Sigh. Perhaps starting a blog along with this insane program was a bit ambitious. Well, clearly, but here I am, trying to catch up my sweet floating duck people.

I finished the first year-and-a-summer, though, and despite my certainty otherwise at the time, actually did pass my licensing exam to become an RN. The end of summer term was pretty much awful, though.

Thank goodness for summer break - over five weeks of stretching out in time and space and returning to a sense of my self. One week for decompressing, two weeks in Mexico with my sweetheart, a quick visit for the first time ever to San Francisco to visit beloved friends, and a scrambling return to Seattle for catching up before the school year began.

We saw ducks in Lago Chapultepec, in the huge park of the same name in Mexico City. The lake, as you can see, is very, very green, and the ducks are adept at avoiding the zillions of visitors in our bright plastic paddle boats.



One of those beloved friends in San Francisco told me that when she gets really sad and disillusioned, her partner likes to remind her that baby ducks exist in the world, and it tends to make things better. We really bonded over the ducks in the nearby park:



It does feel different, starting this final year, the midwifery year. I feel much more responsible for my own education all of a sudden, which is alternately awesome and terrifying. I'm determined to learn even more, to be an even better student (despite my waves of "imposter syndrome," I've had all A's & B's each quarter), and to grow as holistically as I can into the kind of provider I'd want to see, and want other people to have.

This quarter I've lucked out and my clinical rotation is at Swedish Ballard with the midwives there. I'm really excited, and hoping to integrate well and be a good advocate for my own learning there. Mommas and babies and midwives, oh my!

Adventures in Nursing (at Harborview)

This is the third week of my first clinical rotation in a real, live hospital. I've been getting up and stumbling around my little house at 5 in the AM, shivering at the bus stop by 5:40, and go go go! at Harborview Medical Center from 7am until 4 or 5pm. Then a couple buses home, where I collapse. It's utterly exhausting and AWESOME.

In the six shifts that I've been there, here's some of the things I've done (some with the help of preceptors/instructors):

- Worked with patients who speak Spanish only; used phone interpreter on speakerphone as well as using my own rusty Spanish skills.

- Assisted in transferring patients from beds to gurneys and back again.

- Wore gowns, gloves and masks for working with a patient on contact precautions (due to infection with Vancomycin Resistant Enterococci - a bad, bad buggy).

- Gave bed baths and changed Depends and linens with patients in the bed.

- Monitored I&Os (Input & Output - food & liquid go in...you get the idea).

- Helped a teenage girl with a broken leg use a bed pan.

- Removed Foley urinary catheters from both male and female patients.

- Removed peripheral IV lines from patients' hands and arms.

- Gave subcutaneous injections of anticoagulants into patients' abdomens.

- Used the magical Pyxis medication dispensing machine to select meds.

- Gave oral meds.

- Gave IV meds (via syringe) and by hanging an IV bag and connecting it to a pump to allow a steady infusion.

- Discontinued PCA (Patient-Controlled Analgesia) buttons (morphine, Dilaudid, etc.)

- Lots of charting via computers - including meds, vital signs, and nursing progress notes.

- Educated a family member of a patient with a broken bone about the impact of her thyroid medication on bone density and implications for medication management after discharge from the hospital.

- Talked with an adult son who was grieving his mother as she was on Comfort Care (no food or meds besides pain meds).

- Worked with a really cranky RN one day, which made me all the more grateful for the wonderful ones I worked with the rest of the time.

- Worked with patients who needed to be restrained because they were confused/delerious and tried to get out of bed or pull out tubes/lines otherwise.

- Worked with a man with who has a tracheostomy and couldn't speak, so used writing to communicate.

- Used a Yankauer suction tube to clean out the opening of his trach and around it when he coughed up gunk.

- Crushed pills and administered crushed pills and liquid meds via PEG (directly into stomach through abdomen) tube.

- Checked contents of stomach using a syringe in the PEG tube, and checked placement of tube by pushing a bubble of air into the stomach and listening with a stethoscope.

- Assisted with administering EKGs and a bladder scan (ultrasound).

- Gave nebulizer meds - liquid meds that go into device that turns them into a mist that the patient breathes in through a tube.

- Worked with a patient whose husband broke her arm (grrr, DV makes me so angry/frustrated).

