Retirement: It's great!

    
     Today I attended my medical clinic retirement luncheon. About 20 of us retired docs from our clinic get together for lunch once a month. We pick a different restaurant each time and move them around town; sometimes we try new restaurants. Our discussions range from travel reports about trips taken, our families and their happies and their sads, and also, of course, our run-ins with medical care from the other side of the check in desk. At least, we can share the latter, because it is bound to happen. Almost everyone of us present has had something to be treated or has a family member going through medical stuff right now.

     I love retirement! People ask me if I ever miss my patients or my medical practice. On rare occasion, I do miss having that doctor identity, but it really does not occupy a large part of my thoughts. I tell people, "Yah, the other day I thought about that for about 30 seconds." That does seem to be the way of it. I was ready to retire when I did it. I have a lot of interests and wanted to spend more time on those interests. That's where the name of this blog came from. A doctor friend that I used to share an office with often called me the Renaissance Woman because I had so many interests and had read and done so much with those interests. She felt she could ask me about almost anything and I could give her an answer or I could describe a personal experience that answered her question. So she called me Renaissance Woman. The term was usually Renaissance Man. The definition of this term started because during the Renaissance there was much less knowledge about fields of study so one person could be knowledgeable in multiple fields in the arts and sciences such as Leonardo Da Vinci, as an example. A modern definition for the use of that term applied it to a scholar who was in a position to acquire more than superficial knowledge about many different interests. The term was first recorded in written English in the early twentieth century when it was used to describe a person who is well educated, or who excels, in a wide variety of subjects or fields. Usually it meant that the man was accomplished in areas of both the arts and the sciences. Since I had been called a Renaissance Woman due to my many interests, I decided to call myself that in my blog. As my profile says, I am interested in gardening, writing, water color painting and drawing, learning piano, geneology, reading, keeping fish, travel, interior decor, stamp collecting, toy collecting, exercise, tennis, medicine, birdwatching. As you can see I don't have enough time to tend to all my interests, but I try.

     I was going through some stacks of papers and I found this list of quotes on retirement that were in the Editor's Note of Physician's Money Digest, June 30, 2003. This was a throw away newspaper that was sent to all doctors free, paid for by the advertising within. I should explain what "throw-aways" are. Doctors pay for subscriptions to receive medical journals and some newsletters or newspapers that have scientific articles in them. These subscription journals are peer-reviewed. That means that the scientific articles are judged by a panel of experts and/or an editor before the article is accepted to be printed in the journal. But there are many medical journals or magazines that are not peer reviewed. Doctors or other experts are asked to write articles for them, and the article are accepted without peer review. The advertising fees pay for the publishing of the journal. There are no subscription fees. Now there is often good articles and good information in these "throw-aways." But they are usually not kept, or bound. They are read and thrown away.

     Following are the quotes from that Editor's Note:

     The things that should accompany old age; fairly good health to the end, an unceasing interest in life, and the affectionate esteem of a largre circle of friends.  William Osler, MD

    A doctor is happiest twice in life -- the day they hang up a diploma and the day they take it down. Howard J. Bennett, MD

     Our lives bregin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

     How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.  George Washington Carver

     Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead.  Scottish Proverb

    Love prefers twilight to daylight.  Oliver Wendell Holmes, MD

    There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.  Peter Drucker

     A person can stand almost anything except for a succession of ordinary days.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

     Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retired.  Samuel Johnson

     Sooner or later i'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire.  Margaret Mead

    The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.  Coach Vince Lombardi

     I have never liked working. To me a job is an invasion of privacy.  Danny McGoorty, Irish pool player

     The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.  Lilly Tomlin

    I retired because of illness and fatigue. The fans were sick and tired of me.  Coach John Ralston

     My doctor work interfers with my life.  RenRae

Note: The Wordle image that I opened this post with contains the words that were used most often in all of these above quotes with their size relating to their frequency of use. There is a wonderful site online that creates these wordles. You can paste in text, or link to a URL or other site and then tell the application to create a Wordle with these words. You can choose the shape, the directions of the words, the colors and the font. Very artistic, isn't it? This is especially useful if you are creating a genealogical image because the surnames and the places of birth will stand out with the most common ones being larger. Try it at this site: http://www.wordle.net/



   

Like a Bird by Asaf Solomon

Bird's Eye View

"Asaf Solomon, a dedicated Galilean, nature lover, and farmer, photographs the land of Israel while flying over it in a powered paraglider, a picturesque craft that gives the passenger a sense of freedom and tranquility, as well as the opportunity to take photographs from an unorthodox angle."
 
