This past year has been uncommonly difficult, due to the concussion I acquired almost exactly a year ago. And this past month has been a challenge with a double dose of Covid followed by a bee sting that's led to a significant infection, both of which have set my energies back a lot. However, Monday a week ago I was doing my New Year's Examen and was encouraged to realise quite how amazing one thing that had happened this year was.
1 - Church Women's Conference
In July our church held a one day 'women's conference'. It was the first one, and I had no idea what to expect from it - and wasn't sure if I could make it, as I was still very much limited by my concussion. But I got hold of the programme and decided to go to the main morning session, with a plan to go home over lunch and some workshops and return for the main afternoon one.
The morning session turned out to be a brief session of teaching (I can't remember what on, but by a woman from the church a close friend of mine goes to), followed by a time when you could reflect or come to the front for someone to pray for you. Three other women from my friend's church were also there, and they were all part of a prayer team I'd heard a lot about and felt confident in.
They were asking people to come forward specifically if there were lies in their lives that were holding them back. At one point the woman doing the asking said "maybe there's a voice in your head that says you're useless". Without really even considering it, I stood up and went forward (most unusual for me!). Ever since I first developed CFS, when I get tired and sore, I feel like a bad person and want to hurt myself - and one of the persistent thoughts that comes at those times is that I'm useless.
There were two rows of women at the front by the time I got there, and the three prayer ladies were going from person to person, praying briefly by some and at great length by others, as they felt God instructing them to. The speaker was also saying little bits from time to time about what we could be praying about ourselves. I think she said to specifically name the words in your head as lies and ask God to take them away, but what I really remember was when she said to ask God what words He wanted to put in their place. As soon as I did that, a phrawe popped into my head: "You are My Light in the World". It was so unexpected! But also a very Biblically-correct idea (e.g. in Matthew 5), not just some random thing, and I figured it was likely from God.
So I prayed about that for a bit there. And, over the following weeks, whenever I found myself starting to tell myself I was useless and bad, I resisted articulating that and worked on saying "I am God's Light in the World" instead.
In maybe a few weeks that lie was gone. Doing the New Year's reflection I realised that, with very little input from me, God has taken away something that's made me miserable for years. Thank you, Jesus! It has come back occasionally since, but reminding myself that I am God's light in the world seems to generally deal with it fairly quickly :-)
2 - Strategy to deal with concussion cognitive issues
That wasn't the only significant encouragement from recent months.
 |
I loved this house near my niece's place in Wellington. The monarch butterfly to the right of the door was made by the son of one of our neighbours here in Auckland. He lives in Newtown and heaps of the houses in the area were decorated with them :-)
|
Over October/November we were in Wellington/Upper Hutt/Whanganui visiting various friends and relatives. We'd hoped to do this trip back in April, but that wasn't realistic due to the concussion. By October, however, I was mostly back to normal with physical stuff (walking, biking swimming etc.), although still more fatigued than previously and still really struggling with doing most cognitive stuff. My concussion physio (through ACC) had given me strategies that had led to steady improvement with my physical symptoms, but I'd found the cognitive strategies recommended by the OT from the same service much less helpful and was feeling pretty stuck.
One person we were visiting on our trip was my friend Louise, who's also a concussion OT. One day she was kind enough to sit down with me and talk through the problems I was having and what she'd recommend if I was her client. It was a completely different approach from what my OT had suggested. Rather than doing exercises (the various worksheets I'd been given previously), she suggested I pay really close attention to how I was doing. She didn't quite put it like this, but what I've taken from it is this:
- pay attention to how I'm feeling before I start something that takes a lot of figuring out or concentration (like this blog!)
- fairly often while doing it (maybe every 10-15 minutes) pause and think - how am I feeling?
- once it's starting to feel a bit hard (i.e. I've deteriorated a bit) stop - don't keep going till I really can't carry on.
- do a "complete rest" (which has mostly meant lying on my tummy with my eyes shut) until I feel as good as I felt before I started.
