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Today is April 11! This is no April Fools’ Joke. We’re Back in Business

 

from Presenter Media

Can you believe it?  Today is Monday, April 11, 2016. Winter and the month of March are officially over.  We are ten days past the traditional April Fools’ Day of April 1. So this post and the four announcements contained in it are no April Fools’ Joke. You can trust them. They are for real!  Some of the announcements are not as positive as I would have liked. However, they definitely represent a positive movement that was much in doubt through most of the past year. So without further ado, let’s get right to the announcements.

from Presenter Media
from Presenter Media

This first announcement concerns my health. It is a positive announcement since we made it past March and I didn’t have any new health setbacks. In previous posts I have explained that in each March since March 2009, I have spent at least one week in a hospital with some major medical problem.

However, since last Thanksgiving, I don’t think that I have fully explained to my blog audience my current experiences. In the week before Thanksgiving, I started feeling sets of two or three, very quick 120-volt, low-amperage electric shocks in many different areas of my body. After the shocks stopped, I would then feel a burning sensation at the location of the shocks which would last from a few seconds to almost a minute. The burning sensation would then take off, traveling a nerve path to another spot in my body. The burning sensation would settle in that spot and then morph into a normal type of pain for that location. For example, I would get three shocks, followed by a burning sensation in my left shoulder blade. After a short period of time, the burning sensation would travel up through my shoulder, down my arm, past my wrist and the back of my hand, before settling in the large knuckle of my left index finger. At this point, the burning sensation would change into an arthritic pain, which would last until I could work it out by massaging my knuckle.

The electric shocks are not a new experience for me. In January 2013, I began feeling electric shocks and burning sensations like this is my left pectoral muscle. They started slowly with one or two daily. However, by mid-March, the shocks increased in frequency and intensity to such an extent that my doctors were afraid I was having a heart attack. I was rushed to the hospital. After extensive testing, it was determined that I wasn’t having heart problems. I was having a gall bladder attack. My gall bladder was completely blocked with stones and so full of infection that it was playing havoc with other parts of my body. They laparoscopically removed my gall bladder and the electric shocks immediately stopped. My neurologists suggested that the electric shocks I experienced were what is called referred pain. This suggests the pain is originating in one location, but exhibits itself elsewhere. With that history in mind, my doctors began looking for any type of problem that they could find elsewhere in my body. After many tests, they couldn’t find anything seriously wrong with me.

The pattern of six or more shocking episodes continued daily for two weeks. Then one day during the first week of December, I woke up to a new experience. After the first episode of electric shocks and the associated burning sensation traveled a nerve path to settle into its final resting place, I started feeling severe paresthesia (the sensation of numbness or pins and needles) in that limb or area of my body. When I called my GP, he asked what my blood pressure was. When I told him it was unusually high, he told me to get to the ER. Of course, it had snowed the previous evening and our car was snowed in. Thus, my wife called the local ambulance service. When the EMTs arrived my blood pressure was 210/140 with a pulse of 110, and my A-fib was making my heart do flip-flops that weren’t being controlled by my pacemaker. My whole side was also numb and tingling like pins and needles. The EMTs wrapped me and immediately loaded me into the ambulance for a ride to the ER.

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I spent the next seven hours in the ER undergoing extensive testing. I had EEGs, EKGs, CAT-scans and x-rays. The ER doctor wanted to do an MRI. Although I have an MRI-compatible pacemaker, it can take days to arrange to have everyone necessary in the MRI imaging lab to conduct the MRI on me. You know you could be in trouble when the ER doctor says “You’re the most complicated and interesting patient, I have ever seen in ER.”   When the ER finally got my BP and heart palpitations under control with medications, but couldn’t control the electric shocks with additional pain and seizure medications, they sent me home with strict instructions to schedule an appointment with my neurologist and cardiologist as soon as possible. When I did see them, they increased my heart, pain and seizure medication dosages slightly again. When those changes produced only marginal results, the doctors began practicing medicine. They ordered more tests. Since two one-hour EEGs provided no useful information, my neurologist ordered a 48-hr EEG. The results of that test definitely suggested that I had brain activity when the electric shocks and burning sensations hit. The problem was that the activity was not located where the neurologists expected it be. This could have been due to the injuries my brain suffered during the several traumatic brain incidents that I have had, or to the plasticity of my brain in attempting to rewire itself to answer the demands that I keep placing on it.

