Tamara Unleashed

I got up this morning with trepidation knowing that it was 24 hours since my second vaccination and many have said that is when they started feeling unwell. I felt fine and got several errands done and then realized I hadn’t eaten breakfast which is very unusual for me. I had part of a salad for lunch and made myself eat something at 8 PM. So loss of appetite seems to be my main symptom thus far. I will take it.

After returning from Spartanburg, I realized I could not find my toiletry bag. I searched the apartment several times and made three separate trips to the car to look through it including under the seats. I called my host and asked her to check through her house as well. It was no where to be found.

Today I went out to put the recycling in the car and when I opened the backseat driver’s side door there it was – sitting right behind the driver’s seat. Every other time I had checked the car it was from the passenger side. I still have a hard time believing I missed it three times but apparently I did. There is really no one else to blame.

My big task for tomorrow is to finish getting my stuff together to send to accountant for taxes. I have left it about as long as I can. I don’t mind paying taxes – I just hate the hassle which isn’t even that much.

I drove back to Nashville yesterday from Spartanburg. I drove through many rounds of pounding rain during the trip but the last 2 hours were blue skies which made the trip much more enjoyable. I had dinner with my son and daughter-in-law and was lovingly welcomed by their young dog Brady. She is so much fun it is hard for me not to get her in trouble. Not everyone who visits appreciates the high energy welcome as much as I do.

I was first in line for the 8 AM vaccinations this morning. My arm is pretty sore tonight and I have not planned too much for tomorrow in case I feel the fatigue that many seem to after the second injection. I am so grateful for the rapid development of these effective vaccines. It does feel like there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

I have a few things to do this week besides packing for phase 2 of my rest and recovery travel adventure which will last until early July.

This is my post for May 1 – I was without internet for 24 hours so this is a day late. This is the wasp that attacked me last night. After I turned off the light, I heard it again. I have not really had that many experiences with wasps but it made me very nervous. I decided to kill it with hairspray so I didn’t have to get close. I sprayed it twice and it disappeared. When I woke up, it was lying on the carpet next to the bed. My host was less than impressed with my story and told me to “leave the wasp alone” next time.

24 Hours in Loco

We spent noon to noon at her rustic cabin on a small man-made lake. I have been there several times so its isolation doesn’t bother me as much as it did the first time. This is about 15 miles outside of Spartanburg. You go through a locked fence and into the woods. You drive about a mile or so on a rutted dirt and gravel road to the little oasis of isolation. I felt like I was in the movie “Deliverance” my first time there. We read on the screened-in porch, biked on the paved county roads that surround the property the lake is on, had an evening ride in the John boat around the lake – a very relaxing time. In addition to the cabin hidden by the trees, there is a tree house.

Loss of smell is not always a bad thing – there was a dead rat in the cabin and a dead possum floating in the lake — I smelled neither. Friday evening I did get a hint of some cigarette smoke which I used to be exquisitely sensitive to so I think it is SLOWLY recovering. I think my taste may be recovering more than my smell. I am enjoying eating more – perhaps because for the past 2 weeks eating has been a social rather than solo event.

I have my itinerary pretty well planned out now. I head back to Nashville tomorrow for vaccine #2 and then head out later on May 9th to get part way to Lewes Deleware. From Lewes, I will go to Philly for a few days, the Jersey shore for a few days, southern Vermont, and then NYC area before heading into the midwest for Cleveland, Columbus, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and southern Ohio and perhaps a stop in Kentucky before heading back to Nashville in early July. So much fun ahead.

Today was spent getting photos of interactions with different people for my website. It is great to have friends with many talents such as photography to help out. I met a lovely older couple, Don and Nancy (87 and 86) who volunteered. It turns out Nancy has a pelvic floor disorder so I was able to use my pelvic model to explain her condition to her while the photos were taken. I had no idea how animated my face gets when I am teaching women about their bodies. Some of the photos were quite funny. I met a woman marched with MLK and worked in the women’s movement in NYC with Bella Abzug. I can’t wait to visit her again and learn more about her life as an activist in the 60’s. We had dinner with another interesting woman who also agreed to be photographed. In between there was a failed attempt to take photos walking Buster. Dragging a dog is not a good look. I was photographed riding my bike and on a walk in a woods. It was an inexplicably exhausting day. Hopefully there will be enough shots good enough for the web page.