The above introduction is from the Magazine Eretz. We have his book "Like a Bird" showing his magnificent photographs of the land of Israel from the sky. Patterns, birds, nature and archeological landmarks vy with each other to produce a view of Israel that I have never seen. I have been there 7 or 8 times and of course my husband lived there until he was 33 years old. But every time we go to that little country we find something new to see. There is a new national park, or some new event to see. This little country unbelievably has 60 some national parks. They do a wonderful job of preserving their important holy legacy -- holy in three religions. But this book shows still a new view. I recommend you get this book if you can find it. It is in Hebrew, but that doesn't matter; you will just miss out on the short titles of each photo. But the photographer Asaf Solomon has a website and you can see a few of his views there. This book is a wonderful coffee table book of a smaller nature and will certainly arouse interest and conversation in your home.
 
"Like a Bird" by Asaf Solomon. 2009 Kinnaret, Zmora-Bitan, Dvir -- Publishing House Ltd. St. Or Yehuda 60212, Israel  ISBN 978-965-517-351-2
http://www.kinbooks.co.il/

     The above photo is taken from the jacket cover of the book. It is copyrighted and printed here with permission of publisher and author. It is my favorite. It shows the Star of David plowed up in a field, in the Hula Valley in the north of Israel. We have been there in the fall of the year when 10s of thousands of cranes are stopping there on their yearly migration from Europe to winter in Africa. In this photo, the tractor is scattering seed just on the Star of David outline. The cranes are therefore landing and feeding on the Star. For a lover of Israel and a birdwatcher like me, this is a wonderful photo.

The Spy Network!

Russian Spies in the Family! (Names changed to protect our relatives and friends)
    

    We recently had more overnight Israeli house guests. This time it was a first cousin, once removed to my husband, Amos, on his father's side of the family. Emma, the cousin, and her husband Dimitri grew up in Communist Bessarabia, which is now the independent country of Moldova. They lived in the capitol city, Kishinev, and immigrated to Israel in the 1980s. Dimitri was more or less a favorite "nephew" of my father-in-law Moshe. Moshe helped Dimitri and Emma get settled in Israel and helped Dimitri get a good managing job with the electric company in Israel. Emma is a pediatrician who practices in Israel. They now have two grown sons and grandchildren. We had become friendly with Dmitri and Emma and had hosted them before in our home in Milwaukee. They seemed a very nice couple and we thoroughly enjoyed their company. We had even traveled with them from Virginia where we were all at a family bat mitzvah to our home in Milwaukee, through Gettysburg and Niagara Falls and other stops along the way. On that trip we stopped in downtown Chicago on the way home, and we took them up on the Sears Tower to see the view. Then Emma asked us if we could leave them in downtown Chicago and they would catch a bus up to Milwaukee at the end of the day. They wanted to do some shopping, she said. We offered to wait for them and go entertain ourselves for a while and pick them up at a set time. "No," she said that wouldn't do. They insisted on staying by themselves in the big city ostensibly "to shop."

     Well, it was a few years after this trip together, that we learned the unimaginable. Dimitri was indicted for spying for Russia, and agreed to cooperate and tell all about his years of gathering information from Israel, perhaps some through his electric company job and relaying it to Russian authorities. Dimitri and
Emma claimed that they never passed any information that was not already known by the Russians. We never knew whether their release to be able to leave Russia and emigrate to Israel was contingent on this spying. They still had family in Russia, her brother and his offspring, and maybe the Russians would put pressure on them or punish them if the spying were to end. We never knew. There has been the recent Russian spy story of the large spy group embedded in American society. This was probably a similar situation. Like the US spy ring, it did not seem that Dimitri and Emma made a lot of money for their efforts. They did like to go out evenings and drink or party with friends, yes, but they didn't live like wealthy people. And Emma particularly worked very long hours as a doctor. At the time, we did not think that money was a motivation for this behavior.

