Mother’s Day 2016

Happy Mother’s day as fit to you and yours.

This is a fitting moment to share my mom’s health experience with you all in order to help our community.

You can think of this newly annual post as a kind of State of My Mom address.

After being diagnosed with varying degrees of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) — i.e. AD is measured in seven stages, but her neurologist refused to assign one, even after my gentle and brief pressure on that front — I became my mom’s personal caregiver (while continuing my life’s work mainly as a ‘starving musician’ of a professional entertainer).

Being resourceful (e.g. carefully navigating a tight budget), and after my mom has made it clear that she’s uncomfortable with mental pharmaceuticals traditionally prescribed these days (due to their harsh effects), and after my research on the subject — my mom uses medical cannabis (science term for marijuana, if unclear) to address AD and her other relatively minor conditions.

With a state license in hand, she’s been using medical cannabis for roughly a year, and the results have been wonderful at least in terms of symptom management.

Importantly note there’s no known cure for AD, so any pharmaceutical is prescribed to only address symptoms — with serious potential (including common) side effects and heavy cost.

Backed by suggestive science involving mild cannabis intake towards neuroprotection and even improvement, she has steadily improved mentally to apparently validate that science.

That said, she still has notable memory issues, so I’m not ready to proclaim a cure has been found — but there’s solid hope even on this front.

I define her AD condition as mild to sometimes moderate.

The occasionally and relatively heavier aspects (including beginning to desperately write some notes) ended after removing Lorazepam from her medicine list (noting a Harvard study offers a negative connection between that class of medicines and dementia) — a list almost healthily disappearing in terms of traditional pharmaceuticals, with limited exception (and that may even disappear too).

She’s almost exclusively independent (e.g. takes basically four-mile walks daily, weather permitting), and is almost always very capable in the moment.

She sometimes struggles with short-term memory issues, but I’m reasonably convinced that she may be dealing with a case of selective memory (she understandably remembers only what she believes is important) — and mildly affected by cannabis’ (hypothetically healthy) dampening of memory access (healthy by reducing wear and tear against the parts of the brain responsible for memory — obviously a part of neuroprotection).

When she reads, she forgets what she already read basically one day ago, so this is a key focal point — not to pressure her to remember (never a good idea with AD), but to see if there’s any improvement on this front to help validate cannabis as a cure for AD.

Her verbal skills remain intact, which is a major positive, because AD compels people to adapt to language loss.

Dosing with a very small pinch of cannabis (roughly 1/20th the size of an average sized joint) in an electronic vaporizer set to a fixed temperature (thrice daily), her cannabis effects are very mild. She’s never stoned (or such), and it’s worth noting she has no prior recreational drug history outside of alcohol — nor any desire to increase her cannabis intake (no tolerance and dependency problems).

Overall, I attribute her successes to our constant effort to improve her palliative care — including removing some key and terribly pressing stressors. Without desperation, resource limits form our big remaining obstacle, but I remain healthily confident that we can (and, with smart work/relaxation and good luck, will) overcome that stressor too.

I started the Stress Health entertainment project years ago through natural forces (just following my muse without compromise).

You probably never heard of an entertainment project outside of my circles, because I meticulously crafted the concept for about a couple of decades now — taking what fans want in entertainment access and structuring and conveniently giving it to them.

An entertainment project is a highly flexible container (actually just a name, logo, and simple focal point) allowing for audio, video, writing, social interaction, and so on to be grouped together under one “flag” — basically an entertainment ecosystem (dying when nobody gains positivity from it anymore).

The project is freely released, so there’s no hindrance to enter and preferably enjoy that ecosystem. Like a musician playing in the subway, All Sines (my small indie entertainment business) offers a simple but highly flexible ‘tip jar’ (plus merchandise) system to secure necessary resources for a smooth operation, but enough about that here.

My mom and I benefited from a water aerobics class twice weekly — basically calisthenics in a pool (and a healthy, inflammation-reducing workout even for this mid-aged yours truly).

The music selection of that class was (we’re no longer there) understandably geared towards high energy and senior ladies (so I had a bit of an unintended mental workout too — hint: “It’s raining men…Hallelujah…” — nothing against that song — just not a fit in my case).

Exercising my natural audio sculpting skills, and matching the timing of the class (and with help from our great class leader), I created a rough version of what eventually became a series of audio sculptures published under the name “Healthy Work Ethic”. Feel free to listen via stream (and even download) for yourself…

Though I defined Healthy Work Ethic as an album at Bandcamp, it’s really meant to be one side of a major divider in the (preferably perpetual) Stress Health project — more on this in future posting here.

Balance is required for stability (composure).

That logically includes a balance between a healthy work ethic and a healthy relaxation ethic.

Our society tragically ignores that critical balance (usually to bring comfort to our oligarchical “leaders” naturally spanning the public and private sectors “to protect the children”), and the result is rampantly unhealthy stress — and all of the abuse (including violence) arising from and joining that stress to cyclically amplify that societal problem.

Work is considered productive, while relaxation is considered taking a break from being productive.

That consideration must promptly end up with the dinosaurs in the realm of the bygone.

Relaxation maximizes self-healing, so critically helps maximize health — which fundamentally and naturally maximizes work performance (and nonetheless reduces the obscene healthcare burden).

Stress Health is evolving (though still fairly “green banana” these days), and lovingly dedicated to my mom.

My contribution to the Healthy Work Ethic side of Stress Health is likely over, because (as a responsible entertainer) I want to help society raise the volume on Healthy Relaxation Ethic (HRE) for much better health and much safer communities.

HRE flows naturally and casually. There’s no album release, but instead a series of single audio sculptures with each one gently dropped into the online ocean (with whatever occurring rippling effects) for whatever it may be worth to our community.

Publication is now highly flexible with thanks to internet availability, so publication grooves with all sorts of possible nuances are part of entertainment. Publication duration, style, release timing, and so on are like colors on a painter’s palette.

You may think you’re reading just another odd blog here, but you’re really an audience experiencing my performance — with the convenient ability to tap into it (i.e. any of our entertainment projects/ecosystems naturally forming the All Sines super project/ecosystem) whenever fit for you.

The publication groove explains my frequent repetition of key points, and that repetition allows any of you missing out to connect again (and optionally add your feedback as part of our groove).

Your feedback is a key factor (e.g. if you demonstrate that you’re exhaustively understanding those points, I’ll avoid publishing them to righteously adapt our groove away from monotony), but since there basically has been no feedback during the “green banana” phase, I simply continue naturally righteously following my muse (apparently reality itself).

I wanted to release the first HRE audio sculpture today to match the aforementioned motherly dedication, but in the HRE spirit, I decided not to tensely pressure that release like trying to force a round peg into a square hole.

The audio sculpture titled “Peace Within Chaos” is complete, but will be necessarily casually published in the coming days.

Until then, feel free to weigh in, or chill out on this Mother’s Day and beyond.

This journal, and the cosmic-reaching journey that it’s tuned in with, has only merely begun.

There are lots of surprising twists and turns from seriousness through fun to come throughout All Sines and beyond, so feel free to stay tuned in with us all for whatever experience signature you find fitting.

It promises to be quite the ride.

Cheers.

About Spirit Wave

I am an honest freak (or reasonably responsibly balanced "misfit", if you prefer) of an artist working and resting to best carefully contribute towards helping society. Too many people abuse reasoning (e.g. 'partial truth = whole truth' scam), while I exercise reason to explore and express whole truth without any conflict-of-interest -- all within a sometimes offbeat style of psychedelic artistry.