- Applying and removing SCDs (Sequential Compression Devices - they are almost like long blood pressure cuffs that wrap around the calves and are hooked to a machine that inflates (and deflates, in a cycle) them in a way that helps push blood back up toward the heart).

- Called a resident MD to change orders on my main patient this week - eep! phones are strangely nerve-wracking at first!

- Worked with a patient with a (big! like the diameter of a quarter!) tube through her chest and into her lung to drain out fluid, which then drains into a special box for measuring it.


So much! While we each have one patient who we are mainly caring for, I was in the rooms of 8 different patients today, helping out with various things. It is just amazing to get to care for people in all these vulnerable situations, and there's so much running around and keeping track of details and charting and technology and.... I'm really excited about this whole nursing gig.

when reality gets thin, and people seem fragile

Today I am being reminded of just how fragile we little humans are, and how ephemeral are our imagined worlds. I'll confess - I've been very leaky about the eyeballs. Seeing how quickly a person who seems happy and functional and even exceptional can abruptly end or fall to pieces makes everything else seem less solid.

I find myself thinking about the way our minds work, and how much of what we perceive as reality is just stuff our brains made up.

Take, for instance, this Radiolab episode on Memory and Forgetting (it's one of my favorites). I'll go ahead and spoil it for you - the punchline is that every time we recall a memory, we take it out, look at it, and modify it a bit before we put it away again. The more we think about something, the less we remember about the thing we are thinking about. It's like the middle of writing a research paper, after the caffeine wears off and long before it's done, when I start thinking I might get thrown out of grad school for being unable to complete a relatively simple writing assignment - I don't know what the hell I originally meant to say.

And from what (relatively small amount) I know about quantum physics, it appears increasingly likely that our physical reality is mostly empty space, both on the micro and macro levels, and it is our brains that are "connecting the dots" and creating the sensory input we receive. An instructor in one of my classes shared this fascinating article from the New Yorker about how the brain's role becomes apparent when the perceptions and the sensory input don't match up.

Most of the time I find these explorations of the human mind delightful and interesting - they make my own analytical brain kick into gear and I get excited about this strange world we live in. Sometimes, though, I am also reminded of how just a little shift in chemistry can take a balanced brain and completely transform it. And if most of our realities are made up by these terribly susceptible organic components, suddenly everything feels so precarious.

So today I am leaky, and I am reaching out to touch your hands, look in your eyes, and try to find some promise (denial though it may be) that we are solid beings, that our knowing and loving of each other is a real and permanent thing. And I am also smiling and shaking my head, knowing (believing) that nothing is permanent except the matter we are composed of, and perhaps the spirits that run through us, and finding a strange comfort in that as well.

Short List of Things Learned

I am nearing the end of my 5 weeks off (including Burning Man) before the "real" school year begins.

I am a teensy eensy bit terrified. This program is *hard* - not in that the material we're learning is especially dense or belabored, but in that it puts all my organizational and time management skills to the test. And I find myself being vulnerable on an ego level - surrounded by so many smart, capable people. Trying to fit in like I haven't since ... I can't remember when. And especially being graded on brand-new, no-freaking-idea-what-I'm-doing skills.

Sometimes I feel very small. Other times, I feel proud or oddly guilty when something comes easier to me and I can help other people with it.

So my homework for myself over the break was to figure out how to do this time management thing better, so that I can be nicer to myself and the people who are supporting me through all this teeth-clenching challenging stuff.

Here's my list of resolutions:

- exercise 30-45 minutes every day

- carry fruit leather, bars, nuts, hard-boiled eggs, etc. to prevent low blood sugar freakouts

- take notes in class by hand, not on the distracting, distracting laptop

- spend more time studying at home, with minimal distractions

- make study time more effective by turning off compy (or at least Facebook), making goals and taking breaks (take a little bit of time to organize first, and focus on one thing at a time)

- try to keep Sundays for relaxing

- make time with my sweetheart about connecting with him - figure out how to set aside the school stuff

- keep list of suggestions for improvements to the program, but don't dwell on frustrations

- resist the herd instinct; be more independent in learning (don't take on other people's stress)

- remember that making flashcards still doesn't work for me - make visual maps of information instead

I'll continue with sporadic updates when I find moments to catch my breath.

much love,
S

heroin chic

The movie of Trainspotting came out the year I turned sixteen, and my friend Jamie was extra-cool because she'd seen it months earlier while living in Scotland as an exchange student. Heroin was fascinating. I read Trainspotting and several other Irvine Welsh novels, as well as Poppies: Odyssey of an Opium Eater, and found them interesting, funny and dark.

