A memory to get me through the winter

I’ve heard that depression can change your brain. I wonder if Borderline Personality Disorder does too? I read this article at NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) that says studies have shown that the grey matter functioning in BPD patients is impaired in an emotion regulation circuit (I can vouch for the fact that mine is faulty!). Since I’m a believer that our upbringing  causes this disorder, then I have to assume  that the trauma we under went caused changes. Either that or we were born with this shortcoming which in turn caused our caregivers to be so totally annoyed with us that we ended up with BPD. I have to give that theory some weight because I was surely more intense and high-strung than anyone else in my family. My problems go back farther than my memory does so I have no way of really trying to analyze that. Not that it makes any difference in the fact that this is something we have to live with but maybe it gives me a sense of legitimacy. Maybe I can let go of some of the shame of having such an untreatable, horrible disorder that even the mental health community looked at me with disdain.

While I’m at it I’ll mention another article just to show that untreatable myth is slowly changing. Age is supposedly on my side too. I wouldn’t really know since for the most part I live the life of a recluse. It’s not Borderline problems that cause me to isolate, it’s my complete loss of confidence in myself. I can tell you that is a hard thing to get back. When I was in my twenties and bouncing from one problem to another, I still tried. It took a huge toll, having to project the image that I was okay and had things under control (when I clearly didn’t). I used to be so much gutsier than I am now. I am not flighty like I was when I was young, I am more stable in some ways. As far as emotion regulation? I spent over two years in DBT (Dialectical behavioral therapy) supposedly learning how to regulate my emotions, and I still have no clue how to actually do that. What sends me off the deep end?  Well, the DSM-IV-TR puts it this way “Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.”, I say rejection (or perceived rejection) pure and simple. Some times it’s real, many times I believe it’s only in my head. I don’t frantically try to avoid it, as I did in my youth, I avoid getting close enough to risk feeling that way in the first place. Not a great solution but it does keep me stable and out of the hospital and even non-suicidal.  That makes it worth it to me because I hate it with a passion when I get that traumatized, out of control, awful feeling.

I believe the day will come, if we don’t manage to destroy ourselves first, when they not only will know which areas in the brain cause or contribute to certain mental illnesses, but that they will know how to treat them much like they treated my brain tumor. In fact, I’d volunteer now to have those faulty areas rewired or removed!

My Chipin adventure ended October 1st. How did I do? I have $35 towards my furnace goal of $5000. lol… It seems that 99% of my readership is coming from people with brain tumors. I’d say it’s not surprising they have other things on their mind than my furnace problems. They clearly aren’t the blogging types either because they hardly ever leave comments.

So my informal review of Chipin is that it could be pretty darn cool and generate you some income if you actually have a blog people read. Yeah, I know, that was totally obvious.

For those of you who contributed, I offer a heartfelt thank you! As for the furnace. I could be in trouble here but I will do what the furnace guy did in April when he came for the third time last winter, set fan to always on and set the furnace to emergency heat. Guess that’ll run the electric bill up but I have no choice. If natural gas goes up the 40% I’ve seen predicted, I’m in trouble anyway. I’m already bundled up trying to be warm and I don’t think it’s below 60 degrees. I may try a solution I saw on CNN, although for that to work I think I need to be foreclosed on first which could take months. Then I can save my mortgage payment money and by my calculations I can then afford a furnace in 12 months! Awesome :p

Just so you know your money isn’t being squandered, it’s going to sit there in the furnace fund until I actually get one. That could be a while but I’m not touching it!

“I know the year is dying, Soon the summer will be dead. I can trace it in the flying Of the black crows overhead; I can hear it in the rustle Of the dead leaves as I pass, And the south wind’s plaintive sighing Through the dry and withered grass.

Ah, ’tis then I love to wander, Wander idly and alone, Listening to the solemn music Of sweet nature’s undertone; Wrapt in thoughts I cannot utter, Dreams my tongue cannot express, Dreams that match the autumn’s sadness In their longing tenderness.” -  Mortimer Crane Brown, Autumn Dreams

My garden is a sad, sad place now. I hoped the last of the tomatoes would ripen but they’re doing it so slowly that the slugs are getting more than me. There are still a lot out there and very green but I’ve decided not to hold my breath  waiting on them. A few summer squash are still growing too, and one lone zuchinni. I found last years old seeds about mid July and threw them in my flower bed. From those I will have 2 winter squash (yay!) They are small but better than none. Once I’m feeling better I need to get busy and clean up the mess from this years garden. Oh yeah, and there’s that long overdo (hopefully) last lawn mowing to do. The broccoli plants finally got huge but the broccolis didn’t so I didn’t even pick them.