My neurologist also ordered a two-test combination consisting of an NVC (Nerve Conduction Velocity) test and an EMG (Electromyogram), which provide information about abnormal conditions in one’s nervous system. In the NVC test nerves are stimulated with small impulses at one electrode while other electrodes detect the electrical impulses “down-stream” from the first electrode. If the impulses do not travel at the expected speed, then there is nerve damage in that area. In the EMG, needles are inserted in muscles in specific locations. By stimulating the muscles via these needles and measuring the response, any nerve damage can be spotted. Both tests were completely “normal.” This is good news and bad news. The good news is that I have no small or large nerve damage. The bad news is that this means my problems are most likely in my head.

from Presenter Media

As we progressed through February and March into April, I noticed one large improvement in my condition. I began having more extended periods of lucidity, when I could think and write. The shocks, burning sensations and pain have not gone away. However, I am becoming accustomed to them. After banging your head against a wall for so long, eventually you don’t feel it any more.

Thus, I am in a position to attack the large backlog of blog posts that I have accumulated, as well as the multitude of book-length manuscripts that I have outlined waiting for an opportunity to work on them. To readers of this blog, I covet your prayers and thoughts for continued long periods of clear thinking and a bountiful stream of meaningful words. 

 

from Presenter Media
from Presenter Media

Announcement No. 2 concerns the future of this blog By’s Musings.  This is the first posting for five months. At that time, I indicated that I intended to publish posts regularly. However, I wasn’t counting on the difficulties that I outlined in Announcement #1 above.  This time when I say I intend to publish posts regularly, I have taken additional steps to make sure that occurs. One of those steps is to invite a number of my friends and former colleagues to share guest posts. Later this week, the first guest post will be published. It has been written by Professor Erik Benson, from Cornerstone University. When I hired Erik in 2005, he immediately impressed me as a teacher who brought history to life in the classroom. You didn’t want to go to sleep in his classes because you never knew what you might miss. To Erik, history was not restricted to the classroom. He brought the field into the classroom and took history and the students out into the field. Over the intervening years, he has also impressed students, who voted him “Professor of the Year” in 2013. In addition, he has also impressed his colleagues as an integral part of the leadership team for the CU CELT, the Cornerstone University Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, since 2006.

The title of Erik’s guest post is “The Value of the Liberal Arts to the University.” It is already in the queue, ready to published at 5:30 am on Wednesday, April 13, while I am, hopefully, sound asleep. During my periods of lucidity noted above, I have completed the first draft of post that I have titled, “Education: A Public Good or a Private Good?”  I believe the answer to this seemingly innocuous question has deep ramifications that impact the control and cost of education in America. This refers not only to higher education, but to elementary and secondary education. I hope it will engender much discussion. It is in the queue to be published next Monday, April 18, at 5:30 am. This is an appropriate day for this posting since April 18 this year is TAX DAY!  (This is a public service announcement to remind all my readers of the source of funds for public education.)

from Presenter Media

To keep the blog publication ball rolling, I have two draft posts, entitled “My Life in an Amusement Park: Living on a Carousel and the Unit Circle Parts I and II”,  in the queue, scheduled to be published respectively on Monday, April 25 and May 2, at 5:30 am. The formula, x2 + y2 = 1, for the unit circle is the basis for much of mathematics. Surprisingly, it is also the basis for many aspects associated with a majority of amusement park rides. Who else but a mathematician would see the similarities between amusement park rides and the mathematics of the unit circle, and find them fascinating? In Part I of this post, I will explore many of the connections between the rides and the mathematics. In Part II, I will discuss why they are important in my life. Stay tuned to find out what carousels, roller coasters, tunnels of love, Tea Cup rides and the swing rides have in common, and why they are built on mutations and perturbations to the familiar formula for the unit circle.

