Doing when you don't feel like doing

Somewhere up in my cerebrum, I know that sitting around or lazily browsing the internet are not good for my mental health. On the other hand, days when depression surges I don't even have the drive to take a shower and get dressed. So here I sit and type in my cardigan and leopard print pajama pants at almost noon. The below verses on laziness are particularly meaningful for me because I have completely lost my appetite through this whole ordeal. So far I've not lost a considerable amount of weight. But every morning I force down a banana, at lunch, maybe a piece of cheese. I try to finish at least a quarter of my dinner plate. Nothing tastes good, smells good, or kicks in my hunger drive.

Laziness brings on deep sleep, and the shiftless man goes hungry. Proverbs 19:15 (NIV)
Some people are too lazy to lift a hand to feed themselves. Proverbs 19:24 (CEV)

Deep sleep: check. Shiftless: ouch. Yes, that describes how I feel most days, like a boat sloppily lolling from breaker to breaker with no one at the helm.

How do I get back in control of our little family boat? Grab the wheel and do something! Anything! Doesn't matter what it is - recording music, reading the kids a story, doing yoga or pilates, writing here, starting a craft with the kids - doing is what pulls me out of my funk.

Human nature is to slip back to the path of least resistance, and I feel it tugging every day. Do something productive for a while and then I just want to lay on my bed staring at the ceiling. This amazes me, because it is such a divergence from my normal. Normally I would be bored to death doing nothing, lacking an agenda for the day. I have pilot research coming up in a few weeks, a record I want to make, elaborate dinners I've planned out in my head. But I can barely get up the gumption to type.

Have you suffered from depression? Is the way I'm feeling similar to how you felt?

Pipe dreams

Thyroid cancer is a long-term commitment. I remember being told, "This is something you will live with for the rest of your life." But those words don't soak in at 29 when you are holding your 8-week-old baby, nursing him, trying to picture what having surgery will look like. You simply can't fast-forward years into the future to imagine the rest of your life. And today the forever part is here, and I am wasted-exhausted, the wrung out dirty dish rag hanging limp over the lip of the stainless steel sink. I am the dead grass, the wilted weed, the dry and curly leaf hopelessly clinging. Hyperthyroid because spring is here, and my body uses all it's energy to keep on chugging, none left over for the extra things like cooking, laundry, loving, working.

The yellow of my dad's cattail stained glass bleeds warmth into his study, where we sit and talk about academic papers and projects for our next few years as colleagues - our dream come true. I sit in the warm light and imagine being a professor with him, and it seems like a pipe dream. Hardly worth wasting mental energy on the dreaming.

Later that Friday, I watch my children snuggle their stuffed animals in the peace of nap, and I wonder what pipe dreams play over their brainwaves in technicolor. I reach up to touch the matted grit of my own Mama's comfort object, Twinkles, the white elephant with his floppy red ears and the wind-up music box that still works 50 years later. I wonder how Twinkles played into her musicianship and the compositions that flow straight from her heart stuck close like glue to God's, wonder if Twinkles was the first of those pipe dreams of music for her.

Pipe dream for me is someday surviving spring and fall without this deep pull toward the grave, as I feel myself sinking away from life others know, and I feel the cancer patient. Pipe dream is being truly healthy. It hasn't seemed my fate ever in this life, but I pray anyway. Why not keep praying the thorn be removed? Can I say, with Paul, that God's strength is made perfect in weakness? (II Corinthians 12:7-10)

I page through my gratitude journal for this week, written in red, a first for someone who writes everything in black. And there I see that yes, He is made perfect in my weakness. That the little joys keep meandering through my days like a thread of gold woven into the tired gray fabric of sick days and fatigue. Eva Cassidy, long dead of cancer, sings my children to sleep for nap, and I sing with her, too, after reading these little gratitudes:

My life goes on in endless song

above earth's lamentations,

I hear the real, though far-off hymn

that hails a new creation.

Through all the tumult and the strife

I hear it's music ringing,

It sounds an echo in my soul.

