Yarn, Books & Roses

Chickens are taking flight…

It has been kind of busy lately at Casa Hannah and the Coalbear. I’ve been meeting people for chicken hand-offs every few days. I built a new coffee table, worked some in the yard, and then there is the heat. Ugh. The heat. We’ve been trapped in a heat dome for days, breaking records day after day, and the cats and I are all suffering a little with it. It is harder to breath in hot air, but my joints are curiously okay with all of this. I stay outside until noon each day letting my joints bask in the heat, but predictably, the cats abandon the deck/catio long before then. I find them stretched out on the cool tile of the kitchen when I come in, waiting for their tuna. The cats are absolutely over this heat!

Hannah: Maybe it is a little cooler in here…

Before I talk about the yard and the heat, let’s talk about the chickens! I’ve been meeting up with people for a chicken handoff all week, and these chickens have all flown away to their new coops. Here are the chickens that left this week:

That’s right. Five emotional support chickens flew out of here, and tomorrow I hand off another teal chicken knitted to match the one in the picture. My favorite ESC in the whole bunch went to my son: it is made with handspun yarns from sheep that he and I met when we worked a shearing day for the Rocky Sheep Company years ago.

The black/grey marled yarn is from a sheep named Petunia, and the jet black is from a sheep named Clint (Black). I used some Malabrigo Rios for the red bands because it is too darn hot to dye yarn right now! Isn’t this a spunky looking chicken?

Yesterday I cleaned up and sorted out all of the yarns again, and I’m ready to launch into more chicken knitting just as soon as I finish the chemo hat for a scleroderma patient participant in a CAR T-cell therapy clinical trial in Seattle: that needs to go out the door this week. Whew. Lots and lots to knit. I feel pretty motived because a thank you note was emailed to Frayed Knots by a cancer patient thanking me for the “wrist warmers” that she received. I think that she must have been given two PICC line covers, but that note made me realize that I need to be even more productive. As if to nail home the lesson, a couple of the people that I met up with this last week mention how much they struggled with cold and painful hands. Yeah. I need to get cracking on wrist warmers.

I bought a cute little knitting machine that is perfect for churning out wrist warmers!! This is the Addi Express Professional Knitting Machine, and it was on sale. Yay!!

Okay, I bought a big knitting machine that will make hats too. I need to have some way to use up all of this yarn that I have stashed away, and now that I am knitting chickens like crazy, I feel bad that I’m not producing hats and stuff for Frayed Knots like I was. Hopefully, these machines will let me step up my game some.

Hannah: Mother of Cats!! Talk about how hot it is and mention all the birds in the yard!!!!

Okay Hannah: back to the heat. For some reason the potted flowers on the deck are doing exceptionally well in the heat, and the yard is full of life. I’ve been making an effort to keep the water trays full, and the bird feeders have become quite popular. Look at what the flowers have been up to:

The single flowering spear in the middle is the Spanish Lavender finally starting to bloom. I’d almost given up on it, but both plants have suddenly sprouted those buds. All of the potted roses are covered with blooms, and the other lavenders have all started a second blooming. There is so much life out in the yard I replaced a window screen so Hannah can spend the early evenings watching for bunnies. (Why did it have to be replaced? One word: Mateo)

In the mornings the cats and I hang out on the catio watching the wildlife. Here’s the view from behind the chicken wire:

I especially like the blue jays that are hanging out in the yard, but there is a constant line-up for the hanging feeders. So fun. Cheap cat entertainment while I’m drinking my morning latte out on the deck/catio.

Hannah: Finally! Today it started to cool off.

As Hannah has pointed out, the heat breaks today, and it will be closer to normal temperatures for the rest of the week with rain possible each day. I’m hoping that this is the Colorado Monsoon arriving at last, certainly my lawn is hoping that there will be rain on the way.

Bye everyone. It’s time to fill the bird feeders again.

Note: Who’s getting these ESCs? My family, of course. Several have gone to systemic sclerosis patients. One went to person who retired earlier than she had hoped to, and another went to a person coping with a serious genetic disease. Two people are struggling with anxiety. One to a cancer survivor whose chemotherapy triggered scleroderma. I still haven’t gotten any chickens knitted for the infusion center…

Must knit faster!!

