At 12:50 this morning, I finished the book, Apart at the Seams.  It’s due today.  I just need to clean up a few things here and there, and then I’m ready to release it to the publisher.  As much as I have loved it, as much as there has been a lot of happiness in writing this story, it has also weighed so heavily on me for the last four months since I started this edit that there hasn’t been a day when I’ve woken up without a stomachache.

And now, this is exactly how I feel as I let it go: not a sadness in the release, but an absolute peace that this thing that has been dragging down my heart finally doesn’t have a hold on me anymore.

I really hated that version of “Let it Go” that was popping up on Facebook last week where the person redubbed it with the words “fuck it all.”  Because that’s not what Elsa is saying.  She isn’t rejecting her power, casting it off.  She’s embracing it by letting it go, by not restricting herself, and allowing herself to love this thing that has brought her so much heartache.

So I do love the book.  And I hope you guys love it too.  And I am so thrilled to let it go.

As of this morning, my back is starting to feel better.  Or really, they finally found an anti-inflammatory drug that worked so while the pain is technically still there, I can get by on just taking the anti-inflammatory drug during the day.  I don’t totally feel like I did yesterday when I wrote this and slept on it.  But I decided to post it anyway.  Tread lightly.

I am not a good nurse.  I mean, yes, I will bring someone tea exactly the way the person wants it.  I will watch a friend’s kids or run errands or make a meal.  I am good at performing the tasks that make up taking care of another person, but I am a terrible nurse.  It’s almost as if I have an empathy bank, with life-threatening illnesses accounting for the vast majority of my caring withdrawals.  When illnesses such as colds or headaches apply for a caring loan on top of their meal, my empathy bank usually stamps rejected across their application.  Come back to me if you can’t keep down food for three days, or if the pain becomes chronic.

It’s not as if I am any more empathetic towards myself.  Even on Day 8 of intense back pain, I was whispering to myself that my own caring loan application had been rejected and I may want to seek sympathy someplace other than my own mind.  I really hated my inability to get better, to suck it up, to ignore the shooting pain that was traveling from the upper right quadrant of my back, up my neck, down my arm, numbing my fingers.

Either the painkillers made me depressed or being in continuous pain for 8 days made me depressed.  But by Day 8, I was thoroughly depressed; not wanting to talk or see anyone.  I just wanted to sit by myself, with my pain, focusing all my energy on hating both it and myself.  I hated being out of my routine.  I hated not being able to play Candy Crush because even sweeping my numb finger across a screen made me gasp.  I hated sleeping so much and missing out on my life.  I hated everyone who could move easily.  Hated myself for hating everyone who could move easily.  And hated myself even more when I thought about all the times I didn’t give enough of an empathy loan for someone in continuous pain.  Sure, I made them a meal.  I watched their kids.  But I didn’t feel enough sympathy for what that person must have been going through, emotionally.

I’ve been lucky because it’s been nine years since I’ve been sidelined by pain.  It’s not to say that I haven’t felt pain in the last nine years, but my little Puritan heart has been good at berating myself to suck it up and keep going.  This is the first time in nine years where my pain has been more powerful than my rational, no-nonsense, practical ego.

It scares me to age; to think about how things like pain will be more common as I move deeper into middle age.  It scares me to think about how poorly I’ll cope with a lack of mobility, or even having my body ask to take a one day break from my normal routine.

Being in pain has made me think about myself as a nurse and myself as a patient.  That perhaps I need to restructure my empathy bank so it’s a little less stingy with granting loans.  Maybe it will lend out a little unnecessary sympathy and get screwed in the process, but more likely than not, those applicants asking for sympathy deserve whatever I can give.

That includes granting myself my own sympathy loan.  To asking for help, even though it kills my little Puritan heart to ever ask for help.  To allowing myself the right to sleep and heal without guilt.  To acknowledging that when you’re in intense pain, life is going to change.  It’s not going to look like your daily life.

This is an apology for all the times I haven’t been patient enough.  For all the times I asked the stupid question or gave you unhelpful advice or made a suggestion that made you want to punch me in the face.  For all the times when I haven’t given enough care; because nursing is about more than just making tea or taking someone’s kids for an afternoon.  It’s about the mindfulness behind that act, and I got a lot of that these last two weeks that I don’t think I necessarily deserved based on my own stinginess in the past.

This is also a thank you to all the people who checked in and helped out; even though I was a complete dick about it.  I’ll use the excuse that it was the pain itself that made me ungracious and short-tempered.

And a special note to my body: I’m sorry I berated you.  I’m sorry I don’t appreciate you enough when you’re working well.  I promise I won’t skip weeks of yoga in order to make a work deadline.  I won’t treat you as if you’re expendable.  You have a way of popping up and demanding attention to remind me how necessary you are.