As I was preparing for the day, I had to remove a band-aid from my latest misadventure and it caused me to reflect upon all of the injuries over the last 8 months. Right after I started working with my new trainer last August, I seemed to have a new injury every week or two. I cut my finger in the kitchen; aggravated my left thumb arthritis; aggravated my right wrist tendonitis; sprained my right ankle and then cut a different finger slicing sweet potatoes. Braces and bandages aside, I was always able to do my workouts around whatever the new injury was.

I went several months without an injury until this week. I was carrying a plastic laundry basket full of clean laundry and didn’t remember there was a one step down. I fell forward on my knees – fortunately without knee trauma. I got up and continued walking only to discover I was dripping blood. I had managed to raise a flap of skin on a thumb on the edge of one of the square holes in the side basket.

Incoordination and minor injuries have not been unusual in my life but this has been quite the cluster. My family was shocked that I was going to be a surgeon. Fortunately, attention is so focused in the operating room that I never cut myself or anyone else.

As I am entering a different stage of my life, I am going to try to bring more focus to my everyday activities so I can avoid some of these nuisance injuries which take far longer to heal than they used to.

I discovered that you can get chain mail gloves on Amazon and I have not cut myself slicing sweet potatoes again!!

While writing this post, I managed to get bitten or stung by a wasp while I was trying to kill it. I got it inside my sock thinking I could take it outside, but it managed to get me through the material. My finger aches a bit and there appears to be a bit of local swelling. Hopefully this is it for a while.

I did not hear President Biden’s speech last night because of a dinner engagement (how odd it feels to even say that). When I saw this image on the news today, it was like WOW!!

It was a very windy day today but that did not deter the people rappelling down the 10 story AC Hotel in Spartanburg for the Over the Edge fundraiser for cancer. These shots are of the granddaughter of my friend KJ. MC just completed treatment or breast cancer in March and is doing well. The company managing the rappelling made this seem very safe. I think I would consider it next time.

Why are people that ride motorcycles called bikers and those that ride bicycles called cyclists? It doesn’t make sense. Life is good when I have time to ponder things like this.

Today was another wonderful day and I am going to pretend I am on Central time so I get this posted on the 28th. Last night I went to a restaurant in Hendersonville NC with the intent of having Pho for the first time. It never occurred to me that something that full of vegetables would be made with meat stock. The restaurant did not have any vegetable stock so I was not able to have Pho. I had a lovely Thai seafood eggplant dish which did not really penetrate my diminished taste but I was told by others who tasted it that it was delicious.

Today I picked up my dear friend, KJ to take her to Spartanburg for the Over the Edge fundraising event tomorrow. She suggested we go to one of her favorite restaurants for Pho – so we did and they had vegetable stock. I tasted enough to really enjoy it. I am truly not sure why I had not had Pho before.

Tonight we had a wonderful evening socializing at the Piedmont Club with a very interesting group of people from across the US gathered for the fundraising event. It was almost as if we stepped back in time to pre Covid. The Piedmont Club has wonderful ambience and food. One wall was full of pictures of all of the club presidents which were not unexpectedly all white males which. I appreciated that the 2020 president had his picture taken in a black mask.

I have been reflecting the past day or so about the fact that I am just plain happy. I expected to feel relief at getting out of a situation that was so uncomfortable for me, but I expected to feel some sense of guilt at having left with things left undone. But I don’t feel guilt.

Aside from eating to much tonight, I am feeling great!!