Hannah and the CoalBear: Life Behind the Wire

Hi. I’m the CoalBear.

It has been really, really hot here. The poor Mother of Cats woke up on a Monday and… she couldn’t stand. Like, her knees didn’t want to work. It took her WAY TOO LONG to get downstairs to give us our morning tuna, so it was kind of a hard start to the week for us, too. Here is what she thinks happened:

The air pressure in the Denver area dropped like a dead moth overnight, and for some reason that made her knees misbehave. She was very upset with the weather. Good thing the pressure came up again, but… it was hot. Really hot. Hannah and I do not like hot even a little bit. We slept all day, day after day, and we only went out on the deck in the mornings and evenings to look at what was going on in the yard.

The bunnies are always my favorite, but there have also been lots and lots of birds. The Mother of Cats saw an American goldfinch, and there were chickadees, blue jays, robins (lots and lots of robins!), and even tiny birds called bushtits. The Mother of Cats was so excited that she ordered a birdfeeder for the birds from Amazon and went out and bought some food from a store near me. A BIRD STORE!!!! Why didn’t she take me? I like birds… she never lets me ~~catch and eat~~ play with fun things.

Do you see what happened? The feeder is soooo cute because it has a cat face, but that didn’t stop the squirrel from moving in. He was so mean to the bird feeder (he knocked it down!!!) that the Mother of Cats had to make a move the feeder to a new place on a tree closer to the catio (which is a good idea in my opinion…) and put the food for the squirrel on a little platter for them. The food has special worms in it for the robins, but maybe the squirrel ate them too. Anyway, everything was going great until late one night…

Hannah: Ummm… is there something going on in the back yard????

Hannah and I rush downstairs to the big window down there to look out into the yard, and there was a big, fat raccoon climbing over the fence!!!

Now Hannah and I are really worried about going out onto the catio, and we will only do it if the Mother of Cats goes out with us. That raccoon looked mean! Really, really mean. I’m just a little fluffy cat…

So that’s all the news from around here. The Mother of Cats is still taking it really easy, and we take turns watching over her. She got some more chickens knitted up and they are kind of cute, but she put them into boxes and mailed them away this week. Bye, chickens! Watch out for the raccoons on your travels!!

That’s all for now. Hannah and I are watching the Mother of Cats while she types this, and after she finishes, I think that I will catch a little nap.

This is Mateo, signing off.

>^..^<

The Scleroderma Chronicles: A Decade on the Little Teal School Bus.

Here it is again: World Scleroderma Day.

June 29th is World Scleroderma Day. In Australia sunflowers are used as a symbol of scleroderma. Almost everyone uses the color teal for scleroderma.

I used to be a high school biology teacher before I became a scleroderma patient, and I took my students on field trips sometimes. We would all pile on the bus and off we went on one adventure or another: into the mountains for an ecological assessment, or to the Natural History Museum for an anatomy lesson, or a visit to a biotechnology center, or even off for the weekend to study for the Biology AP Exam. It was always exciting, exhausting, sometimes joyful, often a little overwhelming, and at the heart, an educational experience.

Lately I have been thinking about my illness as a ride on a little teal-colored school bus with a crazy rainbow striped zebra behind the wheel. That dang scleroderma zebra is careening down the road on its way to an unknown destination just over the horizon, and would you believe it, he keeps stopping to pick up more passengers along the way.

Don’t make fun of my bus! I changed the colors on some clip art that I found, and putting a zebra behind the wheel was beyond me!! Use your imagination… the zebra is braying hysterically while driving the bus!