How can I keep from singing?

Oh though the tempest loudly roars,

I hear the truth, it liveth.

Oh though the darkness 'round me close,

Songs in the night it giveth.

No storm can shake my inmost calm,

While to that rock I'm clinging.

Since love is Lord of heaven and earth

How can I keep from singing?

Lord, how can I keep from singing?

Oh, how can I keep from singing?
~written by Robert Wadsworth Lowry, 1868~

Excerpted from my gratitude journal, #282-311:

283. The blue and gold of the hot steel of the maple syrup boiling pan

285. Singing again in front of an audience

289. Amy loving therapy

292. God teaching me gently to SIMPLY BE with Him without words

297. Unexpected piano time with my best friend

299. Tears

301. Raw honey

304. Proposal edited

305. God's grace to work through exhaustion

307. Music - wild miraculous soul-melting - at church

310. Icicles in mudpuddles

311. Joy in the lament

Rest in the exhaustion

It's one of those mornings when night gives way to dawn too soon, and we drag ourselves out of bed tired, pull the sleeping arms of children off our necks, and slide woolen stockinged feet over to the devotion chairs, our own private retreat in a bedroom too small. Crack spines on Bibles and open homework for our recovery group, and pray together. Interrupted as usual, half-way through, by the pitter-patter of feet coming to claim breakfast for growling tummies, the toddler-baby clamoring for a few more minutes cuddling under down with Mama.

The moon meets the rising sun across the cobalt sky, the stars shut out by the glistening dawn on newfallen stone. The big crater there feels like the hole in my heart, hungry always for more time with my lover and more time with the Lover of my soul. 

The juxtaposition of night and day a poignant reminder that time is short and redemption of it in short supply as well. We walk our days like prisoners, often, to routine, to schedule, to tasks. I am  the Taskmaster. The laundry folder, dish washer, floor scrubber, diaper changer, child tender. 

There must be more than this,

O breath of God come breathe within,

There must be more than this,

Spirit of God we wait for You.

Fill us anew we pray,

Fill us anew we pray.

Consuming fire fan into flame,

A passion for Your Name,

Spirit of God fall in this place,

Lord have Your way,

Lord have Your way with us,

Come like a rushing wind,

Clothe us with power from on high,

Now set the captives free,

Leave us abandoned to Your praise.

Lord let Your glory fall,

Lord let Your glory fall.

~Tim Hughes, as sung by Hillsong, Consuming Fire~

The craters on the moon like craters in my heart, always wanting more. Always wanting healing. Peace. Happiness. Injected with the culture from birth, inoculated against true joy and forever searching for pleasure instead. Yet in those empty places where I see the emptiness, He begins to fill. Little by little, the cup fills, and runs over.

To wake up early seems antithetical to rest. Indeed He says, It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep. (Psalm 127:2) Then, too, in the consummate book of love, Song of Solomon, the lover tells his beloved, Let us rise early and go to the vineyards; Let us see whether the vine has budded And its blossoms have opened, And whether the pomegranates have bloomed. There I will give you my love. (7:12) And the Psalmist brings his petition early to the Lord: I rise before dawn and cry for help; I hope in your words. (Psalm 119:147)

So I rise early (most days). And find sleep, blessed or tormented, every night. And wonder at the miracle of rest He bestowed upon us, that renews us and finds us ready to face the next day. I have a history of sleep deprivation: working night shift, pulling all-nighters sometimes several times in a row in college, and I know that it is a spiral downward to sickness of body and soul.

And in the slow, incremental dance toward habit, my husband and I dance closer to together in the flickering pink light of dawn, and souls knit over the Word, and we come to peace with our journey together. God is good, always. Especially in this, this rising early, this going to bed at an ungodly hour (10 o'clock, people! My husband wants his night owl wife in bed at 10 o'clock! I often think it is a travesty...)

And in the between times, the night wakings, the nightmares, the torments in the darkness, I sit on the front steps in the cold and watch the stars in wonder, pinholes in the velvet blanket of the sky, and He heals my soul in the whisper of the wind and the blessed quietness.