My son chose a very different career path than I did. He was fairly young when I remember someone asking him if he wanted to be a doctor like his mother and he replied with an emphatic NO. He like playing with sticks and wooden spoons when he was young and in grade school he spent hours writing his autograph. He took up drums in middle school and seemed to find his passion. I wanted him to have passion in his career choice as I had with mine so I was supportive of his desire to drum professionally. There were no musicians in my family or his fathers so he, like I decided to do his own thing. As I knew nothing about the path he was taking my ability to be helpful was limited.

While I had no person in my life to guide me on the path to being a doctor, there is a paved highway that will get you to the destination if you can stay on it. It is 4 years of undergraduate college, 4 years of medical school and 3-6 years of residency and possibly a 1-3 year fellowship depending on the specialty of medicine you choose. It is a long road and there are lots of reasons and ways you can leave the road along the way. BUT if you stay on the road and pass exams along the way, you are pretty much guaranteed you will have a career with security.

My observations of my son’s journey is that there is not even a path to follow. You can go to college or not. Going to a university or music school will give you skills and connections but it is not linked to becoming a successful musician. There are any number of ways to reach stardom – from rapid rise from a video gone viral to decades of hard work. Talent and hard work are clearly no guarantee of success – in fact success seems pretty random.

My son went to music school and met a talented singer and fiddle player on his first day in the dorm. She needed a drummer to record a song for a class project and that was the beginning of their friendship and musical partnership nearly 20 years ago. They formed a band and started getting experience in the summers between school years. She was a year ahead in school. She graduated and he left school after 3 years to continue their partnership in Nashville. By this time they were dating. They had to work jobs for less than 2 years. After that they were able to support themselves as musicians. This was pretty remarkable. Some years they were on the road for most of 10 months sometimes out on tour for 5-6 weeks at a time. They loved it. They got engaged and married during these years.

During the same number of years it took me to complete all of my training (14 years) their band got a label and had a single that hit the Country Charts – a HUGE accomplishment. However big this accomplishment was, there was no guarantee that their success would continue and grow. It is a high risk/high reward industry with lack of security of any kind. For me, that would be intolerable. For them, it has been exhilarating and vital to who they were. From my perspective, there does not appear to be anything they have control over that is anyway connected to long-term success.

Which is harder? It depends on what gives you the most joy versus what causes the most pain. I could not live with the prolonged uncertainty as to whether all of the hard work will lead to security. I have tremendous respect for my son and his wife and all artists who believe in themselves enough to continue to follow their passion.

My “transition to retirement” entrepreneurship is about as low risk as it can get. I am hopeful that I can find a “joy to pain” ratio greatly tilted toward joy. My son and daughter-in-law’s ability to survive all of these years in a fickle industry is reassuring to me.

Today was another beautiful day in Hendersonville NC and in addition to some satisfying writing for my website I biked with a friend for her first bike ride since her knee replacement surgery. My legs felt yesterday’s ride on the uphills today. After yesterday’s ride without fatigue today, I am feeling more and more comfortable the Covid is behind me. Yesterday I actually got a hint of caramel so I am pretty sure my taste is continuing to get better.

Tomorrow I will be transitioning to Spartanburg, SC. On Thursday I will attend an intriguing cancer fundraiser – Over the Edge https://app.mobilecause.com/vf/oteu where dozens of persons will rappel down the side of a hotel. I will not be rappelling. I will be supporting my 82y/o friend who would have been rappelling had she not broke both legs while skiing 6 weeks ago. Her granddaughter will rappel in her place. Bless them both.

Today was a gorgeous day for biking. I got up thinking I was going to do a gentle bike ride with my web designer who is recovering from knee replacement. She decided overnight that I should challenge myself by riding up Jump Off Rock on the top of Laurel Park outside of Hendersonville, She lives part way up the long climb to Jump Off Rock so I thought I could give it a try. I had driven up to the top last summer and remembered wondering if I was ready for this “never ending” rather poorly graded climb. So Game On.

