Teenage baller Kaden Hastings has a fit when his family moves to California. He can handle the new medical diagnosis that slowly eats away at his life, but when his parents separate him from his teammates and girlfriend to move him to California to...
Mirna tugs on my hand and leads me back toward the corner of the epilepsy group meeting room. "Okay, lie down flat on your back," she says.
She wants me to lay down? I'm surprised, but I do as she says and sit down, then lay back. The floor is kind of uncomfortable. That really thin carpet that doesn't offer much cushion at all.
Mirna comes down next to me. She sits on her knees and faces me. "Okay, diaphragmatic breathing is where you breathe from here." She grabs my hands and puts them on my stomach. The contact fills me with a giddy rush of adrenaline. "When you inhale, you need to feel it push your stomach up."
"What's the point of this?" I ask, because breathing doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would help my seizures go away, not at all.
Mirna scoffs. "The point is to teach you how to relax. When you breathe those tiny chest-breaths like that, you can't possibly relax. Relaxed people have fewer seizures, so you tell me, what's the point?"
"Jeez," I say, a reflex reaction to her harsh words. So, does that mean people who are not relaxed have more seizures? I think about how my life has been going lately. That could explain why things are getting so much worse. I haven't been able to really relax in half a year. "Okay," I say. So I give it a try and inhale as much as I can, trying to make our hands on my stomach rise with my breath. I stretch out my stomach so much it actually hurts. It surprises me to feel my chest twinge. "Ow," I whisper.
Mirna gives me a toothy grin. "It's hard at first, because you've been breathing wrong for so long that the muscles in your diaphragm are weak." She lies down next to me. "Make sure you breathe nice and slow. Feel your stomach rise and fall with each breath. Here, breathe with me." She takes an exaggerated breath, and I try to breathe with her. "Imagine the air flowing through you. Focus on that; think about only the breath."
I turn to watch her stare at the ceiling and breathe. "You realize how corny that sounds, right?" I can't help but laugh at her. She spots me watching her, but instead of looking away, I just smile back at her. She grins, too.
"Corny or not, if you spend at least ten minutes a day breathing like this, I promise you, you'll have less seizures."
"From breathing?" I can't let myself hope something as simple as this could actually help me. We breathe while we stare at each other.
"Prove me wrong," she says. "Do this every day this week to help relax you, and then make an effort to stay relaxed all day. Then try to tell me you didn't notice an improvement."
"What'll you give me if I prove you wrong?" I ask as I roll towards her and give her a smile.
Her cheeks go slightly pink. "You'll find out in one week." She touches my shoulder, but then she just gently nudges me back onto my back. "Now keep breathing."
I laugh as I let her push me to my back. Then I try to get serious and actually focus on my breathing. With Mirna laying right next to me, I start to feel pretty self-conscious. Am I doing this right?
Mirna clears her throat. "Okay. So while you are breathing you can release tension by doing what's called tension-releasing exercises. The idea behind this is to tense up on purpose so that you can completely relax all your muscles. You'll be surprised at how tense your muscles always are once you feel them really relax. Start with your feet. Then work your way up your body, tensing each muscle as you breathe in, hold it for a second, and then relax completely as you breathe out."
The lull in her voice could practically make me fall asleep. She sounds so grown up. She's younger than me, but far wiser than I am.
"Do you do this every day?" I ask her.
"Yup ... You really shouldn't talk when you do this."
I just try to breathe for a while as I tense up my feet like she told me too, but I realize now would be the perfect time to ask her what she does to stop her seizures, so I can't resist asking her. "You never explained what you do to stop your seizures?"
Mirna is quiet for a moment, and I turn my head to see her staring up at the ceiling with shiny eyes. "I do the mental image," she says finally. "You have to imagine yourself in a place where you can feel completely at peace. A place where you're truly happy. You can't just think about it. You have to really go there, with every cell in your body."
"Wow. So," I trail off, wondering where in the world I could possibly visualize myself. Any childhood memory would just make me mad that I had to move away. I don't know what makes me feel calm. "Where do you go?" I ask.
She turns her head and catches me watching her. "I imagine myself drawing on a beach. It's so real I can feel the wind and hear the waves and smell the salt on the wind."
That's a great idea. Drawing could really be my happy place. All I'd have to do is imagine a nice place, maybe a place far away from here, a place where I'll probably never get to actually go. It could be anywhere, and I could just sit there in my imagination and draw it. "That sounds nice."
"Think about it for a while. You'll come up with something nice too," she promises me.
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This chapter is one of the terms for this part of the book. Armatures are a wire support that holds a clay sculpture together, so it won't break apart. Does anyone want to have a chat about the deeper meaning behind that and how it relates to this scene with Mirna and Kaden? ^^