^Winter Squash plants!^

I’m rethinking this quote: “Know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.” ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. There is nothing sublime about it.

Sublime:

1. Elevated or lofty in thought, language, etc.: Paradise Lost is sublime poetry.
2. Impressing the mind with a sense of grandeur or power; inspiring awe, veneration, etc.: Switzerland has sublime scenery.
3. Supreme or outstanding: a sublime dinner.
4. Complete; absolute; utter: sublime stupidity.
5. Archaic.
   • Of lofty bearing.
   • Haughty.
6. Archaic. raised high; high up.

No, there is nothing sublime about suffering. You can only endure, which of course is better than the alternative. And oh how you appreciate when the suffering comes to an end!  Of both physical and mental pain, I found the mental to be the worst by far and yes, I can sometimes feel sublime that I bloody well survived it. Well, wait a minute, I have to say the same about physical pain. But I don’t suffer and be strong. I endure. That’s all, simply get through this. So maybe the sublime is the after effect and I guess that’s okay but I’d like to feel some of that ‘lofty thought’ when I’m going through it.

Of all physical ailments I have been lucky. The biggest bane in my life is my migraines. Between the head pain and the nausea I’ve considered death would be a cheerful alternative. Only momentarily though, unlike with my mental anguish where I was convinced it was the only solution. Still, it’s hard just lying there for days on end waiting for this incessant pain to end. That is how I spent the majority of last week. Now, my pain is gone but I’m far from sublime. Now I get to go through the shaky few days of feeling all out of whack and trying to get to eating again and moving around without wobbling. Thankfully my headaches aren’t often as bad as this one was, but hey, I only lost about 6 days.

I chose to suffer through it rather than buy that precious little pill that would have saved me those days of misery because I swore to myself that I’ll no longer buy it if I have to charge it. Why it has to be so ridiculously expensive I don’t know. Not to mention that I can’t even get enough to keep me going through a month anyway. I’m already not taking other prescribed medicines because I can’t afford them so I really can’t justify that one. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. If I had a job and missed a whole week because of a migraine, where would I, and my employer be? Heh, I’m thinking I’d be right where I am now, unemployed. The way of the world, the drug companies get rich off the ones who can afford it and the rest are doomed to suffer.

I’ll leave the feeling sublime to greater souls than me. They can enjoy their lofty thoughts while I wobble my way back to normality.

A tiny little structure deep in my brain that I never heard of until a tumor was discovered on mine. What is a Pineal gland? The answer to that has changed over the years. Hopefully we are closer to the correct function of that gland than they were in the past. There’s some ancient information here but I found it fascinating.

1. Pre-Cartesian Views on the Pineal Gland

The pineal gland or pineal body is a small gland in the middle of the head. It often contains calcifications (“brain sand”) which make it an easily identifiable point of reference in X-ray images of the brain. The pineal gland is attached to the outside of the substance of the brain near the entrance of the canal (“aqueduct of Sylvius”) from the third to the fourth ventricle of the brain. It is nowadays known that the pineal gland is an endocrine organ, which produces the hormone melatonin in amounts which vary with the time of day. But this is a relatively recent discovery. Long before it was made, physicians and philosophers were already busily speculating about its functions.

1.1 Antiquity

The first description of the pineal gland and the first speculations about its functions are to be found in the voluminous writings of Galen (ca. 130-ca. 210 AD), the Greek medical doctor and philosopher who spent the greatest part of his life in Rome and whose system dominated medical thinking until the seventeenth century.

Galen discussed the pineal gland in the eighth book of his anatomical work On the usefulness of the parts of the body. He explained that it owes its name (Greek: kônarion, Latin: glandula pinealis) to its resemblance in shape and size to the nuts found in the cones of the stone pine (Greek: kônos, Latin: pinus pinea). He called it a gland because of its appearance and said that it has the same function as all other glands of the body, namely to serve as a support for blood vessels.

In order to understand the rest of Galen’s exposition, the following two points should be kept in mind. First, his terminology was different from ours. He regarded the lateral ventricles of the brain as one paired ventricle and called it the anterior ventricle. He accordingly called the third ventricle the middle ventricle, and the fourth the posterior one. Second, he thought that these ventricles were filled with “psychic pneuma,” a fine, volatile, airy or vaporous substance which he described as “the first instrument of the soul.” (See Rocca 2003 for a detailed description of Galen’s views about the anatomy and physiology of the brain.)

