Tamara Unleashed

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.

Today I had a great bike ride into DC, around East Potomac Park then on to lunch on Wharf and back to North Bethesda along Capital Crescent Trail. I rode between 35-40 miles. It was sunny and coolish – perfect for cycling.

Bruce has been a great biking partner over the past 4 years. We have ridden in DC, Ocean City and completed a couple of metric Centuries. When I get done with my travels, I will hopefully be able to find compatible cyclists in Nashville. It felt awesome to do familiar rides and feel strong. We rode by the site of one of my early biking misadventures. The stairs below did not have the silver “troughs” to assist in getting your bike up and down 3 years ago when I was riding into DC on the Memorial Bridge only to find the bike path blocked for reconstruction. The previous week it had been open. The only option was to carry the bike down the stairs shown below. About half way down, I stumbled a bit and fell – fortunately it was on one of the wide steps to I didn’t go tumbling down. I was lucky!!

After the ride, I packed up and started driving to Hendersonville NC. I made it as far as Christiansburg, VA – over half way. Thanks to Suzanne for hosting me for the past week and sharing Emmy who is a very sweet dog. I had hoped the Eastern Redbud trees were still going to be in bloom. The further south I got tonight, the fewer I noticed before it got dark. Hopefully I will be surprised tomorrow morning.

This week was a perfect beginning for my adventure to reconnect with friends and family, bike and see what evolves for my Chapter 9.

Today I got good news – the last bit of stress I had that might derail my plans for the next several weeks went poof. I am TRULY unleashed now.

The weather turned towards wintery yesterday so I had happy hour last evening on the patio of a friend with temp in the 40’s with a wind so gusty the fire pit wouldn’t provide heat. I was dressed in 4 layers on top and 3 on the bottom as I did not bring warm enough clothes.

Today was a bit warmer for the visit to the DC Arboretum to see lilacs and azaleas. I was carrying mimosa’s (in the large blue bag) to celebrate the good news. We were not able to find a warm enough place outside to enjoy them so we resorted to the car in between the visits to lilacs and the azaleas. The lilacs provided an opportunity for smell testing. My friends would smell them and then I would. On some of then, I could not smell anything, on some a slight floral scent but there was one that I actually think I smelled lilac. Later I had the opportunity to smell test a dead rat trapped in a ceiling. I got a “hint” but not much – not a bad thing in this case. Recovery is in process.

Tonight I will do taste retraining with some Indian food. Tomorrow I will do a chilly bike ride before taking off in the afternoon to go part way to my next destination, Hendersonville, NC. It is supposed to rain much of Saturday along the route so by starting tomorrow I will have a chance to see the beautiful Eastern Redbud Trees along I-81 again..

I introduced KP yesterday in my blog. I was having drinks with KP late yesterday afternoon when the news of the Derek Chauvin convictions was announced. We quietly acknowledged our shared relief. During my many conversations with KP over the years he shared with me what his experience of growing up black in Prince George’s County had been. He was taught how to act WHEN, not IF he had encounters with law enforcement and what some of his experiences were when he did have encounters for driving while black. While I “had heard” of these occurrences from media and didn’t doubt they existed it was powerful to listen to first person recounts. He knew how to act and apparently executed the act well enough that he is still alive.

These conversations were a part of a several year journey of grappling with and gaining a better understanding of inequality, inequity and privilege. The other key players on this journey were the PLUS Research Consortium investigators (https://plusconsortium.umn.edu/) from Community Health and Social Justice backgrounds.

While I understood that my upbringing was not disadvantaged (middle to lower middle class rural Iowa), prior to many conversations with PLUS investigators, I had not thought of it as privileged. I would have thought that having rich parents, an Ivy League education, and a trust fund as being privileged and remote from anything I knew. Over time, I have come to understand that simply being born with white skin is a privilege; having a warm bed to sleep in every night is a privilege; having nutritious food for every meal is a privilege; being expected to go to school every day because that is your job as a child is a privilege; always having employer based health insurance is a privilege.