     This conviction nearly did Moshe in; in fact my mother-in-law blamed his final heart attack on the stress it induced. Dimitri was sentenced to 8 years in prison.  Emma was not indicted and she continued to take care of the two sons and work very hard as a pediatrician. When we spoke with her on the phone, she usually seemed overwhelmed. Was it worth it? Toward the end of those 8 years Dimitri was allowed out of jail to work during the day and then returned to jail at night. He was released completely a couple years ago. For the first couple years Dimitri was not allowed to leave Israel.

     Now finally, they were allowed out of Israel and they decided to come to the States on a leisure tour. They came to our home on Saturday and we got the Sendik's prime rib supper to have at home that night. On Sunday we went out for brunch at Roots in Milwaukee with its wonderful overview of the city of Milwaukee. Then we drove the couple around downtown showing them views, over Lake Michigan, of the Calatrava Art Museum, and of the River Walk. This time again, as happened years ago, Emma asked for us to leave them alone downtown to walk the River Walk, and shop. This reminded us of the occurrence years ago in Chicago. Emma had asked us a couple times while driving them around the city, "Are we in downtown now?" Were they meeting someone in "downtown Milwaukee" to pass information? I doubt it. I just think that Emma is kind of a nervous lady and she just needs to be on her own. She doesn't seem to have a lot of patience to be shown things by someone else. Well, at least, I hope that is the excuse.

     The recent US Russian spy ring that was arrested, and deported back to Russia very quickly has similar descriptions to our relatives. "Nice young couple."  "Raising children"  "Living in Suburbia of the US" "Stylish people"  No one suspected these people in the US of being spies. Likewise I don't think anyone suspected our relatives of such activities. Certainly we didn't. However, Israeli authorities knew there were a lot of these Russian immigrants that came in the 1970s and 1980s who were doing this. They even allowed such people to come forward and confess at one time during those decades, to be pardoned without any penalty. They knew Russia was coercing many of these people with pressure on family members who remained in Russia. Dimitri did not come forward at that time. We don't know why. Had they gotten used to the small amounts of money coming in?  Therefore when he was caught, he was prosecuted to the full law in Israel. My husband and I talk about this at times. Dimitri and Ella's oldest son was career military for a while in Israel. I often wonder if his parents' activities held back his career at all. Some of the Russian spies in the US had children as well. It was unknown if they were actually their children or not, or other actors for the role. One couple may have been faking their marriage but they had two small children that were probably theirs. Needless to say our experience raises the question of many more living incognito among us who are not who they seem. Hmm! Since our visitors, I wonder if our phone is tapped by the FBI.

