Dooley Noted: 8/27/2016 We have all experienced varying degrees and qualities of pain. As a healthcare practitioner, nearly everyone sees me for visits to help them understand pain. While people want to get out of pain, it may defeat the purpose of why it presents itself. I’ll give you a not-so-hypothetical example. A patient presents to me with crippling knee pain when she descends the stairs. She gets a … Read more
Dooley Noted: 8/24/2016 Lately, I’ve experienced an influx of middle-aged, active people with chronic pain issues. When they come to see me, they are very disconcerted that movements don’t come so easily to them anymore. One particular patient showed me that it was difficult for him to get off of the floor, due to his low back pain. I watched him slowly go from supine to side-lying, then to oblique sitting. … Read more
Dooley Noted: 8/22/2016 I was teaching at an NKT seminar this weekend, when it hit me like a Mack truck. The vice grip on my skull was unrelenting. The nausea debilitated me so that I couldn’t eat or drink. I knew the feeling all too well, although it has only happened twice in the last year. It was a migraine. I have spent the bulk of my career studying migraine, … Read more
Dooley Noted: 8/12/2016 When your heart has been shredded, you find yourself on the floor trying to piece it back together. The frustrations run deep. You filter through each shard, trying to make sense of each piece. None of the segments seem to match. Tears blind you as you struggle. If you’re there, I was in your shoes one year ago. I was responsible for my heart, and … Read more
Dooley Noted: 8/5/2016 Once a road is built, it’s difficult not to go down it. It’s blazed with bright lights and smooth, silky pavement. You start taking it every chance you get. You start to really get to know this road. You know how it feels. This is how you create developed pathways in your brain, too. You pave them and light them because, at one time, they … Read more
Dooley Noted: 8/2/2016 Since January 1, 2011, I have written Dooley Noted every day. I’ve never run out of topics, and I never will. But as I make post #2041, I’m deciding to write whenever I desire to do so. So, this is my last consecutive post. In an attempt to provide a richer, more nourishing personal life, I’m deciding to write as I feel the need. And the … Read more
Dooley Noted: 8/2/2016 We are in troubled times of race wars. As an Indiana girl, I had a purely Caucasian elementary and high school, sans one adopted African-American girl. Confederate flags were flown in trucks – even though Indiana was part of the North. That made most of us laugh at the irony. Racial tensions didn’t seem high, though, because there wasn’t much race diversity. Only the prejudice was flowing, … Read more
Dooley Noted: 7/31/2016 This weekend, I stayed in a lovely hot spring resort and made s’mores with my husband. As I tasted the tender crisp graham cracker, I was shuttled back to my childhood. I could remember being around 7 years old, rummaging through the cabinets under my grandmother’s sink. I was searching for her graham crackers, which, as a child, I assumed were called “Gram” crackers. After all, she’s … Read more
Dooley Noted: 7/29/2016 My mother was the baby girl, the last born of her parents. So was I. As I heard her stories of growing up, I envisioned my uncles chasing and teasing her. I also envisioned them looking out for her. With such a distance between my sisters and me, I had more solo time with my mother than the other girls. I found the similarities between us … Read more
Dooley Noted: 7/28/2016 I have never been the victim of domestic abuse. I consider myself lucky. But in turn, I spent most of my life hitting myself. I never had a hand of discipline restricting me, so I learned to use my own psychology to keep myself in my place. Unfortunately, any blame I could have dispersed to the outside world was internalized. The beatdowns started at a young … Read more