I watched the last hour of the Oscars last night. I have been in bed with a mind-bending migraine. As in literally in bed for days. I turned on the TV Sunday night just to break the monotony. Did anyone else find Seth McFarlane not funny? As in not funny at all? I thought maybe it was just me and my migraine until Daniel Day-Lewis received Best Oscar for his role as Lincoln. Now he was hilarious in his acceptance speech. Maybe they should consider Daniel Day-Lewis as a host for next year's event? I stumbled onto a recap of the event that was fairly enlightening about all things Oscar.
Alex J. Cavanaugh hit me up with an award. ::The Very Inspiring Blogger Award:: I must say I was shocked. Alex's page is where I go to get all of the news for everything that is happening in the Blogoverse He is very much In The Know about Blogfests, New Book Releases, Challenges, pretty much if it's happening Alex knows about it. So, it always surprises me when I see my name in the "content" part of his blog. It is like getting a hard knock in the solar plexus. Yep, that is me. I am the person who was just reading at their computer who is suddenly gasping for air.
Now that I am back down to earth, I have to come up with seven things you don't know about me. Alex cheated and only coughed up one.
1. I am allergic to shellfish, potatoes, beef, and I choose to eat pork in small quantities.
2. I also don't drink any alcohol because it makes my migraines worse. I don't smoke either; it completely clogs up my sinuses.
3. I don't own a camera. I never converted to digital. It has been on my "must buy" list for a very long time. I think it is getting close to a decade now... (Yes, it is tiresome always having to borrow my mom's camera.)
4. For the most part, I heartily dislike Reality TV. Where is the reality????
5. I had a difficult time mentally making the transition to the Kindle. I love books. However, once I did it, I discovered that I loved it. I still have books, but e-book buying is so much easier, and they take up so much less space!
6. I just moved back to Florida with my mom. I bought a house and it feels like our lives are caught up in the whirl of renovations. By the time this is done, this house house should be energy efficient AND easier to cook in:)
7. I just had an appointment with a new Primary Care Doctor here. She seems to have some new ideas about my migraine headaches AND some new ideas about how to get rid of them. I am very excited to start working with her. She meets all of my qualities for a good doctor: she actually listens, she thinks outside of the box, and she doesn't think a prescription is a one-stop solution for everything. In other words, she actually believes in correcting the imbalance in the body and getting the person WELL. It is innovative thinking. I can actually see myself getting better under her care. Yay!!!!
I get to pass this award on to three Very Inspiring Bloggers...
I know that there is a metaphor that is going to illustrate my point. I hope that I figure it out by the time I get to the end of this post. Yeah, it is one of those kind of days. The ideas are swirling around in my brain and I am reaching around and plucking them out, but I am not catching them in the "right" order so they aren't making a whole lot of sense. I know that once I have them all there will be a picture. Well, let's see what we get and go from there.
I always was this sickly kid. Turns out that I have tons of allergies. None of them are bad enough to kill me in singular doses, so I don't have to carry around an Eppi-Pen. However, my immune system is under constant attack ~ and frequently breaks down. It usually manifests itself in a sinus infection, sometimes bronchitis, occasionally pneumonia.
Obviously, allergies can be a serious business because they can be severe enough to kill a person. See the aforementioned Eppi-Pen. Some people have a severe enough reaction to a food that it shuts off their airway in minutes and they die. Allergies. People talk about them like they aren't a big deal. Not true. They can be a very big deal. If you have other problems, they can be an even bigger deal.
One more thing on someone with a host of allergies... They wear out the adrenal system. By making it work overtime (because the immune system is under constant attack), the adrenal system breaks down. This leads to chronic fatigue and hormonal imbalance and probably other problems. It's like a car breaking down. One system doesn't go down without it affecting other systems.
My grandpa was a verbal abuser. On Thanksgiving Day 1995, he was dressing down my mother, and I verbally let him have it. No one had ever done that before. It wouldn't be the last time I verbally knocked him out when I felt like he was out of bounds. The days of me standing around listening to him verbally beat people up ended that day.
I married a verbally abusive person. I never was able to stand up for myself, to him, the way that I stood up to my grandpa for other people. I don't understand that even now. I hope to get a handle on that one day. I was married to that guy for three years.
Eventually I dated another verbally abusive person. After I divorced the verbally abusive husband. Apparently, there was still a lesson that needed learning. His abuse was more manipulative than the husbands. It was different, but still bad. There was theft, cheating, lying, and he had a way of making me feel like I brought all of those things on myself. That is where the abuse part came in.
I have been dealing with migraines for years. Migraines are a disease. They have triggers. Some of them you can control. You can try to control them. I had the migraines more or less under control until I got married. Since then, they have not been under control. Actually, they started slipping out of my control before I got married. That should have been a sign. Stress is a big trigger. I kept telling myself that weddings are stressful.
People asked me for years if I had fibromyalgia. I told them no. I had no idea what it was. I looked it up on the Internet about three months ago after talking to a friend who had it because she thought my symptoms sounded a lot like fibromyalgia. Turns out that about 90% of the symptoms on the list were things that were my other aches and pains. Turns out you really shouldn't say "no" to something if you don't know what it is.