It's very different, now, to be learning about opiate analgesics in my pharmacology class. Since then I've known and cared for some opiate addicts and users, and it all seems far less glamorous and much more sad. And it's strange to have those old aches of lost friends and teenaged angst mingling with the aseptic simplicity of new drugs and practices of nursing school.

So it caught my attention when a little box in my textbook informed me that heroin is "biologically inactive" until the body degrades it into morphine. Huh? So why is heroin illegal, and why is it the drug of choice for opiate addicts?

Apparently heroin, which is a generic name for diacetylmorphine (morphine with two little acetyl molecules attached) is much more fat-soluble, and since the blood-brain barrier is a membrane made of lipids (fats), heroin passes across the barrier and into the brain much more easily than morphine. Once there it sheds its sheep costume, smiles a wolfish grin, and gets to work making the user bliss out. Clever, dangerous creature, that heroin.

p.s. heroin is illegal in the U.S. (of course) but is used legally in Europe in palliative care (usually in patients who are dying, as a comfort measure).

working hard, or hardly working?

photo by Damien

Just in case anyone got the impression that my life has been all work and no play, (which wouldn't be very much fun, or very healthy) I thought I'd tell you about my Critical-versary.

I spent last weekend "camping" (if you can call it camping when there's a microwave, hotpot and ice-maker involved) near Mount Vernon at an event called Critical Massive. Critical (for short) is the regional Burning Man event, and although many there are many shared elements, Critical is MUCH mellower - mainly because it's around 500 people instead of 50,000.

At any rate, this was my fourth year of going to Critical (and will be my fourth year going to Burning Man at the end of August) and this year I was constantly reminded of what an important personal holiday it has become. Many of my relationships have begun or deepened at Critical, including meeting my sweetheart two years ago, and being there I am very aware of a feeling of connectedness. The word for it is somewhere in between family and community, and means a group of people who hold space for each other that is sacred, safe, and very, very silly.

I did some crying and a huge amount of laughing, and came home feeling utterly relaxed and surrounded by love. And ready to return to my new nursing school family-community, which I am still settling into with enthusiasm :)

catching up

Wow - starting school has been even more intensely busy than I imagined. I apologize for the total abandonment of the blog - most of my life just got moved to the back burner.

That said, here's a wee bit of what I've been up to in the last month and a half:

More awesome Deep Tissue Massage classes from Brian Utting

One on QL (quadratus lumborum), psoas and the diaphragm and one on chest and shoulders (subscapularis, pec minor, and all manner of connective tissue around the sternum). Both were cozy little classes in his living room in Ballard and left me feeling relaxed and excited to be doing massage. It really was amazing to see how much easier it was to breathe afterward, especially with all the work around the sternum.

Needles, old folks and early mornings

Some of the things that have scared me most about this program - nasogastric tubes and catheters (yep, tubes going through nostrils and into stomachs or up ureters to bladders) we fortunately got to practice on eerily life-like mannequins instead of on each other. We did, however, get to poke each other with needles in several places. I was amazed to discover that the injections didn't hurt at all, but the pokes for a simple glucose test sure did! (At least to my massage-therapist fingertips - we ended up poking my earlobe, which was not bad at all.)

Perhaps the hardest part has been the idea of not just getting up, but actually being AT my clinical site at 6:15 am on Tuesdays. Yikes - I haven't been up before 8am on a regular basis in years! I've spent two days with my first resident, "B," and just briefly met my second - "A."
"B" is the sweetest little old lady, and still quite lucid and capable. She's made me think about how very little time I've spent with actually old people in my life, and how sad that is.

More updates to come!

Various Duck-y Tidbits

Since I started a duck blog, a certain someone has been finding hilarious duck-related things and sending them my way. I thought I would share a few, because laughter is so very good for you :)

Exhibit 1 : Sex With Ducks: the Music Video
Pat Robertson provides such great material for comedians.

Exhibit 2 : Raising Ducks in the Classroom
Ok, so this isn't actually funny - but just think of all the happy little kids getting to play with ducklings! (I always wanted ducklings.)