Understanding racism is very complex. We need to be able to acknowledge that we have all been racists – often unintentionally. Rather than “I am not a racist”, perhaps it should be “I have not been intentionally racist”. Knowing and being friends with a black person does not mean you are not a racist. In 1974, I “dated” a black man from South Chicago my freshman year of college. It was random; it was fun; it was not a act of rebellion because my family never knew. It was not destined to be a long-term relationship because I was not going to let anything get in the way of medical school. He was kind, funny and respectful. He was insistent that the black women on campus did not know of the relationship. I didn’t understand why at the time. I don’t know if our several month relationship was truly a secret on a campus of 3,000 students but I did not experience any verbal confrontations which is what he was worried about. The relationship simply ended very early in my sophomore year. I never regretted it. In retrospect, I wish I had learned more about his world. Perhaps he didn’t want to share more. This relationship does not mean I have not engaged in racist acts or had racist thoughts.

I have no idea if any of my ancestors were slave owners but that doesn’t free me from responsibility for systemic racism that is the norm in this country. From my position of privilege, how can I truly be anti-racist and more importantly help others recognize their own privilege and seek to be anti-racist. We need to own up to racism and commit to doing better. Easy first steps are to stop denying denying systemic racism exists and acknowledge that each of us has been unintentionally racist – start with owning it. Energy invested in denial does not move us forward.

On a lighter note, today is a fairly quiet day for me. I wasn’t sure how much fatigue I might feel after the longer bike ride yesterday. I slept later but otherwise not adverse events. Fortunately it is cool and windy so I don’t mind not biking.

I was able to visit Nails by Tammy where I got my nail care for 8 years and get a pedicure. I was going to get my usual dark color on my toenails but decided on clear as I have no idea when I am going to get another pedicure. The partitions everywhere are weird but did not impact the quality of the service.

This machine is an engineering marvel. I had my first cup of coffee before preparing my breakfast. As I was microwaving my food, I loaded the Kcup into the Keurig for a second cup. I added the flavor syrup to the coffee cup and pushed the button to brew the coffee. The microwave finished. I got the food and put it down on the bar next to my coffee cup which was empty. I was confused until I realized I had forgotten to put the cup in the Keurig, I turned expecting to find a mess on the counter. But there wasn’t. The drip chamber holds exactly one cup of coffee. I emptied the coffee into my cup and had my breakfast. In that moment when I found my empty cup, I went from being totally confused to being totally amazed.

It was a glorious day for bike riding today and unfortunately, I forgot to take my phone with me so I don’t have any pictures. I took the camera out of the back pouch in the jersey to put a couple of mandarins in for a snack and then forgot to put the phone back into the pouch. When I do things like this (2 in a row, no less), I wonder if it is too late to blame it on Covid.

I rode 27 miles with my friend Bruce and IT FELT GREAT. My longest ride this season and I was not that fatigued. We rode from North Bethesda into DC through Rock Creek Park; took a break on the Georgetown waterfront and rode back to Bethesda on the Capital Crescent Trail. On a Tuesday morning, the pedestrian traffic on the trails was light which made it a perfect ride.

After the ride I met up with 3 friends over the course of the afternoon. One of my meet ups was with KP, the young man who kept me entertained and training for 3 years. I started training in July 2017. I hoped strengthening muscles would help knee pain, that I could lose weight and I needed a reason to leave the office before 8 PM. From previous experience with a trainer 20 years earlier I knew if I paid ahead I would do it. I started out with 2 sessions per week, increased to 3 and then to 4 sessions per week after I committed to cycling 444 miles over 9 days to celebrate a friends 80th birthday the following fall (2018). KP now had a tangible fitness goal to get me ready for and ready I was.

While KP says I initially intimidated him, we quickly found a easy rapport that kept me coming back. While I got stronger and fitter and the knee pain improved, I didn’t lose weight. KP kept telling me I would have to change my eating to lose weight. I finally committed to weight loss in December of 2019 with a goal of losing 40#. I lost 20# before Covid and 20# during initial 3 months of Covid isolation. It was great to see KP today to tell him again how much joy and health he brought to my life and get my “atta girl” for keeping the weight off for almost a year.

My day ended with a massage by Heather who has magic in her fingers and elbows. While the day had a shaky start, the rest was awesome.