My body features an unforgettable SCAR, rather than a fashionable TATTOO

August 17, 2026

 

 

This scar, on my left leg, is what remains from the nasty wound I received on July 13, just over a month ago.

URANUS RETURNS (story): Yesterday’s hysterical “adventure” resulted in bleeding wound.

I spent about three weeks caring for this wound, delicately administering a healing salve and then covering it, twice daily, with time off each day for about an hour of sunlight. Others who saw it were surprised I didn’t go to IU Urgent Care for stitches. But I wanted to do it my way. It’s so damn interesting watching my brilliant body heal itself, how it goes about it. And I knew I would have to take great care, lest the wound become infected. At one point I even snipped off what had shriveled into dead skin.

Anyway, I bring this up here because I realized yesterday that this scar is probably not ever going away. And with this realization, sudden illumination, to wit:

I will designate this scar as my version of a tattoo, except that it’s not something deliberately stamped onto the skin, but what the body did to heal an accidental skin wound. Much more interesting than any tat!

And what fascinates me, is that the shape of this scar reminds me of Lake Baikal, in Siberia. Similarly shaped, long and irregular.

I traveled to Siberia and Mongolia back in 2017 and on that journey, camped for a few days on the shore of Lake Baikal.

While there we participated in an unforgettable shamanic ceremony.

Siberia/Mongolia, 2017

I will carry this scar, this memory map, happily, for as long as I live.

NAVIGATING HEALTH as an 83-year old “contrarian,” an apparently endless saga

August 15, 2026

Yesterday, I walked over to a nearby IU Health Urgent Care Center to ask a question about my health records. I was referred to “My IU Health patient portal.” So I went into that website today, and all I came across was my wrist fracture from 2024.

The reason I walked there to ask in the first place was because I recently (finally) went to a “holistic” MD to speak to her about my situation: 83 years old, take care of my own health, no meds, no doc, etc. Told her about the (brief, and ultimately absurd), long ago, “health crisis” I underwent, where, after a CT scan, I was told I had “cysts in both ovaries and a large mass in the uterus with a larger blood supply than we’d like to see.” (Plus, it turned out, “a 6-inch growth in the pancreas.” What? No. That was a mistake. It was actually in the liver, “where it’s probably no big deal.”)

I told the holistic doc that this drama began the longer saga of agreeing to see a doc once a year for a pelvic ultrasound: to determine whether or not especially the “large mass in the uterus” was growing. That doc died just prior to my fourth appointment. . .

I had told her from the start that I assumed it was NOT growing, since I had likely had all of these “peculiarities” (i.e., my brilliant body had found these ways of successfully absorbing massive stress) since child-bearing age. . .

— see 89-page e-book On Mothering —

. . . and that I would likely die WITH them, rather than OF them. 

 

I currently seek official records of that strange, unusual for me, long ago medical adventure, and remembered that I had written about it, and what followed, in what transmogrified into a multidimensional, multidisciplinary multi-everything “perspective,” starting back when the event occurred, and writing on and on, for months! Clearly, I cannot help but be interested in, even utterly determined, both personally and culturally, to bridge and ultimately integrate, unify, make whole again, the utterly false and horrifically tragic Cartesian split between mind and body!

BACK WHEN I WAS DYING (1)

Aha! So I see now that happened in 2008, eighteen years ago! Actually, I doubt IU health keeps records for that long.

I had thought I’d see if I could resurrect that old CT scan, because I’m going to have another pelvic exam as soon as a new gynecologist comes to town that the female doc I consulted says is worthy of my trust. Might as well, eh? Even though there have been no changes as far as I can detect.

Just trying to be “responsible” for my health. But actually, maybe I should just forget the whole endeavor. I’ve done so well with non-allopathic ways of being with my body that what am I “worried” about? Or am I  “worried.” No. Not really. I will die when I die. And meanwhile, I will live.

Paralyzed, nerve-damaged, inventor son Colin Cudmore and I will share a meal downtown late this afternoon, to “celebrate”  (the eve of) the three-year anniversary of what I call Colin’s Catastrophe, which occurred on August 16, 2023, the exact day my transit Uranus returned for the first time, to begin its saga of moving over first my Moon, then Uranus (exactly opposite Mars), and finally Saturn — in the 6th (Virgo’s natural) house that governs daily health routines . . . for me, two full hours of “physical culture” (four-mile walk, yoga, chikung, taichi, intermittent fasting 18/6, no processed food, etc.). This eruptive Uranian procession over the most stressful part of my chart (transit Uranus at 5° currently approaching Saturn) not to finalize until March 2028, when we plan to (or finalize plans to) move from Bloomington to be with brother Sean in Colorado.