Fun times ahead!

Yesterday I left my apartment without putting the alarm on because I couldn't press the code into the keypad with my gloves on.  This morning I figured out that I can put the alarm on before putting on my gloves.  I blame my lack of logical thinking on the cold and the fact that as a South African I am not equipped or adapted enough to deal with freezing weather.  When my brother tells me the weather in Cape Town is 33 degrees Celsius I want to jump on the next plane to fly there to hit him.  -12 degrees here on Monday.  It's snowing heavily and the temperature is supposed to drop to -29 degrees Celsius by Sunday.  Fun times.
Kiev is in the news quite a bit lately, the peaceful protests have turned violent.  Luckily I don't live or work in the city centre so I am safe.  There is a part of me that thinks 'Wow I am living in an event that will one day be part of history and will feature in history text books.  How cool is that?'  But then I think of the Ukrainian people, how angry they are, how many of them leave their warm homes to protest in the freezing weather and that puts it in the right perspective.

I have to put it out there - I LOVED AMERICA.  I was a bit nervous.  I watch CSI, Dexter, Bones.  It does seem that there are serial killers everywhere.  But America was better than they show on TV and in the movies.  The people are terrific, Five Guys fries are awesome, Shake Shack burgers are the best, and the Gingerbread lattes at Starbucks...to die for.  I got to stay a half a block from Times Square, visit the 9/11 Memorial, eat family-style Italian food, see a Broadway musical, the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, eat Maryland crab cakes, Maine lobster, do the Freedom Trail in Boston, experience a blizzard and winter storm - it was awesome!  Definitely worth another visit.
Hush Baby became available on Amazon just before Christmas and is doing well with some good reviews already.  Check it out.

This week The Colorful Art of Pain made its appearance on Amazon.  This is a book I did with Canadian artist Daniel Quinlan.  I worked with his wife when I was in Moshi Tanzania.  Daniel suffered ongoing chronic pain from a pinched sciatic nerve.  He decided to stop painkillers and started painting as a way to take his mind off of the pain.  When he used up his brushes he turned to finger painting.  In a three year period he painted 125 canvases with his fingers until he had to stop when he could no longer move his fingers.  The Colorful Art of Pain contains over seventy of his original paintings he painted during this period.  My job was to tie all the paintings together with a story.  I have to say I enjoyed the challenge and am very proud of the result.  The book is available on Amazon as a paperback and on Kindle.  Please check it out.
Otherwise life goes on.
At least the supermarket across the road delivers to the door so I don't have to try and lug home bags of groceries in the snow.
Happy 2014 to all!  May all your hopes and dreams materialise this year so that this becomes a year to remember for many good reasons.
Cindy

Life in the Pain Lane

Doctors are not 100% truthful.  Well it's not as if they actually lie, they just negate to tell you or warn you about how exactly painful their op is going to be.  This of course leaves you unprepared psychologically.  You think it's going to be a quick and easy procedure.  But 5 weeks later and you still have plenty pain and limited movement.  Pain sucks.

As you can see, pain does not bring out the best in you.  It saps your energy, causes discomfort and kills all creative thoughts you might possess.  In short, pain kills your ability to think and write.  So no I have not been on holiday rejoicing on the extra time available to work on my book Hush Baby.  For the most part I have been laid up in bed knocked out on painkillers.
Why I thought an arthroscopy in the shoulder would be only slightly painful, I don't know.  It's like when the doctor explains the procedure to you, he makes a tiny hole and inserts a camera, that doesn't sound very painful does it?  Unfortunately that silly camera picked up 5 different problems that needed to be rectified immediately.  This meant 5 holes in the shoulder, 5 times the pain and the procedures included shaving off pieces of bone, fixing a frozen shoulder and repairing a torn tendon.
As if this wasn't enough, 2 weeks later I was back in hospital for a breast reconstruction.  This was a very new technique that sounded painless when the plastic surgeon described it to me.  Haha is all I can say.  After that op I felt like I'd been trampled on by 30 men at the bottom of a rugby scrum.  They took 500g of fat from my sides, shook and stirred it like a martini, converted it to 250ml of stem cell rich lipo-filling and injected it into my breast where they had to remove the implant after I went into septic shock last year.  And the plastic surgeon says we'll have round two of that procedure in June.  Charming.

I did get to have breakfast with Jodi Picoult though, and listen to her interesting and entertaining talk on wolves.  Definitely a highlight of my otherwise miserable Christmas holiday.  The lesson to be learned is do not embark on two big surgeries in a two week period.
The weather has been beautiful most of the time, I just haven't been in a condition to enjoy it.
Hopefully my shoulder will be sorted and will be back to normal in a couple of months.  The shoulder surgeon said it can take a year to come right.  As I said before, charming.
So do I have any new year's resolutions?  Survive, dig deep and survive.  That's all I want for 2013.
Have a good one!