When the bus stopped for me, and I stupidly jumped on board, I only had a few symptoms. I had some trouble swallowing sometimes. I had GERD. I suddenly lost circulation in my fingers if I got cold. Speaking of my fingers, they were pretty fat and puffy. I had lots of red blotches on my face, and the skin was pulling tight. It was hard to open my mouth wide…

Still, I was feeling pretty hopeful as I jumped onto the bus. “This will be fun!” chortled the scleroderma zebra. Bad zebra, bad!! Before I knew what was happening, that dang striped miscreant had pulled the bus over, opened the door, and couple of little demon passengers had hopped on board: kidney disease and gastric complications. What kind of an outing is this… have you ever heard a zebra laugh?

Bouncing down the road, suddenly screeching to a halt periodically to pick up a new passenger, the zebra continued the crazy outing in the little teal school bus. The little demon passengers kept piling into the bus, and those little monsters even started to sing “the wheels on the bus go round and round…” while laughing and clapping. What kind of a field trip is this, anyways?????

The demons all wore little nametags:

Gastroparesis
Pericardial effusion
Chronic respiratory failure
Diastolic dysfunction
Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension
Interstitial Lung Disease
Heart Failure with preserved ejection fraction

“STOP THE BUS!!!!” I shouted at the zebra! “I absolutely did not sign up for all of this sh*t!!!!” Nope. Evidently there is no stopping the bus. Ten years on the road, and we are still on our outing. Somehow some extra demons that don’t even wear nametags snuck onto the bus, but they are certainly annoying as they are making all my tendons hurt and what is up with all this edema!!!! Did I mention the fatigue? Always, always there is fatigue. That fatigue demon is sitting on top of the bus blowing raspberries at all the other people on the road…

It has now been a decade for me on the little teal school bus: always exciting, exhausting, sometimes joyful, often a little overwhelming, and at the heart, an educational experience.

I learned about prioritizing and not worrying about things that haven’t happened yet. I learned to advocate for myself, and I have maneuvered myself into the care of some great doctors. I have learned to build for myself a network of supporters. I pretty much have lost interest in making money, but I’m highly motivated to help others. I’m keeping notebooks and collecting souvenirs while on this field trip, and to be frank, it is the outing of a lifetime. Believe it or not, I’m now singing along with the little demons on the bus with me…

The wheels of the bus go round and round… and the zebra is still laughing its head off… and I’m okay.

Happy World Scleroderma Day.

Note: Scleroderma (systemic sclerosis) is a rare autoimmune disease that is chronic, progressive, and often fatal. It has three main hallmarks: damage to blood vessels, the development of autoantibodies, and subsequent scarring of tissues and organs. Right now, while there are many excellent treatments emerging to handle the serious complications due to the underlying disease (like my pulmonary arterial hypertension and interstitial lung disease), there is no cure. You can learn more about scleroderma and systemic sclerosis in the links below.

An Emotional Support Chicken Story

As some of you may have guessed by now, chickenitis is personal with me. Here’s our family story.

My nephew was a type 2 diabetic who had a rare, and very severe, reaction to the medication that he took to control his blood sugar last year. He sustained major organ damage at that time, the worst being to his kidneys and liver. He made lifestyle changes hoping that his liver would heal, but by this spring it became apparent that he would need a liver transplant. He broke the news to his extended family in a text message this April, and my sister requested that I make them all emotional support chickens. I pulled out some yarn and got to work.

Not long afterwards he went on a trip to Hawaii that was paid for through friends; the last picture I saw of him was a selfie taken while standing in the ocean.

A few days after that picture he was home again, returning early from the trip because his health was declining. Soon after his return he was in an emergency room, and two days later my sister let me know that his condition was critical and that he was nonresponsive. He did manage to rally and fought on for more days in the hospital, but when it became clear that his kidney function was too marginal to allow liver transplant surgery, he was moved to hospice care and arrangements were made to allow him to go home.

Shocked by the speed of his decline, horrified that the bottom had fallen out in the city of his mother’s birth, Honolulu, Hawaii, I bundled up the two emotional support chickens that I had ready to go and express shipped them to his home. I worried that they wouldn’t make it in time.

They did not make it. He died the afternoon before they arrived.

The next morning, I woke up to a text showing his swollen-eyed girlfriend hugging the chicken that I had knitted for him.

The emotional support chicken that I sent, hard at work.