Armaggedon

                                          Entrance to Tel Megiddo National Park

                                           Model of historic Megiddo, Museum at the Park

    In this post, I raise the topic of Israel and that little country's many, many biblical and archeological sites. Many of the approximately 70 national parks are related to the poignant history of this little piece of our planet. My sabra husband and I had visited Israel many times, usually staying in Natanya, a Mediterranean city about halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa. In our treks around the little country we would always take Route 66 inland to access Nazareth, the Galilee, Tiberias, and the Hula Valley and Golan Heights even further north. In all those trips we drove past a site that I had never noticed or realized what it was -- Tel Megiddo. It sits right along this major highway which runs along the eastern side of the low hills that blend into the Carmel mountains along the Mediterranean sea. That route at that particular site apparently coincides with Via Maris, the ancient Roman road that led from Egypt to Damascus and Mesopotamia. The importance of that road, and the strategic importance of a fortified city at this southeastern point overlooking the large Jezreel Valley in Northern Israel made this site a fortified city 5000 years ago. It was conquered twice by Egypt in the 15th century BCE and again in 605 BC. These two battles and sieges were recorded in Eygyptian hieroglyphics and the second one in the Old Testament of the Bible. King David was there and King Solomon refortified it after one of its destructions.  But it was destroyed many more times because archeological digs at Tel Megiddo show at least 26 layers of destruction and rebuilding. During all these rebuildings the same area was always used as a sacred area, probably transitioning from a circular altar where there were animal sacrifices and perhaps early on even human sacrifices, to more familiar sites of worship that would have served King Ahab and King Josiah of the Caananite kingdoms from the Bible. Its site includes huge stables built to house chariot horses for King Ahab, and a very complex waterworks, with cisterns, and a 70 meter underground tunnel hone into the rock to reach a spring that was outside the city walls.  Ahab turned Megiddo into “Ir Rekhev” and built the impressive water works. Israelite Megiddo fell to the Assyrians in 732 BCE and was finally demolished by the Egyptians in 609 BCE. An Ivory Palace was discovered there with the largest hoard of Canaanite objets d'art and jewelry made of ivory every discovered in any Caananite site. When we stopped to visit this site and walked among the ruins, I felt something similar to what I had felt when gazing at the Old City of Jerusalem. I was overcome by a sense of awe at the tenacity and strength of human culture that would keep reconstructing this city time after time, when destruction should have ended its existence. It is a testament to humanity even if one ignores the religious importance of these sites.

                                           Jezreel Valley through the Gate of the City
      

                                           The Sacred area of the ruins, Jezreel Valley in background

                                          A public grain silo from King Jeroboam, (8th century BCE)

                                          The Southern Stables, built in King Ahab's time for chariot horses.

                                           The Jezreel Valley from Sacred Site, Tel Megiddo

                                           Jezreel Valley agriculture, Nazareth in distance

                                           Sacred area from above, with circular altr to right.

                                     
                                          Shaft entrance to tunnel to spring, Tel Meggido

                                          Exit to spring, Tel Megiddo

     Then I began to research this site. Har means a small hill or small mountain and the name of this city was always Meggido which some have said means Assembly. So this name of the place in Hebrew and Arabic is Har Meggido. The name for this place in Greek, is Armeggedan. Recognize the name. Yes this is the site that the prophesized final battle between good and evil at the End of Times will take place. It makes sense that a city of such importance in BCE history would be the place where the final battle would be predicted to take place. Multiple times my husband and I drove past this site without knowing its importance. Enjoy the photos of this site that I have posted here.


     One of the most important archeological sites in Israel from the time of the bible, Tel Megiddo is a beautiful and impressive national park near the town of Afula. Megiddo was important in antiquity: it is mentioned in Egyptian writings and is forecast to be the site of Armageddon in the Christian Book of Revelations. Recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005, the impressive remains of several civilizations draw many visitors and pilgrims.

Physical Therapy

     As my readers can see, I have not posted a new article for over a month. Yet I am looking over the new flags that made hits on my website and also where some of these viewers came from. I feel I owe you a posting, so I decided to write a little about why I have been delinquent.

     I have been accessing the medical profession again from the consumer side of the desk. My elbow has been continuing to have daily pain from my melanoma surgery. I have had various types of strange pains starting about 2 weeks after the surgery. At first it was, I think, a nerve pain with hyperesthesias (extreme sensitivity to normal touch) over the area, and allodynia, which is accentuated pain from stimuli over the area. I saw a physical therapist at the Hand Clinic at the Medical College of Wisconsin. But she really didn't have much to suggest and showed me a couple exercises to try to stretch the nerves, and slapped some corticosteroids cream on the site and gave me an ultrasound treatment. But she said she was not allowed to get the ultrasound head very close to the relatively new incision so she couldn't really get to the area that was bothering. Even so I found the vibration of the ultrasound to be very annoying, accentuating the pain.

     This was very similar to therapy years ago for my knee and mostly what was done was modalities ie ultrasound, and electrical stimulation. That time zapping my quadriceps muscles with electrical stimulus while I was voluntarily contracting them was I thought extreme torture. And I did not complete that session. My knee slowly got better on its own.

