Wyzga On Words

Reaching For $1,500.00! Pediatric Cancer Research Foundation Fund-raising.

 

Hello Family, Friends, Colleagues, Compatriots, and Blog readers ~

Today, I'm asking for money. 

It's true what they say, "Once a nurse, always a nurse."  In my case pediatric nursing shaped who I am.  Over the years that I worked on hospital wards and in clinics I came face-to-face with kids with cancer.  These children were extra special in their grit, determination and perseverance to thrive despite the odds.  Over the course of time, some lived - others did not.  The common denominator: cancer and the on-going research for cures.

In the past 30 years, Pediatric Cancer Research Foundation ("PCRF") has raised over $30 million dollars for pediatric cancer research with donations to some of the leading pediatric cancer doctors, researchers and programs in the country.   How did they do that?  One way is the Annual  Reaching For the Cure Run/Walk/Bike Event.
 
Please consider supporting the fund-raising efforts of my co-captain, Gail Fox, our growing team of Fitness Elite women, and myself by joining us at the Irvine Spectrum on Race Day Sunday, May 5th 2013 as Team Fitness Elite walks and runs together to reach for the cure.  Imagine this: we might see it in our lifetime!
 
If you can't be with us in body, running shorts and Nikes, we welcome you to join us in spirit by making a donation to PCRF.  Our team's goal is $1,500.00.  No amount is too small - every dollar is appreciated - and it all goes to fund research to save children's lives!

Click This Link to visit the Team Fitness Elite web page and register for any event and/or make a donation.

Many companies will match (or even double) your donation to PCRF. Click here to see if your employer has a matching gift program.

With gratitude for your support ~ Diane and all of us.

Listen Well - A Website Of Spoken Word You May Enjoy.

As was told to me yesterday by a long-time litigator, the law is not only a jealous mistress, she can be a lethal one.  Peace, quiet, a moment of serenity, the opportunity to breathe and listen are not often part of the litigator's (or litigation consultant's) lifestyle.  But we can adjust that.

You never know where you'll find an idea.  One of the delightful features of The New Yorker magazine is the side column advertisements, each one about the size of a postage stamp.

Here is a site you may enjoy visiting:

Listen Well: a spoken word website of stories.

 

A Good Story About A Man & A Dog.

When we befriend an animal, we always get more than we bargained for.  Today The Feline Four and I are celebrating Week #83 of Barney still living well (albeit a bit breathless at times) with feline chylothorax as I wrote about in January 2011.

I am reminded once again of a bumper sticker on a local car: "Who rescued whom?" with a little paw print on it.

As Timothy Braun reminds us, "Four-Legged Reason to Keep It Together," love comes in many shapes and sizes.  

 

Wilderness As Antidote To Postindustrial Self-Absorption.

The message after 200 miles, getting lost, snow pits, mosquito attacks, and slogging with backpacks is still the same: get out in the woods.

Nicholas Kristof and his daughter headed for the Pacific Crest Trail.  Their adventure is recounted in his NYTimes OpEd piece, "Blissfully Lost in the Woods."  Apart from a nice father-daughter saga, their experiences illustrate how much we need the outdoors and Nature needs us.  Excerpt.

"This trip, even more than most backpacking slogs, was a reminder that we humans are mere bricks in a vast natural cathedral. As we tumbled in snow pits, as rain fell on us, we mused that we’re not landlords of our planet, or even its prime tenants. We’re just guests.

In short, the wilderness humbled us, and that’s why it is indispensable.

In our modern society, we have structured the world to obey us; we can often use a keyboard or remote to alter our surroundings. Yet all this gadgetry focused on our comfort doesn’t always leave us more content or grounded. It is striking how often people who are feeling bewildered or troubled seek remedy in the wilderness. That’s the point of the best-selling new book “Wild,” by Cheryl Strayed, about how she escaped from heroin and grief over her mother’s death by hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.

“Wild” is a terrific yarn, opening with a moment in which Strayed loses one precious hiking boot over a precipice — and then angrily hurls the other after it. Over time, the forests tame her, providing free therapy and the setting for her maturation. Strayed’s book has been successful, largely by word of mouth, partly because it reflects a truth we recognize.

For decades, youth programs have found benefit in sending troubled adolescents to drink from wilderness streams and lap up truths about themselves. Outward Bound takes a similar path, for everyone from at-risk kids to returning veterans to corporate executives.