Galen went to great lengths to refute a view that was apparently circulating in his time (but whose originators or protagonists he did not mention) according to which the pineal gland regulates the flow of psychic pneuma in the canal between the middle and posterior ventricles of the brain, just as the pylorus regulates the passage of food from the esophagus to the stomach. Galen rejected this view because, first, the pineal gland is attached to the outside of the brain and, second, it cannot move on its own. He argued that the “worm-like appendage” [epiphysis or apophysis] of the cerebellum (nowadays known as the vermis superior cerebelli) is much better qualified to play this role (Kühn 1822, pp. 674-683; May 1968, vol. 1, pp. 418-423).

1.2 Late Antiquity

Although Galen was the supreme medical authority until the seventeenth century, his views were often extended or modified. An early example of this phenomenon is the addition of a ventricular localization theory of psychological faculties to Galen’s account of the brain. The first theory of this type that we know of was presented by Posidonius of Byzantium (end of the fourth century AD), who said that imagination is due to the forepart of the brain, reason to the middle ventricle, and memory to the hind part of the brain (Aetius 1534, 1549, book 6, ch. 2). A few decades later, Nemesius of Emesa (ca. 400 AD) was more specific and maintained that the anterior ventricle is the organ of imagination, the middle ventricle the organ of reason, and the posterior ventricle the organ of memory (Nemesius 1802, chs. 6-13). The latter theory was almost universally adopted until the middle of the sixteenth century, although there were numerous variants. The most important variant was due to Avicenna (980-1037 AD), who devised it by projecting the psychological distinctions found in Aristotle’s On the soul onto the ventricular system of the brain (Rahman 1952).

1.3 Middle Ages

In a treatise called On the difference between spirit and soul, Qusta ibn Luqa (864-923) combined Nemesius’ ventricular localization doctrine with Galen’s account of a worm-like part of the brain that controls the flow of animal spirit between the middle and posterior ventricles. He wrote that people who want to remember look upwards because this raises the worm-like particle, opens the passage, and enables the retrieval of memories from the posterior ventricle. People who want to think, on the other hand, look down because this lowers the particle, closes the passage, and protects the spirit in the middle ventricle from being disturbed by memories stored in the posterior ventricle (Constantinus Africanus 1536, p. 310). Qusta’s treatise was very influential in thirteenth-century scholastic Europe (Wilcox 1985).

In several later medieval texts, the term pinea was applied to the worm-like obstacle, so that the view that the pineal gland regulates the flow of spirits (the theory that Galen had rejected) made a come-back (Vincent de Beauvais 1494, fol. 342v; Vincent de Beauvais 1624, col. 1925; Ysaac 1515, part 2, fol. 172v and fol. 210r; Publicius 1482, ch. Ingenio conferentia). The authors in question seemed ignorant of the distinction that Galen had made between the pineal gland and the worm-like appendage. To add to the confusion, Mondino dei Luzzi (1306) described the choroid plexus in the lateral ventricles as a worm which can open and close the passage between the anterior and middle ventricles, with the result that, in the late Middle Ages, the term ‘worm’ could refer to no less than three different parts of the brain: the vermis of the cerebellum, the pineal body and the choroid plexus.

1.4 Renaissance

In the beginning of the sixteenth century, anatomy made great progress and at least two developments took place that are important from our point of view. First, Niccolò Massa (1536, ch. 38) discovered that the ventricles are not filled with some airy or vaporous spirit but with fluid (the liquor cerebro-spinalis). Second, Andreas Vesalius (1543, book 7) rejected all ventricular localization theories and all theories according to which the choroid plexus, pineal gland or vermis of the cerebellum can regulate the flow of spirits in the ventricles of the brain. ~Lokhorst, Gert-Jan, “Descartes and the Pineal Gland”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

René Descartes (1596-1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and writer.  He has been called the “Father of Modern Philosophy”.  He wrote;

“Since it is the only solid part in the whole brain which is single, it must necessarily be the seat of the common sense, i.e., of thought, and consequently of the soul; for one cannot be separated from the other.”

I’m glad he was wrong because I’d hate to think since I’m now without a pineal gland that I have no soul. Still, his work in ‘Treatise of Man’ and ‘Passions of the Soul’ is very interesting reading.