It’s a funny word; calling someone in need of care a patient.  It is hard to define myself as a patient, harder still to accept a situation with patience.  I want this pain over with so I can get on with the rest of my life.  I miss the daily grind.  I miss helping with homework and washing the kitchen floor and changing the guinea pig’s cage.  All those things that used to get in the way of the other things I wanted to do; I miss them now that I’m in a place where I can’t do the mundane.

I’m sorry; this is a whiny post.  Prior to two weeks ago, if it came across my desk at the empathy bank, I would have stamped rejected across it.  But now, I’m more prone to spend a little time reviewing the file, wondering what it really costs to grant the loan.  Not much.

And in all of this, I’m scared as I get well that I’ll forget to be patient with others and myself.  It’s easy to remember these lessons when you’re still sidelined by pain.  It’s harder to remember them when you feel well enough to return to normal life.

When I was in seventh grade, I had the most gorgeous social studies teacher.  Since he still teaches in the county (yes, I Googled him) and has an easy-to-find name, we will call him Mr. Cohen.  Mr. Cohen looked like a young John F Kennedy.  My dad had a book about John F. Kennedy’s presidency, and I liked to borrow it and sit on my bed, staring at this one picture that closely resembled my middle school teacher.

I still remember all of the quotations he would scrawl across the board.  Lord Acton’s “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  A song we wrote to remember all the amendments to the Constitution.  And the look that he got on his face when he discussed the Protestant work ethic.  It was clear, at least to someone like me who studied his facial expressions as much as I studied world history for his class, that he liked the concept of the Protestant work ethic.  And by G-d, if this man liked the Protestant work ethic, then this little Jewish girl was going to work her fingers to the bone in order to impress him by being even more Protestant than the Protestants.  I was going to out-Protestant work ethic them.  I was going to make those Puritans look like wusses.

Mr. Cohen gave me an A for all my hard work.  He did not ask me out on a date.  That only meant I needed to turn up the volume on my work load.

In eighth grade, I moved over to a new social studies teacher whose classroom was adjacent to Mr. Cohen’s room.  Sometimes they’d open the door between their classrooms to speak to one another.  I assumed that if I amazed this new teacher that she would tell Mr. Cohen about my work while they chitchatted in the door frame.  Isn’t that the only thing teachers talk about with each other?  The most interesting things in their lives: their students?

She assigned a ten page research paper.  This assignment was a huge deal, the first major essay I had to write for school.  She asked for ten pages.  I wrote 40.  40 pages.  40 pages on the assassination of Lincoln.  She wanted us to turn in 20 research index cards.  I went ahead and created about 80.  All the other kids were stunned when I pulled them out of my backpack.  I was sure that this was going to be the tipping point, the moment when Mr. Cohen understood the intensity of my Protestant work ethic.

No offer was made to take me to the school dance or even a movie.  He ended up marrying another teacher at the school.  All I got was a note in my yearbook to have a good summer.

I started dating boys my age, but I held onto Mr. Cohen’s beloved Puritan-style of living.  To this day, I’m frugal.  I’m efficient.  I will never stop working as long as there is work to do.  And I can always find work to do.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing.  I completed a double major AND a certificate of study while in college, while working two days a week.  I went on a week-long work camping trip while I had mono.  I didn’t stop working when I had hyperemesis gravidarum with the twins, vomiting into Venti Starbucks cups while I drove to school. (I needed to pause at a garbage can at a midway point between my house and the school because I only had two cup holders in the car to contain my two full cups of vomit.)  My personal motto has always been “suck it up.”

As I neared the deadline for this edit on Apart at the Seams, it made sense to forgo things like eating and yoga and just sit in front of the computer for 12-to-15 hours per day, writing non-stop.  Apparently, my back cannot keep up with my brain and my burning love for Mr. Cohen, because hunching over the keyboard for hours at a time destroyed the rhomboid muscle in my back.  On Friday, Josh took me back to the doctor because even with the pain killers and muscle relaxants, I couldn’t sleep.  The pain was just too intense.  Delivering twins vaginally felt like a day at the spa in comparison to the spasms in my back that had been going non-stop for seven days.

This new doctor looked at me in horror when I told him why the muscle cramping started, and I wanted to scream in his face, “I can out-Protestant the Protestants and Mr. Cohen should have loved meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”  He asked if I had ever considered taking breaks, walking around, swinging my arms and stretching.  Had I considered this?  Is he crazy?  Waste time with things like stretching?  Do you know how much I can accomplish in the time it would take me to stretch?  Did the Puritans pause to stretch?