Exhibit 3 : Duck Hunters shirt
You can see this above in the photo - I look sort of sleepy, but I assure you - I'm incredibly excited about this shirt. Quack quack!

and perhaps best of all, Exhibit 4 : Guard Duck
"No one ever suspects the duck."
(Now my home is safe.)

Happy Birthday, Waxing Moon!

Waxing Moon Massage Therapy officially began seven years ago, on June 1st, 2002 in the Bellingham Hardware Building in downtown Bellingham. While there have been many small projects and improvements over the years, none have involved as much change as this last one.

To all the people who have helped me transition from Bellingham to Ballard - thank you. I especially appreciate all my friends in Seattle who have come in or referred people that they know, and my patient and devoted clients in Bellingham, who have been flexible with my shifting schedule and come in for massages when I have been up there.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I'm not usually one for giving cards for holidays and birthdays, but recently I've written a few thank-you cards and letters - mainly to people who helped me get accepted to Seattle University for grad school. It has reminded me of how healing it is simply to experience gratitude, and to take the time to focus on it rather than on stressful or negative thoughts.

Writing a letter to my high school nurse (who is miraculously still working there) reminded me that my motivation for going into nursing has been growing for a long time. Writing to a particularly good chemistry instructor, and to my college advisor who has taken on the job for far longer than one could reasonably expect, and to the supervisor I have learned the most from and respected the most - reminds me of the wisdom and humor and dedication that I can tap into because these people are a part of my life.

Even simply writing a thank-you card to the neighbor who found me crying with a bloody knee on her sidewalk and soothed me with icy towels and her calm presence helps me. I find myself noticing the abundance in the world around me, the simple acts of kindness, and the beautiful things among the frustrating. Gratitude has an amazing way of picking up steam and making for more things to be grateful for.

So thank you all for your part in seven great years of Waxing Moon Massage Therapy, and many more to come!

To Bellingham!

Days like this make me want to get on the road out of town - fortunately, that's exactly what I'm going to do! This evening I'll be loading up the car with fresh sheets and pillows (I get to do a pregnancy massage, which means lots and lots of pillows!) and driving up to Bellingham.

I'll be there doing massage tomorrow (Friday) and Saturday - there's still some time available tomorrow, if anyone's interested!

So I get to see some of the Bellingham clients that I just can't give up, and maybe even some of the friends that are still in town.

Other than that, I plan on going to Boulevard Park or maybe Lake Padden, and hopefully making it to Wasabee! for sushi - they are my very favorite, and I always manage to miss their open hours when I'm up.

I'm a happy (duck) girl.

Tapotement and allergies and honey, oh my!

One of my regular clients recently asked me to "save some time at the end to beat my face." Unless you are familiar with the basic strokes of Swedish massage, this probably sounds strange and masochistic. In fact, nearly all strokes that fall into the category of "tapotement" sound at least somewhat torturous - tapping, pinching, slapping, hacking, cupping, and, of course, beating.

In case you've been wondering what "Swedish massage" means, the other categories of Swedish massage strokes are:
effleurage: lighter, flowing strokes used to apply oil (lotion, gel, etc.,) warm up the tissue and move fluids
petrissage: kneading and wringing motions intended to lift layers of compressed tissue, making them feel "fluffy" and mobile
friction: deeper strokes that can be broad or specific, with the intention of stretching and breaking up "knots" - layers of muscle and connective tissue that have become stuck together
gymnastics: moving joints through their range of motion and stretching where tight muscles or limitations in range of motion are evident
vibration: shaking and rocking - often used in combination with other strokes

He'd jokingly asked to be "beaten" because he has chronic sinus issues, and tapping over the sinus areas of the face, and especially over the supraoribital notch (in the eyebrow) seems to help jostle out congestion and ease discomfort from allergens.

I've also been told that consuming locally produced honey can help reduce allergic reactions like hay fever that are provoked by pollens in the air because the honey contains small enough amounts of the allergens to get the immune response working without causing all-out irritation. I haven't seen any scientific studies on this, but I've heard lots of anecdotal evidence, and at least it would still mean supporting the local economy. Oh! And I saw honey at the Fremont Farmer's Market on Sunday - my guess is that it's available at the Ballard Farmer's Market as well.

Dear Ducky

Oooh! Oooh! I forgot that as the author of a blog, I may get to respond to questions from readers, like Dear Abby or Dan Savage.