It was heartbreaking, but I was grateful that the chicken had arrived for her right when she needed it, and happy to see she had claimed it. My sister kept the second chicken, the reddish-purple one knit from homespun, for herself. That chicken quickly became a true emotional support huggable. She took it with her for the memorial barbeque with his friends. She slept with it. The chicken traveled into the mountains on the day that they buried his ashes, along with those of a beloved dog, near a waterway where he used to camp. Raspberry brambles were planted on the site in living remembrance. In my mind, the color of the chicken is linked to the color of the future berries that will come from those plants. Bittersweet memories of a wonderful man gone too soon, a living memorial of berries, and a knitted chicken all somehow linked by the sorrow that has been placed to rest in the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest.

The chicken went to another memorial gathering yesterday in San Diego with my sister and niece.

Emotional support chickens are just… cute little knitted chicken shaped pillows to hug. They are also symbols of love and support when you need those things desperately. They are something to cling to in bad times. Sometimes they are all a knitter can do for another person in need, and sometimes they are just what that person needed.

My nephew and I dancing at his sister’s wedding in 2002.

Now you know why I will never, ever decline a request for an emotional support chicken. Two more requests came this week. I have a spreadsheet and everything. For these people, in the memory of my nephew, for my sister, I will knit every single one of them a chicken.

I invite you to join me.

Knit on, my friends. Knit on.

Hannah and the CoalBear: Chickenitis Explodes!!

Hi. I’m Hannah.

These big fat bumblebees have been coming to the little garden by the deck every single day this week. I just love them! They are so fat and slow. They are fuzzy and look just like a cat toy, right? They come right up to the wire to climb into the flowers, and I got my paw out and onto one of them this morning; he just bumbled off to another flower. These guys are awesome!!

The Mother of Cats is doing much better and hasn’t worn her wrist braces in days. She finished up the knitting on one of her Emotional Support Chickens (ESC) and then spent a couple of days sewing them up. One chicken was done Saturday morning, so she took it to her Frayed Knots knitting group to show it off to the other knitters.

Isn’t this kind of a sweet little chicken? Her colors look like the colors of the garden where the bumblebee hangs out.

The Mother of Cats wanted to show off the chicken because it has been a big hit with her scleroderma support group and at the Kaiser infusion center last month. Everyone wants a chicken!! Like… four of the members of her support group want one, and she figures that the infusion center should get a least a couple. The Mother of Cats is kind of thinking that lots of people who are having a hard time (like, the families at the Ronald McDonald House, or at other infusion centers) would like a chicken. Yeah. It was a good idea, but she lost control, and things went crazy really quickly… the chicken got passed around and people hugged it. And hugged it. One lady wanted to keep it. The Mother of Cats got requests for FIVE more chickens and was asked to think about teaching a chicken knitting class for some of the ladies. One of the ladies swore that she could get chickens sold at craft shows up north (in Boulder, Colorado) and the money could be used to buy items for the personal care packages that are created by the Frayed Knots volunteers. Another lady asked for the pattern so she could start knitting chickens too…

Yeah. A little out of control. The Mother of Cats now has a spreadsheet going with 17 chicken requests on it.

So, the Mother of Cats got cracking and sewed up two more chickens. Now she has three done and ready to go out the door. There are two more little ones knitted that need to be sewn up, but her wrist voted NO!

Today she wound up a lot of yarn (luckily, she had bought all the yarn earlier in the month…) and she is torn about what color to knit next. Maybe it is time to make a chicken that is knit in all solid colors. Should she use some fluffy alpaca? She still has some beads that can go onto another chicken. Whatever… she needs to just get to work knitting and somehow the chickens will all find a home, right? Obviously, the need for emotional support chickens is real.

Unless there are bumblebees. They are almost as good.

This is Hannah, signing off.

>^..^<

Notes from the Mother of Cats:

I woke up to a text this morning: another request for an ESC. A pink one, please.
The pattern is Emotional Support Chicken, and it can be found in knit or crochet versions on Ravelry.
Here are the official portraits of the three chickens. I have to send the pictures out to people so they can pick their chicken.