Emotional rest is giving soul over to the hands of one in control, giving over exhaustion, confusion, chaos and pain to a God who understands and cries out with me. The God who nudges me out of bed in the  morning for devotions with my husband. The God who wakes me in the night to pray for those I love. The God who is slowly breaking down demons of my past, and shattering the walls self-built that only He can shatter, the walls that hedge me alone. He is bringing me out into the open for the first time in my life.

Blessed quietness, holy quietness,

what assurance in my soul,

on the stormy sea, He speaks peace to me,

and the billows cease to roll.

~Manie Ferguson, 1897~

This beautiful life

Her palm quivers across horseflesh and an age-old ache awakes deep in my heart.  This life is so beautiful.  It seems too beautiful to ever leave.

I watch a friend walk over the last threshold of childhood and into a bright and indefinable unknown, and a shiver of cold and loneliness sweeps over me as she is bathed in the beautiful light of evening.

She smiles a smile that you can only smile when you are young, and alive in your skin, and stretching your arms in flight for the first time.  The light catches my eye and sends a prism shooting, a millisecond of glorified sunbeam that sparkles like a jewel off this beautiful piece of sod, high on the hills, up in the late summer wind with the moist smells of horses and hay and apples floating on the evening breeze.

A whisper between girl and horse falls through the shaft of light around the corner of the aging barn.  It's gray bones a silent reminder in a harvest-time moment of fullness and promise and beauty, and the ache grows deeper.

I have been so tired the last few days.  It is one of those seasons of a long battle when you would almost rather give up the fight than keep fighting.  All the beauty that surrounds as autumn approaches is like the poisoned apple proffered Cinderella, the sadistic lie of Life, that promises an everlasting horizon of entertainment and beauty instead of the slow sink into eternity as bones grow old and crippled and sore and tired.

Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, "I find no pleasure in them"- before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars grow dark, and the clouds return after the rain; and those looking through the windows grow dim; when men rise up at the sound of birds, but all their songs grow faint; and the grasshopper drags himself along and desire no longer is stirred. Then man goes to his eternal home and mourners go about the streets.

Remember him—before the silver cord is severed, or the golden bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, or the wheel broken at the well, and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.  (from Ecclesiastes 12)

I remember my Creator, I quake sometimes, in awe of Him.  In awe of an awesome God who first gives us a beautiful creation we are loathe to leave, and then promises, if we believe, to perfect that beauty for all eternity.  As the yellow late summer sun strains through the kelly green of the grass, the barn crumbles, and the dogs shiver in the cool evening shade, I stand with my arms outstretched to a heaven I cannot imagine and do not want to go to now.  I see, in one moment of this achingly beautiful life, that I do not and cannot understand what it means to walk this mortal clod nor what it entails to leave it.

This week has been a week of contemplating, again, death.  Leave-takings.  My last grandparent gone.  A friend from the internet writes that she naps all day long, how her hours grow shorter as she approaches the final days of her 10 year battle with cancer.  A young man, my age, grows visibly weaker every Sunday in the back rows of church, spotted with cancer and hunched in a wheelchair.  My own body is weak now, either from infection or cancer meds that have gotten out of balance again.  I spend long hours on the couch and bed.  Mocked by the dishes in the sink, the dirt on the floor, the mounds of summer clothes that must again (endlessly, this twice a year task comes) be sorted into bins and organized before the air chills further.  I sit at my computer for a few hours today, and sigh as I peer through a pink bed sheet haphazardly strung up against the strong late summer sun of eventide, where a curtain should have been hung years ago.

Departing

Every year, we travel down with a bit of home in our bags...

cheese, wine & syrup.

The end of vacation has come, and finds us all exhausted.

At the start of vacation, the kids are clamoring for more, more, more:

more pool, more ocean, more seafood, more sand castles.

And by the end, sweet bites of all kinds of new pleasures behind us,

they are clamoring to go home to our yellow house.