That last bit (feeling as good as I felt before I started) felt impossible. I always deteriorate significantly during the day - even before the concussion. But I tried to give it a go and it mostly works. Sometimes I've needed to rest only 20 min or so; 30-ish minutes seems typical, sometimes it's been well over an hour. But I do get back to a point where doing the same work feels pretty easy again :-)
This meant I was able to get stuck into the Just Kai Christmas recommendations when I got back. And I literally did as many Just Kai hours in those two weeks as I'd done in the whole year previously - and that without feeling absolutely disgusting at any point! It was a bit of a miracle.
The idea is that this approach will encourage my brain to slowly heal. The time since Wellington has been pretty disrupted (especially this past month), so I can't say I've seen steady improvement in my capacity - but I can say I now have an approach to get way more stuff done than before, and to do it without wiping myself out and feeling absolutely awful afterwards. Hopefully I'll also see actual improvement in time, but it's still an immense and hugely encouraging change.
3 - Small planes have low emissions
For our October/November holiday we flew to Wellington, caught a bus to Whanganui then flew home from there. When I was calculating the carbon emissions for our trip, I noticed something very surprising. The flight to Wellington generated 195kg CO2e across the two of us, whilst the flight back from Whanganui generated only 69kg CO2e (again, for two people).
Why?
Have a look at the screenshots of the detailed info for the two flights.
 |
to Wellington
|
 |
home from Whanganui
|
I use the atmosfair calculator in part because it allows you to specify the make of plane used. Looking at the screenshots you can see that, whilst the distance for the second flight was noticeably shorter, by far the biggest difference comes in the emissions related to contrails and ozone. These are significant drivers of climate change, but only occur when fuels are burned at high altitude. For the Wellington flight we were in an Airbus A320 - a biggish plane seating around 170 people. For the flight home we were in in SAAB340 - a much smaller 34-seater plane. Small planes don't fly as high (you can see the altitude difference in the screenshots above), but I hadn't previously realised that such planes weren't flying high enough to form contrails etc. That was super-exciting information!
We're not 100% sure what we'll do with this new knowledge. One thing we'll definitely be looking into is flying to Kāpiti Coast airport rather than Wellington airport next time we're heading that way. Air Chathams flies there daily (in the same SAAB340 planes), and from there it's about 90 min by bus and train to the Wellington CBD. Total carbon emissions under 80*kg CO2e for two people - compared to 195 kg on the regular plane!
*the AirNZ little planes are even more carbon efficient than the Air Chathams once - presumably as they still fly low but carry twice as many people.
We decided many years ago to do only one domestic flight every three years, as part of limiting our carbon emissions - and those flights have basically all been to Wellington or Whanganui. I've now realised we can do those flights for half the carbon emissions we previously expected/generated. Could we fly more often? We're not sure, as that original target was pretty arbitrary and our emissions are still well above sustainable, but we're certainly wondering about it.
I've also realised that Air New Zealand also uses small planes (in their case ATR72s, which even have a slightly smaller per-passenger carbon footprint than the SAAB340s) to service a bunch of regional airports such as Napier. I have a good friend in Napier, and found the drive there two years ago pretty grueling. We're hoping to go back this year and had been thinking to travel via Intercity Gold bus seats. I'm still interested in giving that a go, but am also wondering about flying at least one way: it turns out the emissions from flying are only double that of the bus!!!
Photos from Wellington/Whanganui
I didn't do a proper blog
post when I got back from Wellington/Upper Hutt/Whanganui as I got stuck
straight into Just Kai stuff as soon as I was able, but here's a few
photos of what we got up to.
 |
A statue of Katherine Mansfield, made up of fragments of her writing. I was captivated by this when I first spotted it as a teenager, and was delighted to see it's still there.
|
 |
| Printing a T-shirt (for me) with my niece :-) |
 |
with my Aunty Elspeth and cousin Karlene in Whanganui
|
 |
Martin and the Whanganui river
|
 |
| my Whanganui relatives (except for my cousin Garth's daughter) |
|
Aunty Elspeth also showed me some old family photos I'd never seen before. Apparently my grandad (who died long before I was born) was a gymnast!
 |
| my grandad's the man kneeling on the right, half-way up the picture. |