Hannah and the CoalBear: She bought all the yarn!!!

Hi. I’m Hannah.

The Mother of Cats brought me this wonderful new box this week. I love this box!!!

The Mother of Cats started out the week being really busy. She worked in her gardens, she knitted on her chickens, and she even did some yummy cooking. I know it was yummy because I dragged off some of her steak when she wasn’t looking. I mean, it was a big piece; if she shared more, I wouldn’t be forced to take matters into my own paws like that. After a couple of days of sun and knitting fun, though, everything came to a screeching halt.

The Mother of Cats hands got all puffy and she had to put on her braces. I hate the braces because it feels funny when she pets me. She also gets crabby when she is wearing the braces because she says everything hurts. Poor Mother of Cats.

I bet if she ate some tuna with avocado, she would feel better…

Anyway, after spending a whole day reading books and doing laundry, the Mother of Cats bounced back and headed out to the yarn store. I think it was a little crazy of her, but we couldn’t stop her. The yarn store had put some videos showing off the yarns on Facebook, and she pretty much lost all control.

Look at this yarn!!! She had to get teal colored yarn because it is scleroderma month, and the store chose teal as the color of the month (!). As she explained it to Mateo, when the universe puts teal yarn out on sale, you just do what the universe wants. She also got the pink/plum yarns because she loves them the most. I tried to sleep on the yarns, but she got a little cranky about that. Silly Mother of Cats. When is she going to learn to share? Anyway, she says that the yarn is for MORE CHICKENS!!!!! She is going to share this yarn with some people, so why not me too?

I do have to admit, I love my chicken. She is really nice to sleep with.

Just when I thought we had reached the height of ridiculousness, more yarn arrived in the mail. This yarn, evidently, just had to be bought because it is… ZEBRA yarn.

Behold the zebra yarn. It gets that name because the undyed yarn is white with black stripes.

So, I can truthfully say, the Mother of Cats seems to have bought all the yarn. It seems a little crazy for her to lose all control like this when SHE CAN’T EVEN KNIT right now, but that’s the Mother of Cats for you. She believes that the world needs more chickens, and she is going to get them knitted after a few more days of rest. In the meantime, she gets to read her books, play with us, and take pictures of her roses. More of her rose plants started blooming this week and they are looking pretty good.

Well, that’s about all that is going around here except for the really big news if you are a cat. IT IS MOTH SEASON!!!! That’s right those crazy miller moths are back, migrating through our back yard, and Mateo has been steadily catching them and bringing them into the house to play with. Then it is fun, fun, fun all night long!

The moths like to hide in the umbrella shade, and when the Mother of Cats opens it up, he grabs them. Then, when it is about time to go to bed… bazinga!!! There’s a moth for me to chase up on the ceiling. This is so much fun. The Mother of Cats isn’t completely on board with all of the moth fun, but I’m sure that if she ate more tuna (with avocado!) she’d be a better fan of moth-o-mania.

That’s all for now. I’m going to take a little cat bath and then it is time for a nap. Later on, around 2am, it will be Miller Moth Time!!!

This is Hannah, signing off.

>^..^<

Notes from the Mother of Cats:

I’ve had swelling and tendonitis like this before, and the only thing to do is to rest the tendons and wait it out.
The chicken pattern is the Emotional Support Chicken.
I have 4 more chickens knitted that I need to sew up.
My scleroderma support group met today and 4 people asked me for a chicken. Well, I did offer. There are days when you really, really need a chicken to hug.
My latest blood results are in, and I am finally back in the normal ranges for iron levels, and my anemia symptoms are better. I’m at the dead bottom, but I will take it! Still eating steak, tuna, peanut butter, and taking iron supplements. Did you know that there is iron in avocado?
The miller moths migrate west every year across the plains to the Rocky Mountains for the summer. My yard is on the flight path.
Almost all of that yarn came from Spun Right Round. I love the quality of the yarn, and you can see how wonderful the colors are!
I tried to knit while wearing the braces. Nope. Not happening.
The beautiful apricot rose is Easy Does It, and this is its second year in my yard. The pink rose is a mostly wild rose that I bought a looooong time ago at the hardware store, and the chicken is with the Princess Alexandra of Kent rose.