     Since my pain is persisting and some of that hyperesthesia is better, but now I am having deep pain with motion and with hanging my arm down, I have decided to try therapy again. It is after all three months since my surgery. A friend from my Spirit Mind Body group gave me a name of a therapist at the Sports Therapy clinic near my home. After the first visit with him, I was very optimistic. I now think there are therapists and then there are therapists. He was great, treating my whole body, found some things that I didn't know could cause me trouble. Very thorough. and astute at picking up on what I told him about the nature of my pain. He found a lot of tightness in my neck and shoulder, and at the acromioclavicular joint in the shoulder. He also said I was lacking about 40% motion when turning my head toward the surgical arm. He said one of my vertebrae was turned on the other because of that muscle tension. so he took it upon himself to strengthen this out and release those tight muscles. Just with the first two sessions I was felling somewhat better in the arm.

     But then he started working on my surgical site and that elbow. He was probably too vigorous that first time. Within a day or two I began to recognize the pain; it was no longer strange or a stranger to me. I now had lateral epicondylitis, or tennis elbow. Somehow all that manipulation of the elbow had centered the pain and inflammation right on that lateral epicondyle. I had experienced tennis elbow before from playing tennis, but this one was created with the help of a surgeon and a physical therapist and it was a wing-dinger. But at least I knew what to do for this. I purchased a fresh new tennis elbow band and wearing it brought some relief. I have been wearing it much of the time since. My physical therapist was bummed out that he had caused a lateral epicondylitis, and stayed away from the elbow until about my 7th or 8th session. He continued to work on my neck and shoulder girdle. He is good, he identifies the muscles and performs maneuvers and asks me to move certain ways against resistance while he is isolating those muscles. My grip strength is lagging and seems to have plateaued at about 30% down from normal. We are able to record increases in neck range of motion, and arm range of motion after these sessions.  But then the next session, I have lost all that range of motion and everything is all tightened up again.  I have learned that therapy is an example of the cliche: Two steps forward, one step backwards. In fact it may sometimes be one step forward, two steps backward. Once I seemed to get a flare up of the arm pain after attending an Imax movie -- looking up. Once when I seemed to have moved backwards, the therapist took a history of my activities and we decided it might be me working a lot on my laptop, writing blogs and, -- I admit it, playing solitaire, or mahjong on line. So I have limited my computer time or else tried to steal the desktop machine which is more ergonomic from my husband, which is not always easy. So, indeed, you have not seen any blogs for a whole month.

     I am still occasionally taking steps backwards. I went to water aerobics on Saturday and had a different and very young teacher. Of course, the moves were different because of the different teacher and she did a lot of arm work with buoys in the water. I stopped using my bad arm about 2/3 of the way through when I saw this, and I iced it after, but still I was pretty sore the next day. My therapist says I must stay positive, so I will try. Thank goodness for tennis elbow bands! And I will get better; I know it. It is just a slow process.

     In the middle of this whole therapy thing, I did go back to see the plastic surgeon who operated on my arm. First let me go against rules and generalize that I think many surgeons (my son excepted) do not deal well with postoperative pain, particularly the pain that is different or more than expected.  He was not very interested in the neuropathic pain I was reporting to him when I returned to get the sutures out. This 3 month follow up was just as disappointing. He really didn't address the location, nature or degree of my pain. He put his finger on a spot on my forearm which was slightly tender, and brought up a diagnosis that I had never even heard of, called a radial tunnel syndrome, and he suggested I was creating it by wearing my tennis elbow band too tightly. He also criticized my therapist implying he was treating me appropriately.  He was otherwise showing off for the medical student that was with him. He also was critical of the report that my oncologist had sent him because she had decided that the total depth of my melanoma was only 0.48 mm which is very superficial. This depth would probably not justify as wide an excision as I had and would not justify a sentinel node biopsy. So he told me that we still do not know the depth. He still said we can't be sure and add up the depths, which of course would be 0.48 mm and 0 since nothing was found in the wide excision specimen. Just to make sure his student knew the degree of surgery was justified, he told me that we still had to be paranoid about this melanoma, that it could come back. Then he said,"Now, if you ask me do I think it has spread, I would say 'No.' but I do think we will never know the depth of this lesion, so I would class it as more advanced class of tumor than your oncologist did." OK, that's going to make me feel good and confident. Needless to say, I found this appointment very disappointing.