By the end of the nineteenth century, several scientists introduced the hypothesis that the pineal gland is a phylogenic relic, a vestige of a dorsal third eye. A modified form of this theory is still accepted today. Also, scientists began to theorize that the pineal gland is an endocrine organ. This was proven in the twentieth century. The hormone secreted by the pineal gland, melatonin, was first isolated in 1958. Melatonin is secreted in a circadian rhythm, which is interesting in view of the hypothesis that the pineal gland is a vestigial third eye. Madame Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy, identified the “third eye” discovered by the comparative anatomists of her time with the “eye of Shiva” of “the Hindu mystics” and concluded that the pineal body of modern man is an atrophied vestige of this “organ of spiritual vision”. The pineal gland is occasionally associated with the sixth chakra (also called Ajna or the third eye chakra in yoga). It is believed by some to be a dormant organ that can be awakened to enable “telepathic” communication.

Today we know that the pineal gland It is sensitive to different levels of light and is essential to the functioning of an animal’s biological clock. In many animals, including humans, it synthesizes a hormone called melatonin in periods of darkness. Melatonin synthesis is halted when light hits the retina of the eye, sending impulses to the gland via the optic nerve. Besides influencing daily, or circadian, rhythms such those of as sleep and temperature, the pineal gland and melatonin appear to direct annual rhythms and seasonal changes in animals.

So, I’m sometimes sad to be missing the seat of my soul, my third eye and especially my circadian rhythms, but I am happy to know I can survive without it.  As for the circadian rhythms, I do see the effect. I stay up at night, sleep whenever and don’t generally function on a 24 hour day. I tend towards 30-36 hour days way too often and about 5 hours worth of sleep. I sometimes wonder if I’ve lost some precious potential to reach a higher degree of spirituality for my lack of a pineal gland but then I believe that resides elsewhere, where my soul resides also.

There’s much more at the cited link. It’s the most comprehensive information I’ve been able to find about Pineal glands and so very interesting how our knowledge has progressed.

Edited to add links to my previous posts about Pineal Gland Brain tumors.

Pineal Gland Tumor

What is a Pineal Gland Tumor?

“Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.” ~Oscar Wilde

“Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.”~Eleanor Roosevelt

This quote has stuck in my head ever since I heard it years and years ago. I love it and it’s so true. It also points out to me my own shortcomings. I guess I’d fall under the average category mostly, although I think there should be another category added. Sad minds discuss themselves. I have an entire blog devoted to supporting that theory. Why do I talk about myself? Am I really that self-centered?

I think it has much to do with the struggle for identity and validation. I think if it was changed to “secure minds” it would give it all new meaning. The lack of feeling secure enough to believe my ideas might be important is certainly a hindrance. I do have ideas, they just get lost under all the emotional baggage I carry with me everywhere I go. That stuff is always right there in front of everything and I’m constantly struggling with it so, heh, I talk about it. My God that must get boring for people!

I have met many very inspiring great minds in my lifetime. I’d say it gives me something to strive for. I’ll just add that to all my other things I struggle with. Oh but wait, there I am being a sad mind again, when what I really want to talk about are great minds. Like the uplifted feeling I get whenever I go to Barb’s blog and read her new posts without a hint of the angst that is in mine. She talks about the overall goodness in life and it seems like another world to me, but one I would love to join. She shares and includes us in every post.  So seriously folks, if you want good art, good conversation and a sense of having spent time with a wonderful friend get thee over to Over Coffee… you won’t regret it. Once you get there read her post and follow that one over to Teacher Time to meet another inspiring and compassionate great mind. What great minds have you met in your life? I hope it’s been many and varied.

Someday maybe I’ll be amongst the great minds that so enrich this world. I really hope so. Shoo now…go read and enjoy!

I just had my yearly one and am supposed to see the neurosurgeon so he can look at it but I came home in between because it was going to be an hour and a half wait (that and I desperately needed my allergy meds). So not having thought of it earlier I just called them to see if I should bring last years in to compare. They said no. The whole thing is strange since I moved here.

In Michigan the copy I got always had a report in it, and they also kept a copy. In the reports they compared it to the previous one. Not this guy, he throws it up on his lightbox, tells me I’m fine and that’s all I ever hear. The last report I actually saw a couple years ago it WAS growing. It’s my brain and my tumor and I’d like to know what is actually going on with it. I’m the freaking patient! So because this dr isn’t all that nice and acts like I’m a pain for even coming in and having MRI’s (which he told me to do), I will ask my medical dr if she is getting reports and if not I’ll ask her to request them. It’s my brain, I’d like to know what’s going on with it.