 OOPS, I am so sorry readers, but we’ve gone far beyond the maximum number of words blogger gurus suggest for posts. For the remainder of the announcements, you will have to stay turned for the post, “We’re Back in Business, Part II.” which is in the queue to published on Friday, April 15, at 5:30 am. In that post I will cover Announcement No. 3, which concerns my coaching/consulting practice, Higher Ed By Baylis LLC, and Announcement No. 4, which deals with my website Higher Ed By Baylis. Thanks for staying with me and please come back for more.

 

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The consulting and counseling practice of Higher Ed By Baylis LLC is suspending operations indefinitely

This blog posting is first a very important announcement concerning the future of my dream to run an educational consulting and counseling practice in my forced retirement. It is secondly an admission that I have failed to live up to the desires that I expressed in my July 31, 2014 post entitled, An important announcement concerning Higher Ed By Baylis LLC and By’s Musings. In that post I noted that I was temporarily suspending HEBB LLC operations and curtailing posts on By’s Musings until at least the beginning of 2015. We are now well over half way through 2015, and I am coming back and announcing the indefinite suspension of the counseling and consulting practice of Higher Ed By Baylis LLC. I am closing up this portion of my dream, in order for me to accomplish at least something from the long list of things that I have wanted to do. After much prodding from my neurologist, I have finally agreed to concentrate only on my writing. Thus for the foreseeable future, I will spend my waking time writing books and posts for By’s Musings. I know that I have enough material to keep me busy because I have accumulated ideas for more than 40 books and more than 400 posts.

However, don’t worry! I may have been a slow learner, but I have learned this lesson well. I will not overwhelm you with these treatises all at once. I will dole them out, one at a time. I do not take this step lightly. I have had so many things that I wanted to do, and things that I believed the Lord had given me to do. However, the Lord has been teaching me daily that we are basically weak, and only He is strong. We can only accomplish what he allows us and enables us to do. Many of us believe that it is better to burn out for the Lord, rather than rust out. However, I have somewhat reluctantly come to the conclusion that neither option is what the Lord intends for us.

For the past six years, I have been suffering from severe fatigue. A plaque on my desk has turned very prophetic. It reads,

“When I works, I works hard.
When I plays, I plays hard.
When I sits, I sleep.”

For 45 years as a student, faculty member or administrator in higher education I lived the first two lines of that plaque. Early every morning, I was the first one in the office, with my ever present cup of coffee. I was also usually the last one to leave the office in the late afternoons or early evenings. I almost always took work home with me. However, given that schedule, I still managed to average ten hours a week in the gym playing basketball. One of the nicknames I picked up over the years was “ Old Iron Legs,” because I could play longer than the other players, most of whom were much younger than I. The gray hair and beard in the picture taken more than a dozen years ago may have fooled new opponents for the first two minutes on the basketball court. However, after just a few quick trips up and down the court, they realized that I came to play, and it wasn’t going to be easy to take advantage of this old geezer.

For the past six years, battling severe fatigue and other medical infirmities have restricted me to the world of the last line of the plaque. Six years seem like a long time. As a result of my neurological difficulties, one of the sensory dysfunctions that I am experiencing is not being able to hear string instruments. Instead of “hearing” such instruments playing music, I feel vibrations in various places in my body, or I see images of the sinusoidal waves of the sounds produced by the string instruments. I hear voices and other types of instruments perfectly well. You may ask, “How do you know what music is playing?” If the music is familiar, my brain translates the stimulus that the auditory receptors in my ears pick up into the vibrations or visual images that I perceive. Then my brain goes into the library of my memory banks and finds the particular music piece that is being played.

Although, I don’t sing aloud very often, so that others can’t hear my off-key singing, I have found comfort in singing silently the old gospel hymn, Just a Closer Walk with Thee. With a sovereign God in control, I don’t believe in coincidence. So it was a God moment, this past week, when at the funeral service for a friend we discovered that this hymn was part of the congregational singing. The presiding pastor explained that this hymn was the closing hymn of the last church service that my deceased friend attended the morning of the day he died. His wife asked that it be included as part of his service. I close this post with the words to that hymn:

I am weak, but Thou art strong,
Jesus, keep me from all wrong,
I’ll be satisfied as long
As I walk, let me walk close to Thee.