Now all that intervenes is the 1,300 mile trip homeward.

We pack hurriedly after an early morning expedition to the beach for sunrise

and the Lost Dog for seafood for breakfast.

And are already looking forward to our beds in Louisville hotel tonight!

Brokenness

I don't remember much about what happened, so I can't give you many details.  But I can write, read, speak, laugh, joke, smile, walk, and otherwise function completely normally.  Even though my head apparently went through our toilet tank last night.  When I saw this picture, it is amazing to me that I am alive and sitting in bed typing.  I did have a seizure in the emergency room, a first for me, but haven't had any more.  There is no sign of any broken bones in my skull or face or bleeding in my brain on the CT scan.  I am continuing to have a lot of head pain and some disturbing double vision.  This post will be short because of that.

I am okay.  I'm not really sure why I fell, if I fainted or tripped or what.  I have had no dizziness at any other point since getting the pacemaker.  My heart looks wonderful on all the monitors since getting re-admitted to the hospital again today.

It feels funny to forget something so important.  I think I lost about an hour of memory surrounding the incident, the ambulance ride, the seizure, the hospital admission.  At first I couldn't see hardly anything and I do remember the fear of feeling blind.  It was like looking through Picasso's eyes for a while - faces were all disorganized when I looked at them, with their eyes randomly on their face (my dad's were in his beard and that really freaked me out).  The only person I really could understand was Aaron.  I am so thankful that I lived long enough to marry him, know him, love him.  Words cannot express it. But often in my worn life's autumn weather, I watch there with clear eyes, And think how it will be in Paradise when we're together. (Christina Rossetti, "From Memory")

It's like forgetting the words to your favorite song
You can't believe it you were always singing along
It was so easy and the words so sweet
You can't remember you try to feel the beat
~ Regina Spektor

Becoming a "special needs" mother

I've been considering this whole idea of being the mother of a special needs child for about a year and a half now. As Aaron and I moved toward adoption of a baby with Down syndrome, I had a lot of questions to ask myself. I pictured myself in every imaginable scenario, and came to my terms with it. Felt comfortable with the idea.

And then one of my already-known, already-born, already-loved children developed a brain infection, and then damage, and finally seizures. For a week now, we've dealt with our first season of "clustered" seizures - more than 2 in a 24 hour period. Amy's had seizures while I'm driving down the road, slamming the truck into gear on me with her flailing feet. She's had seizures at VBS and pee'd all over nursery. She's had seizures playing outside, sleeping in her bed, laying in my arms, eating her breakfast, and in the bath. Every activity is riddled with new dangers and difficulties. What used to rub me raw with the sheer mindless routine of it - meals, diaper changes, baths, dressing and undressing these warm little bodies over and over again - is now not boring, but painful, difficult.

I've been stared at on the side of the road when I'm dragging her out the tailgate from the backseat of a minivan during a seizure (note to self: buckle seizure-prone children in an accessible car seat!). I've had to comfort her as she shivers, wet and cold, after being pulled suddenly from a warm bath. I've had to sweep chunks of bread from her throat while her teeth clamped and unclamped when she seized while eating.

This experience does not wring from me a cry of, "Why, God??" There are no words to the lament it wrings from me. What He created so perfectly - this intelligent, beautiful, personality-filled, sweet, hard-working, sensitive, and passionate baby girl with the lilt to her hair - has lain so limp in my arms this week. Her beautiful kalamata olive eyes are drab and unfocused, her throaty voice is so often simply repeating one word endlessly as her brain fires in a loop from which it cannot break free. To say my spirit groans for her losses is an understatement. To watch the beautiful become broken excruciating.

Many have told me they don't believe this will last. I pray that is true. The glimpses of Amelia's spirit have come so few and far between this week. During the music and dancing at Vacation Bible School, there she is, suddenly - the little girl we've all been missing, stomping to the music, and singing in a baritone scraped husky by the many, many times she vomits every day.

Where, Lord, are you today?

Do you see her stumble, head hitting timber

You say you are in every place

Where is your mercy here?