     In an unrelated experience, I wanted to write another tale of a medical interaction. Amazingly, my husband had a nevus removed from the bottom of his foot about a week after I had my melanoma surgery. A dermatologist in my clinic had been watching this lesion on the bottom of hubby's foot for about 6 months and just could not live with it there anymore. He was going to do a very shallow biopsy of it, but knowing how my depth was disturbed by the shave biopsy, my husband insisted that at least 1 mm of tissue be removed in the biopsy. The dermatologist said he was uncomfortable about doing this and so wanted to send my husband to a surgeon. He called me into the exam room to explain this to both my husband and me at the same time. But then he began speaking to me about my amelanotic melanoma. He related that he made the same "mistake" that my dermatologist made and shave biopsied an amelanotic melanoma on a young woman. He felt bad about this, but then he said: "But it really didn't matter, because her melanoma had already metastasized and she died of a brain met." Yes, he said that to me and I was still wearing the big bandage on my arm from having my melanoma removed. This was an example of the doctor talking with the doctor and his being unable to view me as a patient. He was in truth not very sensitive to the situation. I told this story to my water aerobic lady buddies, and they thought it was terrible. They wanted to know his name, but I refused to give it to them, because this dermatologitst was a good doctor. He was just having trouble telling between the patient and the doctor.

Fall is in the air!

How to tell its fall!! Here in Wisconsin, we have had one of the hottest summers on record and statistics are similar across the country at least from the Rocky Mountains east to the Atlantic coast. But a front has gone through and now the air is cooler, there is a wonderful breeze! Some people would call it a wind. We are opening the windows and turning off the AC. This year's two young eagles are practicing their flying. One landed on our neighbors' chimney and my husband caught a picture or two. It is still so exciting to see those birds as our neighbors here on Lake Michigan.  The purple coneflowers outside my dinette window are turning chocolate brown as they end their flowering season. But there are gold finches in droves on the seed heads. The gold finches nest late and therefore are probably still feeding their fledgelings. I hear our neighborhood bluebirds occasionally give their bubbling song and they are hunting in our backyard. Of course, these may be northerners moved in on their way south. Today I heard a wren singing. That usually doesn't happen in September. The little bird must feel the same invigoration that I feel with the lowered temperatures and humidity. A hummingbird is making the rounds of the flower heads. It comes around the corner of the dinette where there is a window cranked widely open to catch the refreshing breeze. The little buzzing bird stops in midair as only they can do and looks in the open window. It obviously sees something different than its usual rounds. Then it quickly moves on. These little birds with their high metabolism and need for constant nutrition, with their complex tiny brains that keep track of all the flowers they visit and the time it will take for each flower to reacccumulate its nectar, can notice tiny little changes on their daily rounds. There are apples on our flowering crabapple tree and every morning a doe and her two half grown fawns visit the tree to get what apples they can, the doe standing on her hind feet to reach those on the lower branches, the fawns of course eating off the ground. I haven't seen any signs of the males yet but that will come shortly as the males enter the rutting season. They will strut across our yard, neck muscles standing out and looking like kings of the deer world, seeking the females that are receptive.  Monarchs are starting to move south along the Lake Michigan bluff. I must remember the broad wing hawk migration at Concordia University along Lake Michigan. It is usually around September 18 or within 5 days each side of that date, when a cool front with a Northwest wind moves through moving those birds up against the lake shore. Then a viewer might be privileged to see kettles of hawks circling over head and slowly peeling off to move further south. Why do these kettles as they are called form? Raptors generally don't like to fly great distances over water. They rely on thermal updrafts to help them rise and not as many thermals develop over water. Since the broad wings all migrate at about the same time which is a specie specific trait, there will be 100s of these birds in each thermal creating these circular formations of birds. Each individual bird rises to the top of the thermal and when the rising hot air cools and ceases to rise the bird peels off the top of the air column and glides, losing height until it finds the base of another rising air column. This formation resembles a kettle boiling over. Hence the name -- a kettle of hawks.