Refrain:

Just a closer walk with Thee,
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea,
Daily walking close to Thee,
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.

Through this world of toil and snares,
If I falter, Lord, who cares?
Who with me my burden shares?
None but Thee, dear Lord, none but Thee.

Refrain

When my feeble life is o’er,
Time for me will be no more,
Guide me gently, safely o’er
To Thy kingdom’s shore, to Thy shore.

Refrain

“Road Closed” image provided by PresenterMedia. Gray beard picture provided by Indiana Wesleyan University.

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An important announcement concerning Higher Ed By Baylis LLC and By’s Musings

I begin this post with a very important announcement: Due to health considerations, I am taking a hiatus from Higher Ed By Baylis LLC, and temporarily suspending its operations until at least the beginning of 2015. I plan on continuing my blog By’s Musings, posting as often as I can.

I have been so preoccupied with a number of things that I didn’t realize that it has been six months since my last post. During those six months, I have had to deal with a number of health difficulties. In addition, I have also experienced myriad feelings which combined the negativity of sadness, frustration, burden and concern, with the positiveness of joy, determination, encouragement and hope. More on the health difficulties and the cloud of feelings later in this post, and probably in subsequent posts. I am keeping the website and name going so that I can pick up operations again when I am able.  One of my last posts was a December, 2013 post entitled  Update on my Health .

The seven months since that post have been a journey. The headaches that began in October have continued constantly since this post. The intensity and location of these headaches vary throughout each day. Although there is no universally accepted definition or explanation of referred pain, my medical team believes that some of the headaches are referred pain, that is pain that is originating in one place and being expressed as pain in another location. For example, recently I wrenched my left knee when my foot slipped off a curb and my lower leg buckled. After a few minutes of very sharp pain in my left knee, the knee pain went away. Almost immediately, my continuing head ache switched locations from my left temple area to the area above and behind my right ear and increased its  intensity from a “4” on the pain scale to a “6”.

In my December health post, I mentioned that an October 2013 MRI indicated a new growth in the hole left by the removal of the meningioma in March 2009. A follow-up MRI in December 2013 showed no change from the October 2013 MRI. In consultation with an oncologist, it was decided that the best approach in handling the new growth was a one-shot, mega-dose of radiation. That treatment was scheduled for March 2014, and went off without any glitches. However, within the next two weeks, I had two unscheduled trips to the hospital ER. On both occasions, I was admitted and spent a couple of days in the hospital. The two ER trips were only marginally related to each other and the radiation treatment. As a result of these stays, my hospital admission’s “rap-sheet” lists the following problems: TIA, localized seizure activity, dangerously high fever, unidentified infection, severe reaction to medications, and extreme exhaustion.

Following my second discharge, I started writing a follow-up to my April, 2013, post “Beware the Ides of March.” However, I ran into a number of road bumps and detours. The first was an eye infection which greatly limited my ability to read or write. Since mid-April, my online computer time has been limited to one hour a day. That’s hardly enough time for me to read and answer my normal, daily email traffic. Currently, I have a backlog of more than 1000 unanswered emails, many of them unread. This weighs heavily on my mind, as I am afraid I will begin to lose contact with people and higher education.

The above hints at the reasons for my feelings of sadness and frustration. I have been working on this post for a whole week.   In many ways, higher education moves slower than a snail. But, in some ways, things are changing daily, if not hourly. There is so much reading that one must do to stay current. In the midst of these health difficulties, my mind has not shut down completely. I have accumulated more than 400 ideas for blog posts and essays.

Whenever I attempted to use pen and paper to flesh out these ideas, I find myself needing a reference that is buried in the bowels of my computer. After a few minutes of digging, my eyes become too tired to focus properly. I shut the computer down. Fighting a headache, I try to turn off my mind and take a nap. This post has taken me more than four days to bring to completion.

So much for the negativity. To finish this post on a more positive note, I am determined to recover and return to work and writing. I am thankful for God’s protection and care through trying times. I have had a number of doctors tell me there are no medical or scientific reasons to explain why I am still walking and talking. I may not be back to my pre-tumor condition. I may never get all the way back to that position. However, I pray that I can live as Paul commanded the Philippians to live:

“Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice.” (Phil 4:4, KJV),

or as the weeping prophet, generally assumed to be Jeremiah, wrote to the suffering Israelites,

“This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope.  It is of the Lord‘s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him. The Lord is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord.” (Lam 3:21-26 KJV).  