Do you hear my voice call, ragged?

Do you place a gold piece in keeping

as my sore knees bend again to clean mess

a piece of silver for every tear I'm weeping?

Rescue us before we drown in this river

of grief that flows from souls, lashes -

stand in the way of tragedy -

before it all once again crashes

as we tumble together through familiar pain.

She is broken, body, mind

But our souls are nearly empty

faith is elusive, suffering anger-lined.

Dare I compose a song

that asks questions I know have no answer?

There is nothing visible left

which to lay upon Your altar.

You told me once that when my words are gone

You groan for me and plead

for this broken, beautiful, besieged girl.

And so, I hold my creed.

Cover worn, pages torn.

The bandages that bind the broken

become more sacred after we bleed.

Weekends are for weltering

wel·ter :: 1. a confused mass; a jumble. 3. to surge or roll, as on the sea.

Weekends are for serving old friends as they make new ties.

Weekends are for capturing joy moment by moment - deep in the heart and frozen on film.

Weekends are for rediscovering beauty in ordinary places.

They're for finding new friends.

And rediscovering old ones.

Amy (and, in the context of this writing, I should delineate that I mean "Amelia") had well over a dozen seizures in the last four days. I would have to consult the episode record for the exact count. For some reason, she isn't absorbing the seizure medication correctly. She's now developed "clustering" of seizures, with almost a constant simple partial seizure yesterday, punctuated by 6 tonic/clonic seizures. LOTS of clean up, LOTS of tears, and LOTS of worry for parents in new territory. Yet we are off to Vacation Bible School tomorrow in the morning...then on to Mayo in the afternoon for testing. Same thing Wednesday. A "in the area" (a.k.a. no 3 hour drives anywhere) day on Thursday. And back to VBS and Mayo on Friday. In between which I should be putting together a 30 minute presentation and preparing my defense for my comprehensive exam. Time to trust God again!

Never a heartache, and never a groan,
Never a teardrop, and never a moan;
Never a danger but there on the throne,
Moment by moment He thinks of His own.

Moment by moment I’m kept in His love;
Moment by moment I’ve life from above;
Looking to Jesus till glory doth shine;
Moment by moment, O Lord, I am Thine.

~Moment by Moment, Major Daniel Whittle, 1893

Extraordinary

Somewhere along the line I decided I was invincible. Oh, I admitted I would someday die, but until then...invincible. It was right around the time I had to face up to the fact that I would someday die. Around age 19. I felt the tautness of youth in my muscles, the energy propelled on by the drugs that kept my heart beating, the refusal to sleep for fear of wasting precious time. I remember wearing a shirt that bore the motto, "You can sleep when you're dead." And I truly believed it. Rest was for the weary, sleep was for the weak, reflection for the elderly.

One day, once a year, I resurrect that spirit from the ashes. I rise early, pull on my oldest clothes, forgo my shower, and head outdoors, whatever the weather. My body coils and springs again as I chop wood. I lay down in the dirt, and light fires, and breathe smoke. Maple syruping time is the one time I relive this youthful pipe dream of invincibility. I hope I never see the day when I have to lay aside my ax and give it up forever.

That spirit of invincibility carried me through a dark, dark day when my heart actually stopped. When I try to think back to that day and figure out why I acted in certain ways, it still makes no sense to me at all. I collapsed in a hallway at work - thankfully, work was a hospital - and came to during my third shock as defibrillator pads sent an arc of electricity through my chest. I don't remember collapsing, although I do remember having an odd sense of impending doom while finishing my shift, which caused me to check on my patient about 100 extra times before I completed my work. When I came to, I made a miraculous recovery, and refused to even allow the doctor to call my parents. That streak was there from the start of my health problems, and, to this day, I don't understand what about heart disease made me push my parents away as a young person. I wonder sometimes if it was a sense of frantic lack of control, the idea that I would never be an independent, healthy adult? I wonder if I tried to protect them? Whatever the reason, it was a nearly uncontrollable, animal urge, and reduced me to an automaton at times. Like when I told the doctor I would not give him their phone number the day my heart stopped. I regret it, sometimes. On the hand, I lived through it.

