Kreativ Blogger Award – THANK YOU

Shirley_Temple (Photo credit: hto2008)

     Special thanks to Phylor’s Blog AND DogKisses Blog for this wonderful award!

With this award I am supposed to tell you things about me that you may not know:

1) Pizza with grape jelly is one of my favorite food combinations.

2) I LOVE old Shirley Temple movies.

3) When I was young I had 3 goldfish, named Bagel, Lox and Cream Cheese.

4) Collecting seashells is one of my most favorite things to do.

5) I sometimes get frightened of new things; I’ve learned that with 24 hours, I adjust well.

6) I worked for a few days for a catering/ food place but they fired me when I wanted to give a little girl a free sugar cookie. Enough said!

7) I try to be patient but impatience presents itself while I am driving, I’m working on that.

8) I wish I knew one craft, just one but so far Pintrest is the only thing I consider a craft. I’m seriously addicted.

9) My initals spell out LAF which I have always liked.

10) My favorite time is 11:11.

Thanks again for reading my blog, check out Phylors Blog and Dogkisses Blog too. I am grateful to these two very kind and strong women. They both made my day a very happy one.

An Author I Admire (Plinky Prompt)

Image via Wikipedia

Joan Didion

I read her memoir: The Year of Magical Thinking about life before, during and after her husband died. I would ask her where she got the strength to carry on day after day. I would ask how she could distance herself so emotionally from the situation to write a book that does not seem too emotional but more like a step-by-step account of the little things that went on when her husband died; the little details, the reading of the newspaper, the steps to overcome. What happened after you finished the book? Did your perspective change? Was life different? If you had to write the same book over again now, years later, what would you change? What new advice could you give? Were there things that you would have done differently? How has your life changed and what is your life like today?

With great respect,

Yours Kindly,

Hibernationnow.wordpress.com

A Dream Is A Wish That Your Heart Makes

Image by Bob.Fornal via Flickr

I speak with a raspy whisper a voice unknown to me when I was younger. Starting in high school I became the adolescent lioness that practiced roaring with my brown braided hair that ran down my back in lanky curls. I learned to lick my ferocious lips with pleasure getting into funny escapades with my best friend Paula. I spoke with great assurance to teachers and professors whose titles meant nothing to me. My body language stated that I was their equal because I too was involved and able to keep up a conversation; I read the book review from the New York Times.  Of the many poems I penned one was selected as the winner to  recite in person to the poet, Rod McKuen. I mattered back then and I turned heads as I wore my black leotard that clung to my body like a kiss, my worn denim jeans that hugged my body with a warm embrace and my brown clogs that clicked and clacked happily down the hallways. I had a voice back then, a sweet, cajoling, flirtatious, strong voice that I no longer have. I had a lot of dreams when I was younger but in the past four years, saddled like a working mule, with Fibromyalgia, Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis and Chronic Pain I seem to have lost them.

I used to dream that I would publish a book and it would be a best-seller. I saw myself on Oprah, chatting it up, I could practically hear her whisper into my ear: “you go, girl!”  Oprah and I would be friends, and I too would get all the presents that the audience gets, including: the trip to Austrailia, a brand new car wrapped in a giant red bow and one present each of ALL her favorite things, retroactively, of course.

I used to sing out loud, off-key and high-pitched, but that didn’t stop me from believing that Simon and Garfunkel or John Denver would welcome me up on stage to sing with them. I could see the white stretch limo parked outside my apartment building to pick me up. All our neighbors and friends would be hanging out of their apartment windows to see me. After that, I was so sure that I would be the first mega millions lottery winner that I worried about security and who would handle my new financial windfall. Could I deal with all this money? Four years ago with my diagnosis of Fibromyalgia and Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, things changed. With the focus on my pain I lost all of my dreams and tried to learn how to cope.  The dreams died like fragile moths hitting a glass door, violently and forever.

I always dreamed I would get married and when I was 30 I did. I married my best friend and we’ve been married for 22 years. A year after our wedding we started trying to have children with no luck. My dream back then was to get pregnant and have a child, more than any of the previous dreams wrapped up together. Finally, after two and a half years of painful injections and grueling testing at an infertility hospital I got pregnant and that was one dream that did come true. I loved being pregnant and I glowed with delight, all the more because I had experienced such pain and anguish with the infertility process. When my son was one I got pregnant with my daughter and having a boy and a girl made all my dreams come true.

While I daydream about traveling to Holland to see the cheery tulips bloom or a trip to Spain’s countryside I know those dreams come with a huge price tag now: pain, special accommodations, and sacrifice. I am not the young traveler I used to be, I worry about traveling and all my limitations. I’ve accepted the aches and pains and sore muscles and swollen joints of Fibromyalgia and Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis. I live with the chronic pain and the cloudy haze that encompasses my brain.  I can’t entertain the thought of a possible cure because I couldn’t stand to live in my body, hoping. I would not be able to cope with life as I know it today; my skin crawls stealthily out of my body just imagining it. I need to protect myself  and my friends from that faraway fantasy. If I could protect those I love from heartbreaking devastation and pain I would. My new reality is giving up on a lot of dreams that I used to have; like my size 10 pants, that no longer fit me. My new dream is trying to appreciate the good things I do have now: my family, my dog, my dear friends.  If I could I would spin a protective web, thick like golden honey that would protect my family from pain and heartbreak. Living in the here and now, appreciating every moment that we do have is my everlasting, unwavering and constant dream. I had to redefine my dreams as I had to redefine my life, my life as a chronic pain patient.