Perhaps wilderness is an antidote to our postindustrial self-absorption. It’s a place to be deflated, humbled and awed all at once. It’s a window into a world larger than ourselves, one that doesn’t respond to a remote. It’s an Olympiad for all of us."

I can testify to the life changing experience of Outward Bound treks into the Canadian Rockies with a 50 pound backpack and another two week adventure kayaking Baja, Mexico with what I could stuff in a duffel.  I was exposed early on.  My family always camped in a tent with sleeping bags on the ground - where can you take 7 kids for cheap?

Kristof's parting message is urgent: Folks are just not out there like they used to be.  Excerpt.

"To guarantee wilderness in the long run, we first need to ensure a constituency for it. Environmentalists focus on preserving wilderness, because that’s the immediate priority, but they perhaps should be as energetic at getting young people to interact with it. We need more Americans working through their challenges, like Cheryl Strayed, by hurling boots off precipices. We need more schools and universities to offer classes on the wild, in the wild — with extra credit for students who get lost."

 

The Place Where You Live. Citizen Activists May Have Had Something To Do With It.

 

ORION Magazine carries a lovely section called The Place Where You Live.  Readers are invited to submit a contribution telling about the place where they live.  This following piece was printed in the July/August 2012 issue of ORION.  You should be able to access it on line when the September/October issue is in print.

Meanwhile, here is Gary Pace's beautifully spoken homage of gratitude to those who stood up to a nuclear site even after construction had begun and halted it - for good:

"Bodega Head, California.  I come to the Bodega Headlands often to make offerings and prayers.  Offerings to the land - the wild northern California coast - and prayers of gratitude to people who, fifty years ago, had the vision to block construction of a nuclear plant on this spot straddling the San Andreas Fault.  During the 1906 earthquake, this coastline moved 15 feet.

Tucked behind dramatic cliffs, and close enough to the ocean for me to hear sea lions and glimpse migrating whales, is a small pond called "Hole in the Head."  This crater is the site initially excavated for the plant's foundation; now it only hints at the disaster that could have unfolded.  The largest nuclear reactor of its era would have been built on the edge of the fault.

What outrageous hope gave people the courage to believe they could halt construction of a nuclear site even after construction had begun?  Who could have predicted their unlikely success, outlined in this understated park sign?

'Proximity of the San Andreas Fault would have significantly increased risks to marine, tidal, and atmospheric environments.  Citizens and scientists collected signatures, filed lawsuits, wrote letters, and appeared at hearings ranging from Sonoma County to Washington, D.C.  The project was finally abandoned in 1964 after 8 years of controversy and citizen action.'

If it had opened as planned, the reactor would have outlived its utility by now.   I would be standing here before the shuttered structures of cooling towers, looking out over the yard littered with barrels of spent fuel rods, a lonely witness to the radioactivity that would persist for scores of human lifetimes.  The electricity produced would have long since passed through local residents' light bulbs and dishwashers, and we'd be tapping new sources of power for our contemporary needs.

My thoughts drift to those folks who worked for such a reasonable outcome.  As the sea breeze blows across my face, I arrange flowers in honor of the legacy these activists left behind, an ephemeral monument to something that never came to pass."

 

Sometimes You Just Need To Step Away. And Rescue A Swarm Of Bees.

So there I was working away on business at the computer in the office when the call came.

A swarm had taken up residence in a plum tree in a backyard.  The family's two-year old toddler had been sitting at the base of the tree playing happily when the parents noticed what was over his head about 6 feet up.

I was told that the swarm measured about 18 inches across and 12 down. 

So now what?

Sometimes you just need to step away and rescue a swarm of bees.

I waited til mid-afternoon, suited up, put my gear in the trunk of the car and drove over to the home.  I gotta tell you, this was a beautiful swarm: healthy, quiet, peaceable, looking for a place to call home, raise their brood, have something nutritious close by to eat and a source of water to drink.

Before a swarm leaves the colony with the old queen, maybe some virgin ones, the worker bees gorge on honey.  Who knows when and where the next meal will be.  The queen is starved to slim down so she can fly.  At a signal, the queen and a number of her worker daughters leave home.  They may go only 200 yards away and alight in a safe rest stop while scout bees seek new real estate.