The Water Aerobics Group

    
     I know I must show up for the coffee hour after my water aerobics group. After my melanoma surgery I was allowed to take a shower but I was not supposed to submerge my surgery site for long periods. Therefore, I would not be able to participate in water aerobics for at least 3 weeks until the sutures came out. If I didn't show up at all, I knew these women would begin to wonder what was going on with me. They would not call me as readily as some others in the group. Since I am a retired physician, they trust me to take care of myself. But as a general rule if you miss more than a set number of days which is set differently and unverbally for every member, someone will call you to see if you are doing OK. Why haven't you been at water aerobics? It is a wonderful mix of caring and nosiness.
     This group is an interesting community of women, mostly senior women, though not all. We jokingly also call the water aerobics class the "Graveyard for former tennis players." Another person said she didn't like that term and would rather call it the Boneyard for tennis players. I don't really see the saving grace of the second term. Might as well call like it is! Indeed, several of us are former tennis players that have reached an age or a medical condition that precludes the rather rambunctious game of tennis. Water aerobics is gentler on the weight bearing joints, and is sometimes put down as a wimpy exercise routine. But try it sometime! First of all you can make what you want from it. Sometimes we might have a teacher who is a little wimpy but you can do the exercise at a faster pace, or extend the range of motion of the underwater actions and you will achieve a higher level of cardio than you might expect. However, if like me, you are recovering from a medical insult, you can do what you can in the water and still get benefit.
     This group of women is quite eclectic. We have Jewish housewives who took care of their home, their kids, and the Jewish life to which they were born. We have our own poet who has been trying to get published for many years and has recently had some such honors. She still attends writing workshops and actively pursues her trade though well past the usual retirement age.  There is the wife of a local cardiologist who has now taken instruction and become one of our teachers. There is the wife of a retired local weatherman who is well known in the community. She is one of those women who takes care of the Jewish life of her family and the local community. We have a very gentle grey haired lady who has survived two husbands and quietly goes about her life, a little overweight but after aerobics always dressed "to the nines." There is a 94 year old who has just had her shoulder replaced due to arthritic pain. She is doing well with that but now is fighting a low back problem. Little and frail, there she is almost daily at the aerobics class. We have two men that regularly attend. I don't know K well but Yuri is a Russian gentleman who can barely speak English. But he watches the rest of us for the moves and has slowly learned English for the various moves and sequences that the teacher calls out. Our teacher says he doesn't speak English, but he speaks "water aerobics."
    The session often opens with the teacher announcing the current health status of one or two members who have had surgery or who have been sick.
     Of course, the beauty of this exercise is that you can do it at what ever pace or intensity that your body needs. We have one teacher who tries to encourage members of the group to push themselves a little harder. But I don't see that it makes much difference. The important thing is that these people are here and they are moving their body in some fashion. The second important thing, or maybe the most important thing is that this group is a community. After the class we join for coffee and sometimes cake or sandwiches are provided by a member or two to celebrate their birthday. Members support each other, call each other up, offer rides to various activities to others, play mahjong together, take a meal over to another member who is sick, etc just generally serve as a support group for each other. Two of us had played tennis together in a group for many years and that group was friends but I don't think this level of support was there. So when I return and maybe before I return I will get a dose of that support and maybe it will help a small degree in the healing process.
     After the water aerobics class is over, while still in the water, I often do about 10 minutes or so of a movement that I just created myself. It is a repetitive movement that uses the whole body. I try to time it to the music that is still running for a while, or I try to do some mindfulness practice with observation of my breath during the movement. Sometimes I practice some tonglen. Yuri swims some slow laps afterwards and he saw my eyes closed. He asked, "didn't sleep?" I said, "No, I am meditating." He understood and made a surprised look, repeated the word and went on his way. One of the teachers asked me once what I was doing. She said she couldn't show what I am doing to this group but she wanted to know for herself. I explained my practice to her and went on with it. Combining the two important things of mindfulness practice and exercise is a very restorative activity for me. In my retirement the importance of these classes, the water activity and this particular water aerobics community warrants a place on my daily calendar, at least three or four times a week.