Dear Ada -

I agree with so many of your points. Over the last three years or so (not just at the point we transitioned from BT) we have lost a lot of serious participants. And BT was a more compelling environment - even if the mods weren't as carefully neutral as they are today. And for those many of you who weren't there, the factional politics could be intense. I miss all those folks, Artist, Vicc, Condor, Kit Deluca, Lisa, Roz and yes, Theresa. Just to name a few. What folks here probably can't appreciate was that we often had threads going on with 50+ entries and 1,600 hits. Of course, I always to the more serious topics while others liked their fantasy "Road Trips," but that was just a matter of taste.

And where did they all go? Well, some folks passed on, others got sicker and sicker and then we didn’t hear from them again, and then a lot of people just seemed to move on of their own accord and before you knew it, there went some of the critical mass. That said, it's great to see Rosie posting again!

If there was one big difference, it was the issue of institutional memory. And not just what was inthe heads of the people who had been there the longest. GUYS: there is a search key up at the top of the page. Use it. We love it we new folks come on, and are happy they've found the place and can tell there story. That's great. But if you want to use this place as a search engine, please, consider starting with the search function in the blue bar above, hit "advanced search," list this form and then just search by titles of posts. You will be surprised how much stuff is out there.

Now, as to the subject of your post, we have to be careful because the board's rules are very touchy on this of all subjects. Let me just make two points. Jim Broatch, the Executive Director of the RSDSA make no bones about the fact that most of his endowment comes from memorials. Okay? Secondly, here and off the board I have had too much experience with this issue in the chronic pain population. A young women in her twenties, married, but just a kid, her father was a magistrate in the Cincinnati area. She also wrote very beautifully and yet her poetry was so vulnerable she reminded me of a college girlfriend with a depression issue who had died about18 months after I last saw her. Of course, this young lady couldn't find anyone who would treat her on account of her age and a prior substance abuse history, way predating the RSD, so I tried to be helpful and encouraged her family to take her across the state to the Cleveland Clinic. Forgot to tell her though that it was important she be seen by Michael Stanton-Hicks, MD. As if was, she made a clinic appointment, and some young guy blew her off in 10 minutes, no way they would touch her. She posted about the disaster as soon as she got home, I sent her a PM apology and then nothing, for a couple of weeks, until a lady on whose board my friend assisted in wrote in to tell us that she had died, attaching a copy of the funeral notice from the local paper, name of her folks, her husband, her age, 25.

With what I know now, I should have made an MBSR program the first priority. Heck, today I can teach meditative coping skills myself. But I didn't see it then. So yeah, that one hurt.

Another friend of mine, much more senior in every respect, was going mad with cancer pain, and the palliative care physician said they had done everything they could for her, where she was already on a Dilaudid pump! One day she quietly checked out of the hospital to OD at home. Except that two things happened: she was so endured to heady meds that a six month supply of everything just put her to sleep for a couple of days. And when she woke up, she was feeling better! Turned out her team of top doctors had missed what should have been an obvious case of "hyperanesthesia" and she was consuming so many opioids, they actually started to magnify her pain! Bottom line, she got several more months if bearable pain to spend with her grandchildren until her cancer became unbearable again, only this time it finally took her.

Bottom line: you never know when relief - in whatever form it may take - may be just around the corner. And if it's just in ever deepening acceptance and grace, that's no tragedy. Will I always (or let's be real) will I generally feel this way? I don't know. I hope so.

Mike

P.S. I am only responding here to your first post, just saw your second as I posted and have to run without reading it for the timebeing.