In this situation the bees are relatively calm: they are exposed, perhaps chilled, protecting the queen.  Of course, it's no excuse to go up and poke them.  But the homeowner and I stood just underneath the swarm and watched and listened to the quiet hum.

When I was ready to get to work as a volunteer bee rescuer, the homeowner and her toddler son watched from inside the house.  I like to spritz a little honey water on the swarm to give them a bit of food and distract them as they lick off their bodies.  I don't use smoke - there is no need.  After positioning a tall step ladder under the swarm I balanced a hive body on top and climbed up on the stone wall you see in the photo.  Once close to the swarm I gave the branch a big WHACK! to encourage as many of the honeybees as possible to drop into the box in a clump.  There was quite a flurry of bees in the air but they were not interested in me.  Many of them regrouped on the limb before they realized that the queen was in the box. 

Over the next hour we watched as bees stood along the rim of the hive box fanning their wings to let the rest know that the queen was in the box and they better hurry "home."  When I was sure that I had just about all of them I covered and secured the hive box, slid it into the trunk of my car and took the swarm to my apiary.  Finding a good spot to locate the new colony I removed all the screening and duct tape, reduced the hive entry to the size of a single bee so the colony could defend itself against any robbers, and then sat for a while realizing that at that moment I was the luckiest Lady Bee Wrangler in the world.

It's not a waste of time to break up the day, get outside, take in a breath of fresh air, listen to natural sounds, or even rescue a swarm of bees.  Our souls need such times.

 

Q&A Tuesday: A Technique For The Client To Create Their Own Confidence.

Q:    How do you give a client confidence before testifying?

A:     You don't.  A client must create it for herself.

As a litigation and communications consultant I am often involved in helping prepare people to testify.  I find that the process is like being part of an archaeological dig with the client to discover that particular truth or icon she will adopt for herself to become grounded in confident, authentic testimony.

I always ask the client +to recall childhood stories with a good character and an evil one. There is a certainty - an "Ah Ha! moment - when the client uncovers the precise character and steps into the persona of the good or heroic one.

Next I ask the client to draw a picture of that heroic character for their eyes only.  I don't want to see it. I am satisfied knowing that the client has aligned herself with a character she chose to create the confidence she needs to testify with clear, concise and cogent authenticity.

TIP:     As my friend Ed says, "When we ask for courage we are given opportunities to be brave."  Our job is to help the client discover those opportunities which she will use to create her own confidence.

Narrative Medicine And The Cross-Over To Law School And Law Practice.

What do internists, especially ones practicing narrative medicine, have to tell law students and lawyers? Quite a lot.  And all it will take is 39 minutes of your time.

Rita Charon, MD, PhD. a nationally renown physician, writer and educator as well as Executive Director/Founder, Program in Narrative Medicine College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University is at the top of the game of Narrative Medicine.

Click here to attend the Department of Medicine Division of Medical Humanities presentation "Narrative Medicine: Accuracy, Evidence, Allegiance, Joy" as Dr. Charon discusses the importance of the medical narrative as a tool for physicians to better understand their patients and themselves, and it's role in training a new generation of doctors.

What is so fascinating to this former pediatric nurse, life-long storyteller and litigation consultant is the cross-over between Dr. Charon's ideas on the dividends of narrative medicine and those that can be reaped in law schools and law practices.

Highlights with my comments in [brackets]:

*    Medicine must go beyond the bounds of knowledge with differential diagnostic brains.  That kind of fact-based thinking is inadequate to the task.  [Likewise, our reliance on "the facts and only the facts" gives us a distorted view of what happened to our clients and what matters to them.]

*    Illness unfolds in stories.  The thing that is amiss in the body tells the self that there is something the matter and eventually that story comes to the attention of the healthcare provider who will turn around and tell it to a colleague.  The idea being that the telling and retelling should lead one to know what to do.  [How do you see yourself in the internist's shoes?]

*    Medical stories are a matter of ongoingness.  A doctor's duty is to develop a sense of story that takes into account devastation, loss, grief, magnitude of hurt and pain.  [Our clients are in the same boat - and we are there with them.]

*    The big question: Are you available to receive the story, to “co-hear” the narratives of illness, to train yourself to know accurately and fully what the patient expresses to be more effective in care?  [For lawyers, are we available to hold the space for the client so we develop different skills interviewing our clients, determining what the problem is and how to remedy it?]