Updates from the Garden

June is well underway now, and the heat has finally arrived. Yay. I think that there are some days of thunderstorms ahead, but right now my plants are rocking in the heat after days of rain. Happy, happy plants. This is what is happening on my deck and back gardens.

The roses are finally started blooming!

My favorite, favorite rose in the garden suddenly opened up blooms yesterday. This is the Princess Alexandra of Kent rose.

This rose, and several of the others, are just covered in buds after our wet spring. I’m looking forward to days of blooms ahead if the thunderstorms don’t create too much havoc. My lavender plants are also putting out some color and I’m happy with the purple color on the deck shining along the pink blooms of the rose.

There are 4 types of lavender here. The large plant with Mateo for scale is a mystery lavender brought home from the grocery store. The little group of three lavender plants shows Provence Lavender (the tall plant), English Blue Spear Lavender, and French Lavender ‘Otto Quast’. The Otto Quast is having issues with its nationality, evidently, because the tag says English, but the internet is sticking with Spanish. I await some blooms from this plant…

I just want to add that the next big show will be my roses. I counted them yesterday and I have 35 plants at this point. Yay for roses!

I’ve been slowly weeding along in the back gardens, and one by one the flowering plants are emerging from the jungle of runaway grasses to shine. The roses are all pruned, mulched and fed, and the buds are everywhere. I don’t have a lot to admire right now, but the snapdragons and some others are doing their best to represent.

All of the snapdragons are reblooms or reseeds from last year, and the purple is a salvia plant that has taken off this year. How easy can this get? I collected seeds from snapdragons last year, and as I weed out more garden I plan to work in some seeds into the bare places. I have seeds from pygmy plants and some from plants that are rockets, so I can put some height into part of the garden while getting color towards the front edges. This is a good plan because I think that I need to stay out of the garden center for a while. Did I mention that I went yarn shopping this week? I kind of bought all the yarn, wiping out any progress in reducing the stash this year. I don’t care. I love the colors of the yarn that I bought, and I plan to show it all off in another post this weekend because some of it is still winging its way to my house. They echo the colors of my flowers, and they make me happy.

On the deck I have some little experiments chugging along: my milkweed seeds have successfully sprouted and I’m starting to consider places in the yard to plant them. I overwintered a bougainvillea plant in my front room this year, and it moved onto the deck a couple of weeks ago. What a sorry looking mess it was for a few weeks even though I misted it twice a day and limited its sun exposure, many of the leaves burnt and dropped off. Today the plant is covered with the beginnings of new growth. Yay!

Did you notice that the milkweed is growing in a milk jug?

Just a little more about the garden. I have sources of water out for bunnies and birds, and the yard is filled with birdsong and regularly visited by bunnies. My new neighbor loves the bunnies, and evidently they have babies next-door, and the adults use my yard as part of the Bunny Highway towards the front yard shaded pastures. Out in the front, my new neighbor has bird feeders, another birdbath, and little bunny statues.

The left is a bunny on the highway past my deck, and the little statue under the tree with the frolicking bunnies is in my new neighbor’s yard.

Life is good!

Welcome, June.

The Scleroderma Chronicles: June is Scleroderma Awareness Month

I plan to shine like a sunflower this month.

My local garden center had sunflowers for sale.

I am still thinking about resiliency. I went for a drug infusion a couple of weeks ago, and the lady in the chair next to me and I talked about what resiliency means. She is a liver transplant recipient, and she is also taking the immunosuppressant that I take to control my systemic sclerosis. Like a lot of patients in my scleroderma community, she has had to roll with a series of escalating complications tied to her original liver disease. We both now have osteoporosis, walk with canes, struggle with anemia, and are on a lot of drugs. We laughed about the canes and drug side effects: we’re still here, we crowed. Unlike me, she never checks for drug side effects or interactions; if she knew about them, she figured that she would just worry and imagine she was developing them. Instead, she just cruises along and if something comes up, she contacts her doctors.