We should rejoice in the trying times as well as the good times, and seek Him at all times.

 

 

 

 

 

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Update on My Health

Friends, it’s been three months since my last post. It’s been a much longer absence than I intended. Three months may actually be the longest dry spell of writing in my entire career, not just my time as a blogger. I can’t ever remember any three month interval in which I did no serious or significant writing. It has been like I am in a boat, stuck in the middle of a lake, and I lost the winds in my sails. However, it is not as if I had run out of ideas on which to write. During those three months, I accumulated a list of more than 200 potential ideas for posts. However, during this period, whenever I sat down at my computer to write, something would happen and I could never finish my thoughts. Sometimes as I started to write, I couldn’t decide on the approach I needed to take to bring out the important aspects of the subject at hand. At other times, I would get into a topic and I found it had a mind of its own. It started going in a direction I didn’t want to go and I had to shut it down.

I finally decided to step up to the plate and follow the advice that, for years, I gave to scores of institutions that were struggling in the beginning stages of assessment programs. I would tell institutions to just pick an area and an approach, and then attack it. I would also suggest that after that first task was finished, the institution should celebrate its victory. The institution should then pick another topic, and go after it.  You make progress one topic at a time.

The first topic on which I have decided to write is an update on my health. I offer this posting, not as an excuse for the recent scarcity of posts, but as a partial explanation of my pain. It is also a request for your prayers and thoughts. The past five years have clearly taught me that God is a God of miracles, and not a God of my convenience. If not for the grace of God, I would not be writing anything. I have had six doctors in six different specialties tell me that there are no scientific or medical reasons to explain why I am still walking and talking, or even breathing.

After a life of excellent health, the past five years have been a long, trying journey. During this period, I have picked up a long list of problems which began with the rescission of a benign meningioma. This list of current conditions includes a mild case of aphasia, epilepsy,  abnormal involuntary movement (tremors), disturbed sensory perception (dysesthesia), organic hallucinosis (sensory hallucinations), fatigue, attention or concentration deficit, and mental status changes. These are complicated by another somewhat smaller list of conditions that I have picked up over the past ten years, independent of the brain tumor. This list includes atrial fibrillation and obstructive sleep apnea. Taken collectively these conditions have complicated my life and forced me to retire from full-time work within the academic world.

This fall as I strove to get my proposed coaching/consulting business, Higher Ed By Baylis LLC, and this blog, By’s Musings, off the ground, I have encountered some additional complications. Since the onset of my epilepsy four years ago, my seizures have been controlled by medication. However, earlier this fall I became concerned as I experienced several incidents of sensory overload, brought about by loud noise, quickly changing lights and my cross sensory perceptions. The confluence of these sensory experiences seemed to take me to the precipice of seizures. I developed intense headaches, became nauseated and momentarily lost track of where I was.

The intensity and frequency of headaches increased throughout the early fall until they reached their peak in mid-October. Thus, for the past eight weeks, I have experienced continuous headaches. The only things that change are intensity and location. I wake up with them in the morning. They wax and wane between “four” and “eight” on the normal ten-point pain scale. The headache moves around my head, fading out in one location, as it fades in at another location. As I wrote this paragraph, I found myself engaged in a metaphysical and grammatical argument: Am I experiencing one headache and I should use singular nouns and verbs; or is it many different headaches and I should use plural forms?

In an attempt to find answers, my neurologist ordered a DAT scan to determine if the tremors were related to the possible onset of Parkinson’s disease, and an MRI to determine if there have been any changes within my head. The DAT scan was negative. The good news from that report is that the tremors are not related to Parkinson’s disease. The bad news is the test doesn’t tell them what is causing the tremors. The results of the MRI were a little less positive. There is still a hole in my head where the tumor had been. There is still scar tissue approximately the size of a dime on my right frontal lobe where the tumor had been attached. Unfortunately, the new MRI showed some swelling in the surrounding area, along with a very small new growth within the hole. My neurosurgeon says that the growth and swelling are not extensive enough to be causing my headaches and other problems. However, any abnormalities in the brain area must be watched. Thus, I will have another MRI in three months. Depending upon the results of that MRI, it could be followed possibly by additional MRI in another three months to monitor the growth and swelling.

