve been reading the Future Ready with the Library posts at the YALSA blog and it’s got me thinking about the skills I was building in middle school and how they have persisted and how I’ve leveraged them throughout my career.

In middle school, I spent my out-of-school time practicing theater, reading books, and coding in BASIC. I volunteered one summer at the library. (My memory of this is that somebody at school decided I needed more to occupy me and sent me to the counselor and when she asked my interests, “reading” was the only one she could figure out how to match with a volunteer opportunity.)

In my career, I’ve been an educator and public speaker (both use my theater training), a librarian, and a web editor (HTML is pretty easy if you’ve got a handle on BASIC). I use knowledge and skills from all of these domains as a researcher, too.

It’s fun and cool to think about the connections between that me and this me.

🔖 Read The Millions of People Stuck in Pandemic Limbo

…people are still dying, and immunocompromised people disproportionately so. Ignoring that sends an implicit message: Your lives don’t matter.

I have too many chronic conditions and I don’t like it.