The Lost Souls

I can’t stand the pain anymore;  I just can’t take it another second. I am having a hard time accepting that this is my life. I am not coping well today; I am not coping at all. Another day of stomach pain and too much sleep, no energy and endless trips to the bathroom, not leaving my home. Is it my long-lost enemy IBS revisiting me? Is it the side effect of the Cellcept that I am taking for my auto-immune disease, Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis? I don’t know, I really don’t know. I could easily start crying now, I just don’t know if I could stop.

I don’t know what to do and I hate that feeling, I feel powerless. I have no energy to fight or to make any medical decisions, minute or radical. I don’t have the strength or state of mind to start going to doctors anymore, again. What if I do nothing? Stop the medications and live like that? I’m scared. The medicine is supposed to be making me feel better and in some ways it does, except for the horrible side effects. Unless it’s a virus….See? There’s no way of knowing and I feel helpless, truly helpless.

People try to be nice, “Hang in there!!!” they write or say with heartfelt warmth. No. I can’t. I just can’t do it anymore. I’ve been pushed beyond my limit and I don’t know if there is a way to pull me back on board without me kicking my legs, punching fists in the air. I refrain myself from starting to scream obscenities like an absolute crazy person. I take an orange pill for anxiety, I drink a cup of ginger tea from a yellow ceramic mug. I droop.

It is clear I can’t continue to live my life this way. I’ve seen more doctors than I would like to see in a lifetime. Friends and relatives  yell out well-meaning ideas: homeopathy, acupuncture, massage?  There’s a doctor in Massachusetts, in Israel, two towns away? Try gluten-free, try vitamins, go to Dr. Weill, to this woman we’ve heard about in Brazil, how about the Mayo clinic for a minimum of $50,000 dollars and no guarantee?

I don’t want to talk about this, I don’t even want to write about it anymore except for the other “friends” who have painful and annoying chronic illnesses like me. They understand, they are the only ones who understand what it is like to live hour by hour. It’s not life-threatening, true, so we don’t get much sympathy but we have no lives to speak of.  What about us? The lost souls that linger in our beds, hoping for a surge of energy, a sign of life?  We are not part of the statistics because really, who knows about us? Who cares?   We are not in hospitals or reporting ourselves to the CDC.  We are not checking in to one specialty hospital because they don’t exist. We have symptoms all over the map, we are not just one disease. There are many, many of us who are unhappy, who are fighting each and every day ; we feel sorry for each other, because only we can understand the struggle, the fight, the emotional and physical pain that live with us just about every, single day.

If you are reading this anywhere other than hibernationnow.wordpress.com please be aware this posting was copied without permission.  Please visit my blog at hibernationnow.wordpress.com to see this, and my other blog postings.

*FML. No, Wait. Don’t.

I’m in a quiet mood tonight. The rain is dripping outside, the humidity is high, spirits are low but even. I am not happy in a joyful way yet not depressed in a hide- under -the- blanket- way either. I’m coping. Coping is a good thing I think, it beats hysteria by a mile and clinical depression by tens of thousands of kilometers.

There are times in our lives when coping has to do. This is that time for me and my family.  When life has piled an extraordinary amount of pressure and stress upon you all you can do is try to go with the flow or basically moan and groan and give up. Moaning and groaning is  not an option. Anymore. We all know the drill, sometimes up, then down, down, down and hopefully up again. You need to believe in the “up again” because EVENTUALLY things will be better someday. It’s just hard to see at the moment or the last two years. Believe me, I know.

A very long period of unemployment, a longer period of sickness, stress for the teenagers and from them, stress from the relatives, stress from our stressful selves. Take a deep breath. Now breathe. I feel like I should have a cup of Sleepy Time tea right next to me. With milk and honey added to it. And, perhaps an English biscuit or two.

I need to take a vacation in my mind. Where to go, what to do? Climate? Sunny, of course. I see the rolling green hills of Spring and red, yellow and pink tulips blossoming everywhere. Birds chirp happily singing their sweet songs. I listen, lying on my back, head on my crossed arms, feeling the soft grass as my cushion and the sunlight warming my eyelids. It’s 75 degrees and life is sweet.  At least in my mind and my lofty imagination that is.

I went to my Dr.’s office today and when he asked me how I was doing I said I was “coping.” But, after addressing what was happening, and describing the actual events I found myself going from “coping” to “miserable.” Literally, within one minute of each other, sitting in the same, plaid, uncomfortable bumpy chair my status changed to “miserable.”  I even asked for platitudes, I asked for rainbow idioms but I got nothing, no advice from him except his comment: “Try not to fall.”  Huh? Is that the best you can do? Couldn’t you even come up with there’s a silver lining in every thunderstorm, cloud formation or tsunami? Apparently not.

It gave me pause to think. If I am complaining and recounting all the bad stuff to myself or anyone else, what good does it do? It just seems to focus on the misery and the past and not leave room for the possibility of a better time, a different time, a good time.

So for the next few months, I will be focusing on the positive, wherever and whenever I find it. It started tonight with a Weight Watcher’s dessert that I added whipped cream and rainbow sprinkles to. It was in the People Magazine that I bought for myself  with a smiling Sandra Bullock and her beautiful baby on the cover. It was reading Confections Of A Closet Master Baker by Gesine Bullock Prado that had me smiling warmly with nostalgia: marzipan, chocolate treats, plum cake or as we called it “Kvetchekuchen.”

So, here’s to the Bullock sisters and to HOPE, to dreams and most importantly, here’s to positive energy. Energy that I have to control, and I will; I will definitely try.

*FML stands for F-ck My Life, thanks to the FML website.