I hobbled home with a new prescription and slapped on two heat strips.  And then I Google Mr. Cohen because this is all his fault.  If he hadn’t been so cute, so charismatic, so charming 27 years ago, I would never be in the pain I’m in today.  If he had instead had a flicker cross his features when he mentioned slothfulness instead of the Protestant work ethic, I would be happily lounging on a beach somewhere, relaxing.  But no, he had to be enamoured with Puritans, working their farms until their bodies gave out.

I found him first on a “rate my teacher” site, where high school student after high school student raved about his counseling skills.  He had guided them to the perfect career path.  He would do anything for his students.  And in that moment, I realized that I was just one girl in a sea of thousands of kids who had crossed his path and fallen in love with him.  There could be hundreds of us with chronic back problems due to our love for Mr. Cohen.

I said a quiet goodbye to my crush and vowed to become lazy.  That is, right after I finish editing these 270 pages.  I swear, I can quit any time.

A bunch of people emailed me about level 181 of Candy Crush recently after I wrote a note about it on the level 180 and 182 post.  So maybe it’s not as straightforward as it seems.  I tried playing it again to remember how I did it, and of course lost on the first try.  It took me a bit before I could win it again.

So you have to bring down two cherries.  They’re locked on the side columns with multi-break whipped cream below them.  The only way to pop that whipped cream is to smash through the whipped cream in the middle and make as many striped horizontal candies as possible to shoot them through the side columns.  If you make a horizontal striped candy higher than the cherries, don’t use it until you can bring it down.

Should you make a vertical candy?  No, not unless you can also make a wrapped one or a speckled doughnut and combine it.  Every move needs to be either smashing that whipped cream in the middle or doing something to set up a horizontal stripe.

This is not a level where you can predict whether a board is good or bad before the first move, so it’s worth playing on Facebook because you won’t be exiting out the board.  Just look for places where you have two of the same colour one above the other (let’s say, yellow), a yellow one off to the left or right, and another yellow one in the same column as the first two yellows.  You’re looking to make a foursome vertically so it creates a striped candy that moves horizontally.

Hope that helps!  Off to go moan about my back.

While my back heals, I’m writing out advice for passing level 130 and level 140 of Candy Crush because I have a lot of requests for those two levels in my inbox.  They both require skills that pop up a lot on later levels, as well as Candy Crush Saga’s penchant for red herrings.  More on that below.

Level 130

To pass this level, you need to make ten striped candies and combine them five times.  Well, maybe you’ll end up making a few striped candies that you’ll never use, or striped candies that accidentally get set off before you can combine them, but for the most part, you’re looking to pop two striped candies together, five times.

Look at the board above.  Four columns over from the right, you’ll see three yellow candies, with a 4th one in the column to the right.  Slide that one on the right over one and you’ve made a striped candy.  Now look above it at that formation of blue candies.  The instinct is to slide over that 5th blue candy to form a wrapped candy.  DON’T.  Instead, slide that blue down four rows from the top and you’ll have a striped candy land on top of that other striped candy.  Combine them, and you now only have 4 more combinations to go with 38 moves.

Plus there are two more stripes waiting to happen in the board above.  Do you see them?  One is a vertical yellow stripe three over from the left, and the other is a vertical red stripe four over from the left.  You’ll need to mess around a bit with the red one to bring it down a level or two so it’s next to the yellow one, but this can be done.

This board uses the same threading technique that will help you when you get to level 356.  In fact, this board mirrors that one almost completely with the added difficulty of how the board on 356 is set up.  So go over and read those hints, but the one that will help the most is to look for places where you have two of one colour (let’s say, red), one of another colour (blue), and then another red.  Make a match below ONLY the blue candy to gently pull down another red candy into that row.  That will form a stripe for you.

Level 140

This board is what I call a red herring board.  You think you have to only focus on the reds, oranges, and yellows since those are the orders you’re filling.  WRONG!

If you did that, you likely won’t make enough matches even with 45 moves.  You need 99 moves to clear this board if you keep making three-combination moves with only those colours.  See, impossible.

What you need to do is make as many special combinations, regardless of colour.  The opening move for this board creates a red striped candy (two columns over from the left).  This is actually a fairly crappy board (above) because you can only make one special immediately.  I would restart (exiting out if you’re on a mobile device.  If you do this on Facebook, it takes away a life) until you have a board where you can make two specials as an opening move.  When I played the board above, I didn’t pass on the first try despite making a speckled doughnut and combining it with a red candy, as well as a striped/wrap combo.

So ignore those orders and instead take out whole rows and columns (or many rows and columns) by creating and setting off special candies.

Currently: I’m on Level 409, and I’m happy to go backwards and explain how I did any board before that. Sometimes it was stupid luck but other times, there was actual thought involved (here are the other advice posts I’ve written). Let me know the level you’re struggling with.  I’m finishing a write up for 181 that will be up in a moment.