Very exciting.

I would *love* to answer questions, if you have them - you can leave them in a comment, as Laura B. did with my first question, or email them to sara@waxingmoonmassage.com

So let's get to her question:

Dear Massage Therapist,

Do you have any tips for relieving necks that are stiff from from hours sitting in front of a computer screen. (Tips that, of course, would only be stop gap measures between Waxing Moon Massage appointments?)

Signed,
Sore Entrepreneur

Dear Sore Entrepreneur,

Most of us know that we don't stretch enough - we notice when the incessant nagging of our bodies finally overcomes our absorption in whatever we're doing on the computer for long enough to get food or run to the bathroom. It seems like many people think that stretching is something they need to set aside time to do - like taking a yoga class, or spending a half hour doing it in the morning.

While those things would also be great, I often try to encourage my clients to take one minute each hour at work just to shake out the position they've been in.

Most people who work with computers a lot have shoulders that roll inward and downward, so taking a moment to lift your shoulders up, then roll them backward in a few circles can help open up your chest.

You'll probably notice yourself taking in a deeper breath as you do this - some of the most important muscles involed in breathing are between the ribs (internal and external intercostals) and between the ribs and cervical spine (scalenes.) Unsurprisingly, these muscles can get pretty stuck together when we spend hours shallowly breathing and locked in position.

The scalenes are flat, sheath-like muscles on the front and sides of the neck that run under the clavicles (collarbones) and insert on the ribs. Moving your neck (gently!) through its full range of motion, as much as possible, helps to loosen things up, but to really work your scalenes, you can do a "pin & stretch."

To do this, you shorten the muscle that you're wanting to stretch - i.e. tipping your head forward and to the right to shorten the muscle on the front right side of your neck. Then use the side of your finger to gently "pin" the muscles in place - right above the clavicle is a good spot - and slowly move your head back in the other direction. You don't really need very much pressure to do this, and you'll probably find you don't need to move very much to feel the stretch. You can experiment with moving to different areas to see what feels most useful.

Just remember that there are lots of nerves and other delicate structures in the neck - if you can feel a pulse, don't hold pressure there. Use common sense to avoid things like shooting pain/tingling or compressed breathing passages.

Last thing - you can also do a pin & stretch on your forearms, which get tired from typing and mousing. Again, shorten the muscles by placing your palms up, then bending at the wrist toward you. Pin, and gently stretch. It's nice, too, to do a little kneading and squeezing on your forearms to fluff them up.

I hope that helps!

Your Faithful Massage Therapist,
Ducky

p.s. I know that my name is Sara and not Ducky, but it's way more fun to have a pen name, don't you think?

p.p.s. Just a reminder that as a massage therapist it is not within my scope of practice to actually give clients exercises to help with specific issues - that would fall within the purvue of physical therapy - these are just some general ideas, with which you may experiment at your own peril (and hopefully, relief!)

Legal Definitions

Baaaa!

Ready for a sheepish confession to complete this silly pun?

It turns out that the Department of Health website links that I was complaining about earlier work just fine - if you're using Internet Explorer. If you're a Firefox user such as myself and you want to see these links, you'll need to open up a different browser.

The waiver at the bottom of my intake form is based on
the legal definition of massage therapy, and looks like this:

"I have listed all my known medical conditions and physical limitations and will inform my massage therapist of any change in my physical health at the start of each session.

I understand that a massage therapist must be aware of any and all existing physical conditions to ensure appropriate treatment.

I further understand that a massage therapist neither diagnoses conditions nor prescribes treatments, nor performs thrusting joint or spinal adjustments.

I understand that this massage does not involve touch of a sexual nature, and that I may halt or end the session at any time if I feel uncomfortable."

Basically what this means is that massage therapy:

- does affect the body, and could harm you if the therapist doesn't know about certain health conditions beforehand

- is not the same as seeing a doctor - we can't diagnose or prescribe, nor are we chiropractors

- is not sex work, and should not been seen as a way to work with sexual energy/needs

and

- is something that you, as the client, are ultimately in control of - if something isn't working for you, please let us know so that we can change it, or stop entirely if that is what you need.

For a more in-depth accounting of what massage therapists should and shouldn't be doing, there is a longer list of laws, as well as information about how and when to make a complaint.