Resilience.

Welcome to Scleroderma Awareness Month. I’m spending the month organizing my thought about resilience into some type of logical order. I have a Word document going with an organizational table, a ton of links, and everything scleroderma in it. It will be good for me, I think.

This is a pygmy sunflower. How cute it that!

By the way, my new friend also wants an emotional support chicken.

Welcome to June.

Hannah and the CoalBear: Chickenitis Continues…

Hi. I’m Hannah.

I’ve really been keeping a close eye on the Mother of Cats.

The Mother of Cats has been completely out of control for a few weeks now. She spends all her time working outside and hunting for lavender plants to put in the garden. I mean, there is a lot of lavender now, and it kind of smells funny. What is up with that?

See. Lavender. She now has five different types of lavender growing in pots on the deck along with the baby roses that get way too much attention. Why does the Mother of Cats play with plants when I need her to play with the CoalBear so he doesn’t bother me?

The only good thing about the gardening is this wagon that the Mother of Cats bought for us to play in. Then she took it outside. Why does she do these things?

When she isn’t outside working in her gardens or hunting for more lavender, she is knitting CHICKENS. Lots and lots of chickens. I really don’t mind that she is knitting, because I really like to hang out with her while she is working, but this is getting ridiculous. The chickens are starting to take over all of the room on the back of the loveseat where I like to sleep.

Do you see this? One more chicken and I won’t be able to fit on up here. Why is she doing this????

To make things worse, she saw some photos of LITTLE chickens on Facebook that made her go crazy in the yarn stash pulling out yarn for chicken construction. Then she had some people ask for chickens. Then the people who got the chickens had friends who DESPERATELY needed a chicken for themselves. I think that the Mother of Cats should charge people for the chickens (TUNA FUND!!) but so far, she gives the money to her community knitting group, Frayed Knots. Why is she doing this? Now I’m getting pushed all around by the chickens, and I’m not getting any tuna out of the deal, either.

Here all of the finished big chickens to date. She has a couple of other chickens that still need their stuffing.

The three chickens in the individual chicken photos (did you notice the big lavender plant behind the chickens?) were mailed out this week. The blue one with the little shawl went to a lady whose husband is battling cancer, and the other two flew to members of the Mother of Cat’s family. Good riddance!!!

Sigh. Is the chickenitis getting better now that some are gone? No. No, it is not. She’s determined to make even more for some people she met on Facebook. Then she went away in the car for an afternoon a week ago and returned with EVEN MORE YARN for more chickens. She says the place where she went for the afternoon needs the chickens.

She says that chickens need to go here. I hope that they take flight soon!

I guess they asked for the chickens. She showed them pictures, and they got really excited when they saw how cute they were. I’d be happy to send them Mateo to keep patients entertained, but they weren’t interested in a cat. Just chickens.

So, that’s all I have to report for the last three weeks. Gardening, knitting, and chickens.

This is Hannah, signing off.

Happy Caturday, everyone!

>^..^<

Notes from the Mother of Cats:

The chickens are knitted from the Emotional Support Chicken pattern on Ravelry. I’ve lately joined a KAL group on Facebook, which is feeding me lots of ideas for more combinations. Today people started posting little hats and shawls that can go on the chickens…
I visited the Kaiser Infusion Center last week to get Reclast to treat my osteoporosis. This is the infusion center that I knit PICC line covers for, and when I told them I was one of their knitters a whole party broke out! There was cheering and general excitement all around, and when I mentioned emotional support chickens, they insisted on seeing the pictures. Yep. They want chickens.
One of my Facebook friends with systemic sclerosis has been accepted into a CAR T-cell therapy clinical trial. She will be receiving chemo and I’m going to send her a chemo hat and, (wait for it), a chicken!
What is CAR T-cell therapy, you ask? It is new technology that is now being adapted to address some autoimmune conditions, including systemic sclerosis. The video in the link above explains how it is used with cancer.

