Time Marches On...

After an absence of more than a year, I resume my writing with an apology to those faithful followers who kept visiting this blog site in hopes of recent news. I took a sabbatical to finish my studies in Traditional Chinese medicine hoping to acquire the knowledge to bring you more health, more wellness, more balanced lives.

I graduated in May, took the Medical Boards in August, received my license to practice in the state of California in October, and have been busy practicing what I learned with great success.

I have used my free time to reconnect with family and friends. To give my body the nurturing I denied it, while cramming for tests and spending so many hours studying. I told myself, I have many years ahead of me to set up new goals, and started by planning to run a marathon next year. I started an exercise program. I hired myself a trainer, and implemented a nutrition plan which will do me the most good and which I counsel my patients to follow. I am still growing!

Then today, I was forced to acknowledge the passage of time. Since Sunday, I noticed threads obscuring my vision in my right eye. Thinking it was hair from my bangs, I kept slapping my hair away from my face. Monday at work, I was too busy to notice much, but in two occasions I saw them again and thought they were due to a scratch on the lens of my glasses. But this morning, when I left my bed without my glasses on, I noticed I could still see them. I moved my eye up, down, right, left, inward down, inward up, outward down, outward up and the darned things followed every movement. "Holy Moly! I thought with some trepidation, these are FLOATERS!"

Even though these flecks of protein or collagen floating in my eye were not accompanied by loss of vision or flashes of light, I still thought I should have my eye checked as soon as possible. Luckily, I was not working today, so I called the Ophthalmologist for an urgent appointment. "Dr. Yamamoto," my eye doctor for 30 years, is cutting down his hours, but his son, the awkward teenager I used to run into, could see me later in the afternoon. He is a doctor now? I thought. That should have been the first red flag. Well, actually the second, the floaters were the first.

After having my eye dilated and checked, I got the good news from "Yamamoto Junior" that there was no retinal tear, no bleeding inside the eye, and no dreaded retinal detachment. " They are benign, he said with a smile, a sign of your age."

WHAT??? I have no diabetes, no high blood pressure, no loss of energy, no depression. Didn't I just say, I will be running a marathon next year? I am starting a new career and put in 12 hour work days without a flinch. I am planning new dreams and setting new goals, and working hard at them like a twenty year old. I do not even get headaches, for Pete's sake. But, now I am old enough to get floaters as a benign sign of my age? As Ausonious, I have strived to never know what old age is, and have never counted the years. This has been a rude awakening.

Well, I will show my old decrepit body who's boss. As I type this post, I am brewing a very concentrated ginger decoction, I have acupunture needles on my right eye, strategically located at Yu Yao, GB1 and Tai Yang to benefit my eye. I will start a daily regimen of Korean red Ginseng and a little Lu Rong to tonify and strengthen my Qi, Yang, Yin and Blood. I will make Francis Bacon's words my anthem, "I will never be an old man (or woman). To me, old age is 15 years older than I am." Yes, I will. Thank goodness, stubborness is a trait old age cannot steal away.