I think we are here for a reason. We experience every single thing for a reason. All things, good and bad, are giving us something to bring to the table for something in the future. It's a big picture thing that I don't have a handle on.
In Third World countries the doctors don't tell terminal patients that they are dying and how long that they have to live. Because they don't tell them, their brain doesn't hear that message and they don't die. Because they don't hear that they only have six months to live, they end up living five years. Our brains are very powerful.
Our brains can beat disease. Migraines are a disease. Fibromyalgia is a disease. Even battered women's syndrome is a mindset.
Am I pushing forward with the SSD to get the medicaid? Yes. Am I filing for bankruptcy? Yes. Am I going to continue to take my medication and see my doctors? Yes. I think I have good doctors. They are both willing to travel traditional and non-traditional paths. They both are interested in the root. They both understand that this is a system breakdown and they have their parts to play in helping my system get better.
Chris, over at A Deliberate Life, has written over and over again that her weightloss journey has been mind over matter. Obviously, just thinking about exercising is not what I am talking about. The most crucial moments in keeping going happened in her head. It was a mental battle. Isn't that the case with all of us? Quit or keep going? That decision-making happens in our heads. Am I going to give up or keep fighting?
And so am I back to what I said before. Our brains can beat disease. Damned if I know how. But I know it is possible because it has happened. People have done it. There is living proof out there. So, while the lawyers do their thing and the doctors do their thing, I am going to do my thing. I am going to figure this shit out. Thank you Linda Pressman for this song. Before this is said and done I might start liking something I used to hate. Egads. There is no "video." It's just the song. It's about what happens if you don't take chances. If you quit. So, no way am I quitting.
Don't forget to turn off my music player at the bottom of the page.
Do you know how to make a long story short and still make it good? I don't. I try. I tell myself that I am going to be concise and I still end up with a Dickens novel. Seriously. I promise to try. Maybe I will just use key words and phrases instead of full sentences and abort punctuation altogether. Wouldn't that make it more confusing rather than less? I think I hear a clock ticking.
I moved to FL and in with my parents in 2006 because of bad migraines. Really bad migraines. Doctor said 2-3 years of no-stress/low stress along with meds and vitamins and I could be back in business. I didn't believe her. Kept doing and bringing stressful things into my life, wouldn't quit my job and didn't get better. Hmmmmm. Eventually it started to sink in. So I traded one for the other. And then back again. I never could quite get the hang of it. When my parents decided to move back to GA I was working a part-time no-stress/low stress job and doing okay with that. It was four days on, three off. The first three were good. The last day I was dragging. I never have been a morning person. Never. And that last day kicked my butt every week. I got a call out of the blue from a sales company looking to hire an outside sales person in their GA territory, same business I was in before I moved. I am thinking this is fate. It is meant to be. I am ready for a full-time sales job. I am ready to reclaim my life. I am ready to actually have money again. Praise be to God. The buy on the house fell through. However, someone else bought the house a few months later. When I got to GA the company had just hired someone else that morning. But they were going to need more people soon. All was not lost.
All of my belongings were still here in storage since I always planned on coming back to GA, so we pulled my mattress and box spring out and set me up. A month and a half later and I was down. Way down. I was in migraine hell. It was like I never left. Any ground I gained in Florida was gone. Any thoughts of full-time employment were gone. Even part-time employment was out of the question. Each day it was an effort just to get out of bed. Never does the thought even occur to me that I am sleeping on dust and mold galore. Fortunately someone in my house has their brain plugged in and suggests that maybe the bed is full of dust and mold (lightbulb). I am highly allergic to dust and mold. I guess that explains the previously unexplainable rash that has taken over my entire body, too. I did see a doctor about that one and it went away until the medicine ran out. Bye bye mattress and box spring. New mattress, new box spring. Mild improvement on migraines. You heard me. Mild improvement on migraines. That mattress/box spring incident was the equivalent of a nuclear bomb to my immune system.
The thing you should be asking is this: if you were so healthy how could you be compromised so easily? That, ladies and gentlman, is the million dollar question. I posted my resume on monster.com right after the job I thought I was going to get fell through. I received a call four days ago requesting an interview. I explained that I was ill and needed to remove my resume and apologized, but it got me to thinking. Before I left Flordia, I sold myself on the idea that I could work a full-time sales job knowing full well what that meant (more than 40 hours a week) when I could barely work a 32 hour/wk no stress/low stress part time job. Then I thought about the medications I was taking in FL at the time of the move... Rx anxiety meds, anti-depressants, pain killers, nausea meds, and I supplemented all of that regularly with over-the-counter Excedrin Tension Headache because it works better than Excedrin Migraine. What was I thinking? Not only did I sell I myself on this clearly delusional idea of a full-time sales job, but I sold both of my parents on it! Is this how people become liars? They just want something to be true so badly that they convince themselves that it is true and, therefore, it becomes true in their own mind?