The Scleroderma Chronicles: Resilience

I’ve been thinking about resilience today after this graphic showed up on my Facebook feed.

What is SPIN you ask? It is the Scleroderma Patient-centered Intervention Network.

I’m pretty sure that I was one of the patients in this study. Certainly, I was a participant in a SPIN clinical research study during which I filled out lots of questionnaires about my illness. The focus of the project that I was enrolled in was to see if online educational videos about scleroderma, possible interventions to help with the progression of symptoms, and information about resources could help patients in how they coped. I was tracked for over a year to see how I was doing. How was my pain? How was my sleep? Was I depressed? How severe was my disease, and how did I feel about that? Did I have issues with anxiety? What were my scleroderma-associated complications?

Not surprisingly, the study referenced in the graphic found that they could break patients into 4 groups based on the severity of their disease (Low -> Very High). They found, for the most part, as patients dealt with an increasing disease burden, they coped less well and struggled with depression and anxiety more.

Except for one group of outliers. They had a pretty significant disease burden, but they were not depressed and didn’t struggle with anxiety. They kept rolling with the punches and finding ways to flourish even within the eye of the storm, securing for themselves a better quality of life than others facing the same challenges. I’m pretty sure that I am one of the people in this group of outliers. I remember that I reported that I was having lots of trouble with pain and sleep disruption, but no depression; my current battery of scleroderma-associated complications should put me into the High disease group. Here is a paper where the researchers further investigated the association between disease burden and mental health and resiliency.

I bought myself little roses last week. Look at how cute they are! They are under a red light, but you can still kind of see that they are a peach color.

So, the big question that the researchers are now pursuing is what determines resiliency, and how can these essential coping skills be conferred to other systemic sclerosis patients through training and support.

So, what is resiliency? That was the big question of the day for me as I worked out front weeding a garden. Working outside is now hard for me, but I dragged out a little chair to sit on, put my tools into a crate that was easy to push, and I slowly worked my way along the front walk cleaning up my garden and pulling out weeds. I had to take breaks to pant from time to time, but by the time I was done the gardens looked great! The weather was perfect, there were lots of birds, and one of my neighbors had music playing while he worked in his garage. After a little break on the catio with the cats (coffee and a lemon bar time!!), I strapped on my portable oxygen concentrator and mowed the front lawn. I’ve had a hard week, and I struggled to get myself outside to work in the yard, but by the end of all of this I felt much better. You might even say I felt happy.

Look at how nice the front pot of flowers is looking! I bought a new rug to put by the door onto the catio, Amazon delivered it today, and Hannah moved right in. Yay! Take that scleroderma!! I win the day!! I am happy!!!!

So, what is resiliency? I’m still stuck on that question. I’m pretty sure that it is a state of mind that allows people to focus on what can be done instead of what has been lost. Resiliency allows people to embrace their changing circumstances and effortlessly employ life hacks to get things done while acknowledging that other things are now too much. It must have to do with an ability to name the monsters, stuff them into a box, and put them on a shelf (in the back of the yarn stash) while activating self-advocacy. It must require faith that you will be able to cope with scary things when they come, while still recognizing that you are in a difficult situation. It must require support and resources. I think it has to be an internalized quality: resiliency gives you the self-confidence and self-worth that’s necessary to face down medical authorities and to ask for ~~demand~~ help and answers.

I look forward to what these researchers find as they continue looking at the phenomenon of the outliers: patients dealing with a severely debilitating and isolating rare disease with grace.

I kind of think that they will discover that these people have engaging interests that allow them to have a sense of accomplishment and purpose. I bet that they find that they have pets and people that they love. I bet that they produce something of beauty in their lives. I am almost certain that they will find that the outliers have found ways to communicate in a positive manner with others about the challenges of life with a progressive, and often fatal disease.

Why am I resilient? I have cats. I have yarn. I have curiosity and lots of resources to chase it. I have purpose as I produce donated items for others in difficult situations. I have roses. I have people who love me, and I have people who read my little posts about coping with life on the down slope of systemic sclerosis.

Thank you for being part of my resiliency system.