College Update

 It's still rather amazing that my sixteen year old has 52 college credits and has already completed four semesters of college and been on the honor roll every semester!  There are times that his asynchronous development socially/emotionally still shocks me, but I think the gap is narrowing.  He'll turn seventeen in a week. For years I've said that he has an eight year spread, that he acts four years younger socially/emotionally and four years older academically (12 y.o. / 20 y.o. right now). But I think the gap is narrowing as I watch him slowly mature... I think that my 17 year old is really closer to a six year spread (14 y.o. / 20 y.o). That might not seem super different, but the feel is definitely changing. My kiddo is growing up. I'm including both his beginning of the year writing sample and the update I just sent to his educational team.

Beginning of the year writing sample:

(Cameron responded to this prompt because the high school needed a beginning of the year writing sample even though he's taking only college courses… um, leave it to my child to incorporate Morgoth, the evilest of evil gods in Lord of the Rings.)😂 

1. Should mental health days be incorporated into the school year calendar? Explain your reasoning.  

Mental health is a very serious concern. It heavily affects how we act, how productive we are, and much more. Despite this, the majority of schools fail to incorporate them. This is especially unforgivable because they assign a wide variety of tasks that are very stressful and damaging of mental health. Schools should have mental health days to alleviate stress, and by extension support mental health. 

       School's time commitment can be quite stressful. This is partiality because school demands in person attendance for about 6 hours every week day. A former student in a public middle school once said "school starts at 8:30 and ends at 2:30, and I often work 4-6 more hours every day after that. I feel deathly tired and wish they would stop torturing me with their endless workload"(Miner Cameron 9/8/20). Our beleaguered student also proceeded to enter online college courses where he was forced to witness his beloved home become the site of 6-8 daily hours of pain, with weekends no longer being a place of beloved rest and freedom. This college student has been known to say "I am very tired and stressed after this commitment, I hope I enjoy sweet release sometime soon"(Miner Cameron 9/8/20). This time commitment is clearly very stressful.

      School's variety of assignments are very stressing. The average student at the intrepid Mr. Miner's middle school had seven different classes, with five of them assigning materials weekly, and giving major projects about once a month. The constant, unending effort of completing spelling tests, math homework, history quizzes, math quizzes, health quizzes, and too much more is the kind of agonizing pain that crushes a child. There were at minimum 7 assignments to complete every week often more. There was also the looming horror of the major projects and exams; assignments that would be very dangerous to fail. This was especially daunting when our valiant Mr. Miner entered college, and was faced by 75% of his grade being evenly divided into three major exams, showing the horror of failure on any exam, and similar percentages being assigned into exams, honing the stress onto a single day. There were often similar numbers attached to english courses that would assign massive papers, worth, when combined with each other, 70% of the grade in their own right. The stress of the potential failure of such a major assignment hung over our hero almost constantly.

     School's importance also leads to stress. Our determined adventurer was faced with repeating grades, and severe parental disapproval if he failed to pass his courses. If he missed just one, his family would ritually sacrifice him to Morgoth, a very painful fate indeed. He also held the importance of school to a high standard of his own accord, and would be very unhappy to have such a poor showing. Thus it is highly stressful to run this gauntlet of potential failure so often.

     Schools should have mental health days. This is because school has a hefty time commitment, a large amount of very stressing assignments, and an importance that inherently gives it stress. As such, there should be preventative measures to ensure that this stress doesn't lead to a mental breakdown, and by extension getting sacrificed to Morgoth. As a helpful preventative measure, mental heath days should be included for this reason. With this knowledge the viewer can have a good case against the enemies of mental health days.

As I am Cameron Miner, I can cite myself as much as I like without using any citations

Status update for his team:

Hello team,

Cameron is now six weeks into his fifth college semester and things are going great. 

He had a bumpy start. He did wind up dropping that Calculus2 course after working incredibly hard to fill in the unexplained gaps. (He managed to get his “review” grade up from 25% to 55%.) We’re still not sure how he had so many gaps when he received an A in Calculus1, but the courses were from different sources and he’ll be working to be more prepared for Calculus2 next semester. (He substituted an accelerated psychology course that’s going great.) He also had a bumpy start with Spanish. Again, his online communication wasn’t taking into account how easy it is to miscommunicate tone in an email. With some parental coaching, he got that sorted out. 

He is getting A’s in Spanish, geography, and psychology. He got a D on his first physics test, but he is getting a B in the course and will be evaluating what errors he made when the teacher releases that test (because he had thought he would get an A-/B+ when walking out of it). Overall, after the bumpy start, he has been taking responsibility for doing all his coursework and clarifying questions independently.

Outside of school he has been loving this resource for socializing (Catalyst groups https://brightandquirky.com/catalyst-join/ ) and done a bit of climbing. He still misses live chess games and martial arts.

As usual, please do contact me if you notice an area where he is failing and needs assistance. Thank you so much for all the teaching and nurturing!

Warm regards,

Rachel

Migraine Thoughts

I was recently asked for my advice about migraines and I was struggling unsuccessfully to give a few sentences. So, here’s a brief brain dump on my experience with migraines and my thoughts.

