Nancy Blake:
CLASS OF 1952
State College Area High SchoolClass of 1952
State college, PA
Nancy's Story
UPDATE!!!! i'VE BECOME AN AUTHOR! I've written about ME, really important for anyone who gets this illness - exercise makes it worse, but Graded Exercise 'Therapy' is often forced on people on the theory that they only think it will make them worse. Rest is just completely important, also fish oil. My own book is 'A Beginner's Guide to ME/CFS', and I've co-authored 'Ramsay's Disease - ME' with Les Simpson, a specialist in blood flow problems.
Both are on Amazon Kindle and now in paperback as well.
So lifetime ambition to 'write a book' now achieved, and in my old age I plan to keep on with it - writing about how you can help to sort out your own depression, teaching piano with NLP, my own take on psychotherapy (few tears, lots of shared laughter)
So, blatant self promotion here...probably against the rules
Life
I'm living in Kingston-upon-Hull, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, practicing as a neurolinguistic psychotherapist, and teaching piano. I would love to get in touch with Beverly Corl (her maiden name) and Lenore Babione, my two best friends from State High.
12/16/08 Last Christmas visiting my Mom at The Gables in Ojai, CA - she just had her 106th birthday! Voted, for the Democrats, naturally.
Looking forward to a quiet time here at home with my friend Sue and her son, Ethan, now 15. Ethan and I had a lot of fun while I was teaching him to drive. Now I've got 9 points on my licence (12 points results in a ban!) which I think is quite good going, at 73. Also drive a modified 1990 Honda Civic - find changing gears really stressful, but I'm going to get a cheap automatic off ebay soon. And I take Ethan to an under-age driving club so he can be off-road and legal.
Sue is doing a part-time Ph.D. in philosophy and working free-lance helping foreign students get their English correct for papers and theses.
My daughter Julie lives in Hull, so we'll be seeing each other at Christmas. Her kids are teenagers now, very charismatic and hectic! The oldest is doing a degree in creative writing, the middle one has decided to learn how to build boats, after doing a lot of web-design, and her daughter is still going to high-school. My son, Andrew, is married and living with his wife, Maria, in Mexico. Maria is a translator and editor. They have a son, Matias, and a daughter, Maia, both still in high school. Andrew does some writing for a newspaper, some web design, and plays a lot of guitar.
I've been very ill with ME since 1986, but am almost the only person I know who has had it and is nearly over it. A lot of the cr...Expand for more
edit for that goes to Sue, helping me physically and also keeping things, and my life, a lot tidier than it used to be! So I'm very interested in ME and the (very nasty) politics around it - the insurance companies have a real financial investment in getting experts to say it's mental because then they don't have to pay out for the physical care and help that is needed.
I continue to be a psychotherapist, accredited as a neurolinguistic psychotherapist by the UK Council for Psychotherapy, and enjoy being able to help people sort things out - usually amazingly quickly, thanks to NLP.
The rest of the time I teach piano to little ones, or adult beginners. I was headhunted by a local private day school (nursery to about 11), and thanks to the fact that all the little ones have been demanding piano lessons this year, I seem to be (more or less!) solvent, for the first time ever. It involves getting up earlier than I should have to at my age!
I have a couple of male friends but no one serious - living with another woman seems much more restful and interesting for the most part. Not that I'm not open to offers: anyone who would take me to swim with dolphins would be high on my list!
The main thing I seem to do is get involved with causes for various people - ME is at the top of the list. The National Health recommendations for ME are cognitive behaviour therapy, which doesn't help, and graded exercise therapy, which makes it very much worse and is dangerous. However, I have just been invited to become an Associate Member of the Royal Society for Medicine, which will give me access to a medical library (and a club in London!) - they must be desperate for money, to be inviting psychotherapists to join! But it sounds impressive, doesn't it! Maybe now the newpapers will print the letters I write them! What actually helps with ME, at least for some people, is taking a worm medicine - Ivermectin. The theory is that some small parasite may be part of the picture, stimulating the part of the immune system that fights bacteria, hence the sore throats, swollen glands and fevers, and suppressing the part of the immune system that would fight off parasites. It's not accepted, yet, but if you've got ME I would at least give it a try.
And I've got a large black rescue dog, sheds hair everywhere, drools when he's begging for food, has been know to let burglars in the house and then terrorise the nice policemen who come to see what's happened (and the occasional harmless old lady) - so obviously I can't live without him.
Be good to hear from ......you?
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