As the morning progressed, I came to understand that I was meeting with the 3 persons I would be riding with at the bottom of the steep climb – a much longer ride uphill than I have ever attempted before. As I am really trying to just say yes to physical challenges put in front of me, I had to go with it. Hendersonville is at 2100 feet and the Jump off Rock is 3100 feet. Believe me, it seemed like more than a 1000 foot climb.

It was a perfect day and while I did have to take a couple of short breaks to catch my breath and there were 2 short sections I had to walk 10-20 yards while I got my breath, I made it to the top. It was beautiful scenery. I was shocked at how steep the downhill ride seemed even though I had just ridden up it. I will take this as a win for today.

Thanks to Joe, Peggy and Catherine for their patience and encouragement on my ride UP the hill.

We continued to make progress on the website as well. A very satisfying day.

Today we started working on the words for the the landing page of my new professional website – drtamarabavendam.com. This daily writing has given me the opportunity to reflect on memories of pivotal times on my journey. Today I will share how I got started on path to being a doctor.

I grew up in an extended family where men were farmers and women were teachers (if they worked off the farm). We did not go to the doctors often and used many home remedies for common illnesses. I watched Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare and Marcus Welby on TV during the sixties. My parents were not living on a farm when I was in school so I went to “farm camp” every summer for 4-6 weeks splitting my time between my grandparents farms that were 2 miles apart. I spent my time with gardening, canning, laundry, cooking, cleaning, sewing, knitting, etc. I was never allowed to drive a tractor – likely a good decision.

My escape during farm camp was reading. When I was 9-10 years old, I discovered the Cherry Ames series of novels. Cherry was a young women in nursing school. Through these novels, I decided I wanted to be a nurse. I did know a woman on a neighboring farm who was a nurse. When I mentioned my interest in nursing, my grandfather told me he had always wanted to be a doctor but had to quit school after the 8th grade to help on the family farm. I thought perhaps he was why I was drawn to a medical field. It would have never occurred to me to be doctor.

I enjoyed school. I studied hard and got good grades. When I was in the 10th grade, I was in a accelerated independent-study biology group. At the end of that year, my biology teacher told me I was smart enough to be a doctor and I should consider that rather than nursing. HUH!!! I was drawn to the “care taking” aspect of nursing and I had no frame of reference for being a doctor outside of TV.

I pondered it over the summer. I had conversations with the nurse I knew who shared her dissatisfaction with more paperwork and less time in direct patient care as nursing assistants were being used more. She also voiced frustration that she had to follow the doctors orders even when she had a more informed perspective from spending more time with the patients. I already knew that I had a hard time following directions that did not make sense to me so perhaps nursing was not the best choice for me. I had no idea if I was smart enough for medical school, but a teacher I respected did. I liked school and was not put off by the number of years for medical school and residency. I decided that I would go to medical school so I could be a decision maker as well as a care taker.

I have often wondered if I would have arrived at this decision on my own. A teacher was a powerful disrupter in my life. I am not sure I ever let him know how impactful that statement was. I hope I did.

Today I arrived in Hendersonville, NC. I drove as far as Christiansburg, home of Virginia Tech last night to avoid driving 8 hours in the rain today. This was a great decision as the 4 hours of driving in the rain today was exhausting. I had my first Soy Chai late since Covid and I think it tasted sort of normal. Some of my taste is recovering.

I will be staying with friends for a few days while I do an immersion experience to develop my professional website. This is unchartered territory for me and while I have been thinking about this over the last few months, it is finally time to go from thinking to words to website.

Being an entrepreneur has never been on my bucket list but I want to create a way to use the tapestry of my career experiences to help patients and families in a medical advocacy role as one part of the business and students and professionals for career development as another part. I have NO idea if and how this will work but I want to see what can evolve. Both of these activities bring me joy and should it be successful, I can control how busy I am and have flexibility with my schedule.

This is the view from my bedroom window. Tomorrow will be sunny and mountains should be visible through the trees. I am looking forward to getting out and biking again.

Have I said lately that I love not working and taking time to connect with friends.