And kept on my invincible course. If my heart stopping didn't kill me, what would? I wasn't a particular risk taker, although I enjoyed crazy hobbies like snowboarding and whitewater kayaking, and did weird, random acts of insanity like jumping from a perfectly good bridge into a shallow river and skydiving from a perfectly good plane. Oddly, cancer hasn't inspired a second surge of "Bucket list" type activities - instead, I am cataloging the simple pleasures and stocking up on hundreds of hugs from my kids and fabulous evenings with my husband.

Somewhere around the time of my radioactive iodine treatment, I began to feel vincible. Death, of which I had always been aware, didn't seem that much more real; but weakness did. I began to feel the life blood course a little slower, I felt the tautness melt out of my muscles as I gained extra pounds of flesh fed by stress, sorrow, and a drastically slowed metabolism.

This week, I had just one glimmer of the old self: in the chopping of the wood, the starting of two fires, the brave cooking outdoors on a windy, bone-dry spring day. The chatter of children floating on the wings of the wind, and moms reveling in the smoky morning tradition. For tradition it has become now, after 5 years: a sausage and pancake breakfast cooked over an open fire; the steam off the sap scenting the air; the walk up into the sugar stand to touch the skin of the maples and taste the drips of icy sap flowing down metal taps. I emerged from a week of extraordinary weakness to feel extraordinarily invincible once again.

Now I realize it is just another gift from God. Although I do fuel the fire of the energy myself, clawing down deep to find a hidden reservoir, He fans the flame. He gives the sun, and the unseasonable warmth, and the friends to help chop the logs and load them onto the fires. Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.They are brought to their knees and fall, but we rise up and stand firm. (Ps. 20:7-8)

I am invincible. This week especially, I am reminded that my Lord destroyed death. There is absolutely nothing that can destroy me...because I am covered with His righteousness. (Isaiah 61:10) His extraordinary strength has been completely revealed to me in my extraordinary weakness. Two days ago, I chopped wood like I was 20 again. Today, I am laid up with a chest cold-bordering-on-pneumonia due to my lowered immunity, and yet can hardly sleep because of the cancer suppression drugs that are currently wreaking havoc with all body systems. I take nothing for granted but this: Christ died, Christ is risen, Christ reigns!

A day of chaos

One year and four months ago, the duct-taped wonder also known as the "Ghetto Dryer" slowly died. A $50 miracle - the matching dryer to our splurge of a front-loading washer - replaced it. The dryer struggles shone a light on some spiritual unrest deep within, and I wrote about it in detail back in December, 2008. Tonight, the miracle dryer started on fire. Somehow or other, a metal headband got thrown in with the wash, plugged itself in to the circuitry at the rear of the dryer, and electricity and smoke billowed forth. The fix was simple - the flames hadn't actually burst out yet, and opening the dryer door stopped the flow of electricity. However, the heating element seems to have taken the brunt of the damage, so the dryer is probably kaput. Aaron and I ran around locating the fire extinguisher, cleaning out the laundry closet at midnight. Quite a scene! Beyond the dryer itself and the blackened headband, there was little damage.

It was a fitting end to an equally chaotic day. Amelia had two seizures today that were the blatant, twitchy, nasty type we have been thanking God she doesn't have. I am beginning to settle into the new normal...the life in which whatever you least expect will always happen, the life in which whatever you fear will probably come to pass. I wouldn't call it resignation exactly, just a kind of resolute and dogged expectation. The seizures lasted about 2 minutes, and were full-blown enough that any denial I have been entertaining about the reality of epilepsy was completely swept away. The post-seizure (post-ictal) phase was also significantly more "classic": overwhelming lethargy, drowsiness, decreased ability to respond to commands or questions, dilated pupils, poor muscle tone. A few phone calls with the team at Mayo brings relief on one hand, and sorrow on the other: the video EEG monitoring in mid April has been cancelled, as it is unnecessary given the new circumstances; and Amelia was started on an anti-convulsant medication today, Keppra.