I hope that this helps ewe ;)

Adventures in Marketing

I am SO excited - we've finally decided to put an ad on myballard.com, the fabulous blog of all things Ballard, which I've been enjoying following since I moved here last summer. I'm going to be making a coupon for my fellow Ballard-ites to clip out with a deal that is even better than the Sunshine Special that I'm currently running (see the flyer above.) That's how much I love the Ballard.

Damien Jones, my fantastic partner in many ventures and recently titled "VP of Marketing," has been working tirelessly on different ideas for promoting my massage practice. My old ways of yellow pages and sandwich-board sign on the sidewalk just don't fit here, even in the relative small-townish-ness of Ballard. While he has tried out ads on Facebook and helped reorganize and "Google-juice" my website, I have been talking to other massage therapists and small business owners.

The most helpful of these has been Laura of Laura Bee Designs, who generously met with me over coffee to discuss our respective businesses. She had many good suggestions, my favorite of which was to start a blog - hence the creation of onehappyduck. It also quickly became apparent that her success has come out of a genuine warmth and enthusiasm as well as a good eye for design. I was inspired to trust that the quality of the service I'm providing, given the encouragement of some good promotion, will eventually build back up to a practice that is thriving at least as well as my old one in Bellingham.

Which is to say, "thank you" - to all the people who have given good suggestions and encouragements, come in for massages and written reviews. I am so grateful to be doing this work and to have so much support in making it happen.

Sidewalks, cherry blossoms and herbal remedies

On Thursday I decided that Green Lake was too crowded, and that instead I would take short run in my own lovely neighborhood of Ballard. It was sunny and warm, and all down my street were cherry trees bursting with beautiful white and pink blossoms. There's something particularly joyful about cherry blossoms to me - I always notice them when I'm running in the spring and they make me feel like a whole world of possibilities is unfolding.

Unfortunately, I only made it about a block from my house before I met an uneven wedge of sidewalk with my foot and fell, hard, onto the cement. Fortunately, I did so in front of the home of a wonderful woman who came out and put icy wet towels on my bloody knees while her husband joked with me and offered to walk me home.

Things this reminded me to love:
- icy wet towels
- calendula cream, which soothes cuts, scrapes and burns, and arnica cream, which helps reduce bruising and inflammation
- living in a neighborhood that feels like a small town, in the best way
- the amazing things the body does to heal itself (how convenient that I'm learning about blood right now in my Anatomy & Physiology class!)
- cherry blossoms

Checking up on healthcare providers

If you've ever been curious about whether a healthcare practitioner is behaving properly, you might be interested in knowing that the Washington State Department of Health has both very specific guidelines about allowed and prohibited behaviors for different classes of practitioners*, and also that you can search providers' credentials to see if there have been complaints filed against them.

Practitioners should ideally have their license numbers on their promotional materials, but if they don't, they should at least be willing to provide them if you ask. You can also look them up by name, but this might not work quite as well if the person doesn't go by their legal name, or if it is a very common name.

If you were to look me up by name, though, you would find that I am licensed as a Massage Practitioner (MA00016246) and that I am registered as a Nursing Assistant (NA00193321).

*The legal parameters for massage therapists are usually listed under Licensing/Certification, then Massage Therapists, then Laws, but it appears that the link is currently broken. This may have something to do with the fact that there are only two employees working for the state who handle ALL of the licensing, which also means that it sometimes takes months for new practitioners to receive their licenses after they've submitted their applications and money. *sigh*

One thing that is always surprising about massage is how hard it is for people to make the time and allow themselves to be taken care of. I understand financial difficulties, but it's clear to me that money is not the obstacle for many people.

Case in point: gift certificates.

Some people call right away, and make use of their gift certificate within a week or two. Most schedule a massage within a few months, depending on their often busy schedules. And a handful of people I don't hear from for six months, a year, or ever.

While plenty of people have said that this is just a lucky situation for me - making money without really working - it always makes me sort of sad. When I sell someone a gift certificate, they have found me and decided that my work would be a special gift. I have all intention of making their gift a special one - I think of us as co-conspirators in making their loved one feel good. So when they don't appear, I feel a little like I've promised to do something and not followed through.

I don't usually take it personally - I know that people get busy and lose track of things and sometimes just have their own reasons for not wanting to be massaged. I trust that they will make it in when and if they are supposed to.

