A Reason To Be Slow…

Be punctual. Be prepared. Be creative. Corporate slogans pumped to pump up:  pushing employees to give it all they got. Their biggest nightmare? B12.

I recall it was three or four years ago when I first heard a cousin of mine mention B12. Since then, the vitamin has become a star.

Vitamin B12 is a water soluble vitamin with a key role in the normal functioning of the brain and nervous system, and for the formation of blood. Vitamin B12 deficiency can potentially cause severe and irreversible damage, especially to the brain and nervous system. At levels only slightly lower than normal, a range of symptoms such as fatigue, depression, and poor memory may be experienced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12

I’ve always been an “I don’t need to see the doctor for this…” type of attitude-wearer. I’m easy-going, or uncaring if you wish to put it that way, when it comes to taking care of myself, my body, my health, and other things that belong to me; such as clothes, accessories, electronics…  Was never really cautious with the things I owned, a category to which my body (and health) belongs.

But recently I’ve been feeling a little tired at the office. Fatigued would be the more appropriate word. Vacuumed of energy, desire to work, to take initiative, to think even.  I thought that perhaps this was just me getting sick of working for someone else. I sometimes blamed myself for lack of sleep or that extra round of Tricks (card-game) the night before… I’ve blamed it on my sudden decrease in morning caffeine consumption, and I’ve blamed it on a lot of other things too.

It kept getting worse… or I imagined it getting worse, but it got to the point where I could not afford to provide my attention to friends that were talking about things that were of a 40% or lower rating of interest to me. If you needed my attention, or at least more than half of it, you need something solid to keep me plugged. Not that I consciously put in the effort to avoid being attentive, it was my brain on the inside relieving himself of duty.

So it got worse, and one day lying on my neighbor’s bed, he mentioned he needed to go to the hospital to get his shot. I didn’t know he took shots, or has been on medication, but turns out I knew about it but hadn’t paid much attention or failed to register the new tidbit of information into my existing stacked and packed memory.

He was taking B12 shots. I took him to the hospital. We went into the ER and waited for a nurse (male) who came with a needle, a paper, and a big smile. He brushed my kindly outside of the room as I nodded my way out, wondering why I had to step out. “Privacy”, he smiled back at me and left. Turns out B12 needles are long and are referred to as Deep Muscle vaccines that are pushed up your bottom.

When my friend came out alive, I asked him why he was taking those shots, why he needed them, and how much they cost. I was researching quickly. His answers: I always feel tired, dizzy, and like a dead sac. I cannot pay attention to things that last very long.

From that moment I diagnosed myself on the spot. I was B12-deficient. Internally, I justified everything wrong I did under the umbrella: “but I’m B12 deficient!”

It reminds me of that anecdote about the horse that was irritated because he felt that something was poking at the bottom of his foot. Because he couldn’t reach down there, the horse remained in some pain, and was feeling distressed and unsettled. A time comes when the horse is drinking from a pond and a little frog hops around the horse. The horse asks the frog if he can take a peak and see if there was anything under his foot. The frog peeks, nods, “there is a twig stuck in there…” The frog attempts to push it out but he can’t… to weak. The horse thanks the frog for his efforts and carries on.

Although the branch was not removed, and thus the pain could not have been eliminated, the horse was now less distressed, calmer, and able to smile and go about his life. He needed not the removal of the pain to carry on, but simply a reason to why the pain existed.

That is how I embraced B12.