*    You must learn to heed the story, learn from the story, learn the skills to recognize it, stand in the gathering of the story and work with the patient and family - to experience what the patient and family go through and for the patient to learn what the healthcare people experience.  [Who here has often desired that ability to co-hear with our clients and our clients families?  We are walking parallel roads with these internists.]

*    What are the dividends?  We find this practice helps improve cohesion of healthcare teams, minimize burn-out, increase empathy, encourage taking on the perspective of another person, feeling a growth in affiliation with their colleagues and others, listening attentively and less defensively, recognizing the unique dimensions of colleagues, using parts of the brain that had gone fallow, and recognizing that stories are total storms rather than the typical pattern of beginning, middle and end.  [What would you give for similar practical and human dividends in your practice?]

*    Narrative medicine helps medical students and doctors stop squandering evidence by learning to retrieve it in narrative, grasping the patent's story in words and learning to plumb the meaning of the evidence.  [For lawyers that meaning will carry over to the trier of fact.]

*    When doctors are fortified with the competencies of listening, curiosity, empathy, imagination their practice changes, they make authentic contact with the patient cleared of biases and other fsact-gathering screens.  [All anyone wants is to be heard, even for a moment.  After you have given the client the chance t tell their story you can go back and collect the data you need for the lawsuit.] 

Dr. Charon's makes this introduction to every patient: " As your doctor I face you so you can express to me what you are going through in words - please tell me what you think I should know about your situation."  She sits with her hands in her lap and absorbs what happens.  By inviting the account she can learn without shoe-horning the patient into her own fact list.  [Beginning with law school we can encourage the development of attentive listening. It wil flow over to practice.  Imagine th transformations.]

I invite you to spend 39 minutes and change your practice with practical and human dividends.
                                   
















                          

13 Minutes With Bill Harley - Storyteller - TEDx: Stories Out Loud.

Back in the day I fell in love with the storyteller Bill Harley.  But then so did many many many folks: storytellers and listeners alike.  We knew so many of his stories and song by heart.  Bill made us happy and nostalgic and giddy and wistful at the same time.

Over the decades, articles, blog posts, and presentations to thousands of lawyers, I've said the same things about the importance and power of story:

1. To make your story emotionally meaningful to the listener, you must marry content (facts) to context (circumstance).
2. We are wired to hear narrative, to sort matters out - even legal matters - in narrative.
3. Narrative is how we figure out the ways to carry on despite the problems in our lives.

TIP:    Click here to take 13 minutes to listen to Bill Harley in his recent TEDx talk on the power that stories have which no media, no social network, no list of facs (or factoids), no computer can match.

A few highlights:

TIP:    We are creatures of context.  Context gives order: what happened before and what came after.  Order gives meaning.

TIP:    Stories are how we assign meaning to our lives, and the lives of others.

TIP:    The stories we create are how we answer the riddle of the problem so we can carry it through our life without it dragging us down.

TIP:    We are not built to remember lists of facts - we are wired to recall narrative.

TIP:    Stories work because they are cognitive & emotional: safe to think about because it’s not about us: we take the story & apply it to us & take us & apply to the story.

TIP:    Know when to speed up & slow down.  Know which visual underscores the narrative.

TIP:    Rely on this: we are genetically encoded to pay attention to the person in front of us. 

AND, if the one in front of us is you, the storyteller, imagine what you can do with the power of story.

 

 

Laughter Is As Necessary As Food, Air & Water.

 

No matter  who we are or where we are; no matter our race or creed or gender; no matter our skin color or language - we all laugh the same.

We just don't do it often enough.  Maybe we forget.

The older I get I find there is plenty to laugh about.  As a former nurse I can tell you with certainty that laughter is the best medicine.

Art Linkletter thought so, too.  Time out of mind Linkletter worked in a TV station playroom asking children questions and listening for their responses.  As you'll see, what made it all work so  well was how Linkletter made the kids feel: as if someone was really listening to them.

Here are a few that might bring a smile to your face:

Kids Sat The Darnedest Things1

Kids Say The Darnedest Things2

Kids Say The Darnedest Things3

If kids are not your thing, perhaps The Laughing Buddha might be.

Or, if you prefer puppies, have I got the farm for you.  Juniper Moon Farm and Day #1 of their three-week old Maremma puppies on Day #1 eating solid food.  Kinda reminds me of growing up with 6 siblings.

TIP:     Laugh well and often.  It certainly makes folks wonder what you're up to.