It did become an issue when I started planning to move to a new area, however. I moved my home in August, but continued to do massage in Bellingham until the end of 2008. So last spring I went through my gift certificate log and contacted everyone I'd sold an unredeemed gift certificate to, to let them know that I'd be leaving the area, and that they might want to nudge the recipient.

Some of these people had purchased the session years ago, but I contacted them all because my conscience was going to poke at me relentlessly otherwise. Sidenote: since 2004 my conscience has had backup - in Washington State it is illegal to put an expiration date on any gift certificate or gift card that has been paid for with money. (Donations are different.)

So, while I'm not taking it personally, and you can technically wait as long as you want (assuming the business still exists) to cash in your gift certificate - why wait? If it feels selfish to lie on a table and do nothing while someone else works to make your feel better, think of how much easier it is to be kind to other people, to focus, to stay healthy, and to appreciate the world around you when you are feeling more relaxed. I think that you might actually be doing us massage therapists and everyone around you a favor.

Visiting Bellingham

I'm going up to Bellingham to visit some of my favorite clients there, and perhaps to visit the ducks at Lake Padden.

Or go to Boulevard Park.

Even though I am happy to be here in my little house in Ballard, surrounded by wonderful people, Bellingham has a special magic about it that is nice to return to.

I'll be there Friday and Saturday of this weekend, and am tentatively planning *two* other weekend visits in May - the 15th/16th and the 29th/30th. So if you want a massage in Bellingham, or know someone who might, please pass the word!

Erector spinae & Brian Utting

About a month ago I finally treated myself to a satisfying continuing education class. The last couple I'd taken had either been disappointing (Breathworks) or good, but in an eat-your-vegetables kind of way (Professional Ethics for LMPs.) I spent the money because it was a class on Deep Tissue Massage of the Paraspinals, and I thought it would be a good mix of my favorite area - the neck - and the one I sometimes find the most frustrating - the lower back.

Also - it was taught by the Brian Utting, founder of the Brian Utting School of Massage, the only school that paralleled my beloved Brenneke in overall reputation and quality of instruction. (Before, of course, they were both bought out by Cortiva and turned into franchise schools, but that's another story.)

Anyway, I'd been longing for the warm, interactive learning environment I'd had at Brenneke, and hoped it would be a tiny sliver of those days.

Ah, such alchemy. While we bubbled and chatted through the morning, after lunch a calm settled over the room as we practiced our new techniques. Busy, content bees, we tended our sighing, yielding blossoms.

That is to say - it was amazing.

So my "take home," or most useful bit of information and technique I gained from the class, and the reason I started this post to tell you about has to do with the erector spinae.

In the illustration you can see what Brian said that surprised me - the erectors (iliocostalis, spinalis and longissimus) are ideally wide, flat sheaths of muscle. This is surprising because more often than not they feel like one big, heavy cable alongside the spine.

Chronic tension pulls the muscles taut and they roll in on themselves, then get stuck together as the tension limits movement and squeezes out the lubricating interstitial fluid, and - voila! - one ropy mass of muscle all glued together.

We don't notice what we're missing because the erectors are still able to do their main function - holding up the spine. The difference is that one long, linear slab of muscle connecting essentially two points is really only good for that one job.

What those wider, more flexible sheaths allow is what you see in belly dancers as they twist and undulate - a whole range of movements. We learned a technique for slow unraveling - a gentle, rocking finger friction along the spine - and I've been having fun integrating it into my massages.

Thanks, Brian.

p.s. there's a lot of questionable continuing ed. out there, and the Therapeutic Training Center is offering quality instruction at better rates than I've seen nearly anywhere else!

health = happiness = ducks

I feel that my aspirations in this world are relatively reasonable; I want to help people stretch and grow into happier, healthier beings. I want to write and travel and learn as many words in various languages as I can possibly retain. And someday, I want to build a house and have ducks.

Ducks can be serene and beautiful, but more often than not they're bobbing their heads in the water or wiggling their tail-feathers. They're pretty silly and don't seem to worried about it. I'm not sure how many languages they quack, but they fly long distances and somehow make it back home. They always make me feel happy when I see them, and it's amazing how much of health stems out of happiness.

So I'm starting a blog that appears to be about ducks, but is really about finding the things that make for happiness and health and overall well-being. I hope you enjoy following me, as I waddle and drift and nibble these topics.