My experience

About twelve years ago I started having periods of nausea with headaches. For the first year, I assumed it was thyroid related and did a bunch of labs / trials involving thyroid hormones without any success. I then went to a neurologist who diagnosed migraines and prescribed Sumatripitan and Aleve with every headache.  She said that I should always take them together because one addresses the neurotransmitter issue and the other the inflammation (taking one without the other would leave one of the issues and likely lead to a rebound migraine). That medication combo has worked for me for over a decade. But, she had no idea what caused the migraines and no suggestions except to take the meds and work to identify my personal triggers. I discovered that gluten was either a cause or powerful trigger for me; my migraines went from several headaches a week to several headaches a month. I found heat, motion sickness, poor sleep, stress, menstruation, and synthetic fragrances were triggers for me. I work to minimize those issues as much as possible. Luckily, all the other common food triggers including red wine, cheese, and chocolate were not triggers for me.  I have not found whever cause(s) remain that make me susceptible to migraines.  Migraines are a symptom diagnosis. Like hypertention, a symptom is described but not its cause.

Difference between causes and triggers

Whatever has lowered the threshold in my brain so that I still experience 3-4 migraine headaches each month is the cause of me getting migraines. It is likely multifactorial, so I should say, those combined factors are the cause. I do not know what they are. Over the last decade I have eliminated or ruled out many of the typical causes, but I have not found anything that has cured my migraines.  I have identified many triggers that can start a particular migraine headache and minimizing those has definitely made a huge difference in lowering my frequency of ill days.

Complicating factor: Mast Cell Activation Syndrome

According to my labs, I have Mast Cell Acgtivation Syndrome (https://mastcell360.com/what-is-mcas/). I have not found following that path very useful because the end advice is to focus on eliminating the cause for the immune system’s mast cells being overactive. I am already looking for the cause of the migraines, so I haven’t found this path to useful, but others may.

Game Plan

I have a treatment (that medication combo) that patches my migraines and I am overwhelmingly greatful to pharmaceutical companies and conventional medicine for rescuing me from hundreds of days of pain, nausau, and misery over this last decade. I have worked with a functional medicine doctor to gradually explore a huge variety of potential causes. In my case, my migraines are not causes by heavy metals, SNPs (https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/genomicresearch/snp), mold toxicity, parasites, Lyme, Epsein-Bar, root cannal infection nor a host of other common issues that are found to be root causes. I will continue to search for root causes and work with my awesome functional medicine practitioner: https://kresserinstitute.com/meet-the-adapt180-health-team/  I will not puruse the more extreme treatment interventions that can have massive side effects, because I have a current treatment that has been working beautifully for me for a decade.

Advice

So, if you’re dealing with the agony of migraines. I would suggest seeing a neurologist and getting some kind of medication that can rescue you. I would suggest finding a functional medicine doctor that will help you work through the process of hopefully identifying a root cause. (May you have more luck than I have!) I would be deeply kind to yourself because this is a symptom diagnosis that can be tricky to pinpoint and so frustrating.  I would focus on your values and the wonderful things that bring you joy in life because tracking a symptom illness that can be patched with medication is only worth so much of your time.  Happy living!

Beauty on our Twentieth Aniversary

Crested Butte was definitely a perfect place to celebrate our twenty years of marriage and cherish time together!

Andrew dubbed Soupçon the best meal he'd ever had in his life and what an overwhelmingly delightful experience to kick off our celebration!

(Also the most expensive meal, but what an experience! The sommelier and chef came and chatted with us between every course and ohhhhh the courses!)

This is the sommelier talking talking us through the pairings!

A few snuggly photos at the end of the evening (three plus hours later)

The menu (but we also have a hand written recipe for gruyere gratin potato and there were several items in addition to the official menu)

Morning wild flower hike

Ending up at Bush Creek

An afternoon of rest and an evening of delight at Django's!

Next morning wild flower hike

Aspen Forest

Forest Stream

Wildflower meadow

Hint of the Aspen shimmer

A Bit more wildflower beauty

Exploring some back roads... um, getting a wee bit dusty!

Sound of Music moment near the top of Washington Gulch

And today we moseyed home and found our sixteen year old had done an awesome job of keeping house and was thrilled to see us! But, maybe that was because we walked in with two, large, pepperoni pizzas!

Here's to delightful celebrating and delightful home-coming.

Feeling Super Stressed! What should I do now?

Feeling super stressed! What should I do now?

I’ve recently been asked this question by a friend who was going through a rough spot and found herself unable to relax, sleep, chill-out. I thought I’d share my quick thoughts here. There is so much research around the way the body adapts to chronic stress in a way that leads to physiologic anxiety and your body actually needs to get retrained.

Invest thirty minutes each day.

My first thought was, get five minutes of “meditation” three times a day. I put meditation in quotes because I mean whatever mindfulness practice works for you that is neurologically soothing. Some people love the Headspace app. Some people love a moving meditation (Qi Gong, mindful walking, Feldenkrais). Some people can just close their eyes and visit a favorite spot in their mind, gently coming back when their thoughts wander. Whatever it is that works for you, give yourself these three moments of peaceful soothing each day.

Second thought, fresh air and sunlight for at least ten minutes. Whether that’s a city courtyard or country road, get outside for a stroll and breathe that nature feeling. It’s powerful stuff. I’m not going to put a ton of references, but PubMed is easy to search.

Finally, do a brain dump of all the things you find soothing and spend at least five minutes on one of them each day.

There you have it. Thirty minutes each day invested on retraining your nervous system that is out of practice in soothing. If you spend 16 hours every day practicing neurological-high-rev and zero soothing, it’s no surprise that that’s what your system learns and it gets bad at doing the soothing path. 

Then, all those to-do items? They can be approached from your wise frontal cortex, not your freaked out amygdala... the human brain is awesome!

Photo of a favorite place to breathe that "nature feeling" a few years ago