I know that God can heal me and I pray that He will do so. However, if God decides to do something else, I pray that I will be able to stand with Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Job and say, ” My God is able to deliver me from these medical problems. If he does, the glory goes to Him. However, if He doesn’t, I will still serve Him. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Please pray this prayer with me.

16 Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, answered and said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter. 17 If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. 18 But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up. (Daniel 3:16-18, KJV)

20 Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, 21 And said, Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. (Job 1:20,21, KJV)

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Living in the World of Visual Thinking

I can’t believe tha it’s been almost two years since I published the post Living in a Metaphoric World and Trying to Communicate with the Academy.  Although many things have changed, many have remained the same. In October 2011, I was living almost exclusively in a metaphoric and visual thought pattern world. Over the two intervening years, I have worked very hard to regain some of my life in the verbal, analytic, quantitative, and sequential thought world. Today in August 2013, the best I can say is that “Some days are better than others.”  This, of course, drove me to the U2 song, Some Days Are Better Than Others, particularly the verse

Some days it all adds up
And what you got is not enough
Some days are better than others.

When faced with any question, situation, or problem, my thinking still immediately goes to a picture or a scene. Prior to my TBIs, I would have attempted to formulate a verbal description, before piecing together a verbal, analytic, quantitative, sequential explanation or solution. Today, I begin with a picture around which I build a scene. I will then put together a storyboard, and eventually a script. It is as if I am scripting and directing a movie.

Some of my movie productions are visual travelogues, focusing on the scenery. Other productions are closer to documentaries, where I attempt to present a verbal description of what I see. In these I attempt to translate the pictures into words.  However, to use words, you have to have a ready supply of words. Here is where I experience the down side of aphasia. Sometimes I must struggle to find the best word. I know what I want to say because I see the pictures. Nevertheless, the right words don’t leap out at me as they used to do. It takes me back to one of my first posts, Words Are More Like Cats Than Dogs.

One criticism of living in a movie, is that one is always living in a fantasy, a make-believe world. It is not real. Having lived in this fantasy land now for more than two years, I would counter that living in a world of words, analysis, numbers and sequence, is not living in the real world either. The words, analysis, numbers and sequences are only representations of the real world. If analogies congeal into dogmas, metaphors and pictures are easily mistaken for reality. C.S. Lewis said that the danger of using a metaphor is not that it may be wrong, but that people forget it is an analogy and not necessarily reality.

Which is the better description of reality? Having been a resident of both worlds, my answer would have to be, “It depends!” James Geary, New York Times Bestselling author of “I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World” gives us an answer. The answer is that it depends upon the audience. In his book Geary introduces us to the concept of expectancy bias. Individuals bring their own biases to bear upon any communication. Those differing expectations will cause individuals to create their own interpretations of your story. However, you can help lead individuals in particular directions by the  words, analyses, numbers, sequences, pictures, and metaphors that you select.

What’s left to say? Quiet on the set! ACTION!

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An Unexpected Joy

One of my favorite bloggers, Tara Fall, in a recent series of posts on her blog “Finding Strength To Stand Again” raised the topic of resiliency. She did it with the seemingly benign question of whether there is something in some people that makes them more resilient than others.

One of the unexpected joys that I have experienced with my aphasia is the excitement of discovering new words or rediscovering lost words. When I read Tara’s post “Question and Answer Week 2-b,”  the word resilient just jumped off the screen at me. My immediate reaction was I know that word from my recent battles with epilepsy, hallucinations, dysenesthesia, and aphasia. However, I also had a feeling that I was missing something. My academic background kicked in and I started researching the concept of resiliency.

Very quickly, I realized what had bothered me with the word “resilient.” A number of different definitions are in common use. I found this somewhat ironic in that the same day I read Tara’s post, I became part of a discussion thread that involved academics and professional people from all over the world. The thread began with the question, “What is a professor?”

