Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name...

The nature of my game does seem to trouble a lot of people (and if you're too young to remember the heyday of the Stones, try googling song lyrics.)

I've been going by IndiaJoy online for the past 5 since that's where I've called home during that time - far up in the Northern part of that country, in the state of Himachal Pradesh, about 100 km from the Tibetan border as the crow flies ('cept the crow doesn't fly there, too steep, so it might as well be 1000 km for practical purposes.) Don't be surprised if you're not following me too well - the whole process of tracking my life and times proves puzzling for just about everyone, self included.

Somehow I've come to be the owner/administrator of the Chronic Bitches group on Ravelry (due mostly to my habit of saying "okay" first and thinking about it second) something which is only made remotely possibly by the grace of my wonderful co-admins and moderators who have more more tact, attention and people skills than I can manage these days. Thank (insert deity/ies of your choice here) for them and for the whole lot of you Chronic Bitches who have kept me (sorta) sane during the last trying year!

I doubt if I need to explain my qualification for Bitchhood here, but my qualifications for Chronic just keep growing. I'm in the process of filing for disability and we ran out of spaces in which to list diagnoses on the form long before we ran out of actual diagnoses! For the longest time I thought my main complaints were severe osteoarthritis in both knees (due to a motorcycle accident in '87,) asthma, chronic venous insufficiency (also due to same accident) and Fibromyalgia (which covered everything else.) Then we discovered that I have an autoimmune hypothyroid disorder which had led to severe (really, really severe) iron deficiency anemia. Unfortunately, treating that triggered a landslide of reactions which ended up with me hospitalized for Congestive Heart Failure (who knew that could happen when you have no iron to carry oxygen to your heart eh?) COPD, Some other stuff with long names that means that my left ventricle doesn't want to work anymore and, as a result of the rest, hypertension, more severe vascular disease than I'd previously thought, a big old dollop of depression and, the gorgeous centerpiece - Carcinoid Syndrome, which means that somewhere in my body, hidden where the CT Scan couldn't find it, lurks a tumor or tumors that are pumping out all sorts of nasty endocrine secretions and probably causing most of the nasties that weren't already caused by the motorcycle accident. If you've read this far, you must be either a doctor or compulsive.

At the moment, I'm hanging out in Portland, OR with my daughter and grandkids, trying to do my physical therapy so I can heal rather than drop dead in the next six months and - hopefully - get to the bottom of this carcinoid thing. Eventually I hope to head back to my lovely home in the Himalayas where I research the traditional textiles (especially knitting) of the region (am working on a book or three on the subject) and run an emergency assistance program for Tibetan refugees, hill tribes and others without the means to obtain vital medical care or the necessities of life. Up there I can do a little bit of good in this world. Down here, well, I do get to spend time with my grandkids who give me a lot of incentive to go on living despite the chronic crappola! And I knit. Obsessively and wherever in this world I happen to be.