My primal reaction to the first seizure was horror. The nice thing about being a nurse is that, when confronted with any health crisis, the very first thing that happens inside of me is the nurse "switch" gets flipped. I immediately run down the checklist: Airway, Breathing, Circulation. It isn't until later that emotions creep back in. At first, I felt relief - this seizure was so undeniable, I am no longer faced with uncertainty about whether the side effects of seizure medication outweighs the benefit. I know now that Amelia needs this treatment. Yet I am stricken with the thought of watching my dear one grow up with a disabling condition, a condition that will probably limit learning to some degree, will certainly embarrass her and cause emotional angst, may limit career choices, educational endeavors, or social opportunities. Yet I also know that, finally - in my 30's - I can finally see the health problems of my youth as the gift they were. I would not be the tenacious fighter, the compassionate nurse, or the impulsive, fun-loving mother I am now if it hadn't been for heart failure at 18 and cancer at 29. Today I heard a man dying of cancer say, "God cannot give me a bad gift." God has not given Amelia a bad gift - nor has He given a bad gift to me as her mother. I need to get my teeth into that lesson in the next few days. All over again, in a new way. The prism of God's character is thrust once again before my wandering eyes, and I am brought back to my knees in praise. God is God; God is good; God is great.

Success & exhaustion

The Valentine's Dinner was a resounding success! God smashed our fundraising goal by about $600. And I am tiiiiirrred! Have you ever heard me say that before? Probably not - I only get this tired once a year, in the week following the Valentine's Dinner! That, and I have absolutely NO desire to cook, which is also very unusual for me! Back tomorrow with some reflections of the spiritual kind...

Worn out (but home)

I came home from the hospital a little while ago. Very, very tired. I can definitely tell I've been sick since November. I am hoping the latest surgery will be the last I have for years to come. Please continue to pray for complete healing. I still have quite a bit of pain, and developed a reaction to one of the antibiotics they had me on. Now I am on a single, strong antibiotic, and will remain on it for 3 weeks. There is a litany of possible complications due to the necrotic tissue in my abdomen and two surgeries in one area in so short a time. Please pray that my recovery this time would be complication free. I have mild signs of returning kidney infection, but the doctor chose an antibiotic that will treat kidney infection, too.

More about Jesus would I know,
More of His grace to others show;
More of His saving fullness see,
More of His love who died for me.

More about Jesus let me learn,
More of His holy will discern;
Spirit of God, my teacher be,
Showing the things of Christ to me.

~ More About Jesus, Eliza E. Hewitt, 1887 ~

In the dark places

He reveals deep and hidden things; He knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with Him. I thank and praise You, O God of my fathers... Daniel 2:22-23a

Alas, I have not had time nor energy to update this or visit all my normal blog haunts this week. The Crypto continues to rage in our household. I beg your prayers. Our annual church camp is this weekend and I am slated to play music in our annual family band. Without some dramatic improvements, most of the children and I will be stuck home. It's the third week now, and it feels as though the light may never shine at the end of this long, dark tunnel. I find it wryly humorous that an intestinal parasite visible only by microscope has brought me to my knees in frustration and desperation in many ways that cancer several inches long could not. My faith in God the Healer has always been skeptical at best, and at worst it vacillates to near scoffing. I am grateful for the lantern of sickness shining in the dark spots of my soul, exposing those parts where I am still me and not Him.

In my internet wanderings, searching for a cure for this tenacious bug, I discovered that wormwood (read: absinthe) and black walnut are more effective than any antibiotic available. Obviously, we're taking it in capsule form, not the historically popular alcoholic beverage! Interestingly, the same cure is nearly as effective as anti-malarial medication in regions where that illness is endemic. What's more, you can use this herbal preparation once monthly for dogs and cats, and skip the heartworm and various other dewormers available. It also repels fleas for a short period of time after consumption.