Immediately people jumped into the discussion arguing about whether the word represented a title or a job position. In the course of the thread, as happens so often in academic discussions, some one raised the question about the difference between colleges and universities. At this point a contributor suggested that what we needed were certain words with “reserved definitions” so that confusions like this would be avoided. My reaction was, “That would be nice, but it isn’t going to happen.”

Returning to the word resilient, the first use that came to my mind was the ability to take a blow or weather the storm and bounce right back up. The victim comes back stronger than before. We see it in television commercials and news reports all the time. We are reminded of the 9/11 tragedy and the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. Immediately after the Boston Marathon Bombing, news reports, especially sports reports, highlighted the idea of being Boston-strong. Every evening, we are reminded that the New Jersey shore is open again for tourists, because “we’re stronger than the storm.” We’ve seen the same sentiment in New Orleans and Oklahoma.

What were the other definitions and questions that were running around in my head? The first involved the research that I had done about the idea of neuro-plasticity in relation to my situation. In my readings I found a number of scientists who said that my condition “was what it was, and I should learn to live with it.” Other scientists said that it was possible for people to change their brains to relearn skills or learn new skills to replace the ones that were lost. In a sense, this was a type of recovery. However, the scientist took great pains to emphasize that it wasn’t the former individual. In a real sense, it was a new individual. This is a slightly different view of resiliency. It still holds some hope for victims that they can become new individuals with new skills that in some sense may replace the ones that they lost. However, they will not be their “old selves.”  They will be someone different with different strengths and skills.

Many of the neuroscientists  I read concerning brain plasticity, referenced a new growing science of resiliency. As I researched this, I found it has quite a following among environmentalists, entomologists, and medical researchers studying bacteria and viruses. For these scientists, the primary idea is that one species or environmental state changes or evolves in ways that ensure the survival of the species or environmental state. Resiliency refers to the survival of the whole, not the survival or well-being of the individual. I am still trying to figure out what this has to do with neuro-plasticity.

More research on resiliency lead me to a fourth definition. This definition came from the popular psychologists associated with Psychology Today. In a series of posts they suggested that pyschology has identified factors that make some people resilient, while others wilt under pressure. The resilience factors were an optimistic outlook on life. These individuals are almost always positive. They have the power to regulate their emotions. This struck me hard. Prior to my TBI, I was always known as being even keeled, with my emotion under control. After the TBI with damage to my right temporal lobe, I have much more trouble controlling my emotions. I erupt much more easily. The third attribute of resilient people was that they could accept criticism  well, and could see failure as a form of helpful feedback. When Edison was asked if he was discouraged when experiment after experiment failed when he was trying to invent the light bulb, his answer could have been the battle cry of the resilient ones: “Of course not. I now know a thousand things that won’t work. I will soon find the one that works.”

But I wasn’t done with resiliency. Some lines from a hymn kept playing in my head. As usual, I had only part of the words, so I had to do a search to find the hymn. The words that were echoing in my head were, “When sea billows roll.,” I was more than slightly embarrassed when I discovered it was one of the most popular hymns of all of Christianity, “It Is Well with My Soul.”  

The words of the first stanza are

When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll; Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to know [say], It is well; it is well with my soul.

The story behind this hymn involves a tragic sea accident. The words were written by Horatio Spafford just after he got a telegram from his wife informing him that only she was safe. She had to tell him that all four of his children were killed when the ship on which they were traveling to Europe sank. Spafford was a modern day Job. Almost everything he loved was taken from him. His response was “Praise be to God.”

I don’t believe that it is inherent to us. It is a gift of a loving father to his children. If we accept God’s grace, we like Job can say,

…, ‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’ (Job 1:21 KJV)

This final type of resiliency is a resiliency built upon faith in a power outside of ourselves. I have seen it my life. I can truly say, “We serve a God of miracles, not a God dedicated to our convenience.” We should reply with our tears, like the father asking Jesus to heal his sick child. When asked if he believed,  the father replied,

Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. (Mark 9:24b KJV)

“Lord, give me your resiliency. Help me in my unbelief.”