Christmas Just Wasn’t The Same

My mom was diagnosed with ALS. She is dying, and I am her main caregiver, along with my dad and sister.

This story is hers to tell but she can no longer do that. ALS is taking everything she has, including her voice.  So I am giving everything I have to her. I may at times sound selfish but the reality is that she gets everything I have and nothing is left over at the end of the day. This story is hers to tell but I’m going to tell it instead.

In mid November 2018 (less than a year before this post) my mom got sick. She came down with a high fever and weakness all over her body. Cold sweats, freezing but hot to the touch, couldn’t stand on her own, couldn’t keep her balance. She stuck it out and felt better after a day or 2 in bed.

1-2 weeks later my mom got sick again. The same kind of sick but worse than the first time. After a day of this fever, we brought her to the hospital because she could not stand or walk on her own. They diagnosed her with a severe bladder infection and possible lung infection.

After some meds, she felt better but her left leg was still weak and she would lose her balance often. She got tests on her lungs and bladder and all came back well and good after antibiotics.

A month or so goes by and the weakness in her leg and her balance kept getting worse but she pushed through. She was such a champ. We went on with life as usual. Hanging out, playing with our new pupper, Christmas was around the corner! But the Christmas spirit just wasn’t there for our family. We knew something was very wrong.

We couldn’t muster the energy or spirit to decorate, bake our traditional Christmas cookies, or even get my mom to go shopping. These were my mom’s usual things to do at Christmas. She loved this time of year and would set up our Christmas tree with lights and we would all decorate it together, she would put silly decorations everywhere, and get the lights and scenes put up outside. Every year of my life, we have decorated the Christmas tree as a family. That didn’t happen this past Christmas.

I put the tree up myself, strung the lights myself, and helped my daughter to decorate the tree just her and I. I didn’t put up my Christmas village, or extra lights outside. I didn’t wrap the banisters with ribbon or tinsel or bulbs. I didn’t put our wreaths on the doors or Santa pictures on the walls. I didn’t put the star on top of the tree. I didn’t put THE STAR ON TOP OF THE TREE!

Something was wrong but we didn’t know what. By early to mid December my mom’s leg was beginning to drag just a little bit and she was dizzy often. She said it felt like her leg was just not connected to her body, it just wouldn’t listen to what her brain told it to do. She would hold on to things if she needed steadying, but you could tell the dizziness made her tired. The doctors were convinced that she had vertigo. A really bad case of it, but vertigo none the less.

Let me tell you, that vertigo is no where near what was wrong with my mom. But it would take us another 6 months, lots of fighting with doctors, a 3 month hospital stay, and time away from our family, to find out exactly what was happening with our mother.

(to be continued)

 

Its Been a Minute

Hello WordPress world!!

Wow it’s been a minute.

Recently, a good friend of mine told me that I need to start writing again. My life has been flipped upside down and I just don’t know which way is up anymore. So with her great advice of “it will help you” here I am, beginning over.

This post, or even the rest of my blog, may not be about ‘fitness’ or getting healthy or anything in particular. I am just going to write what I need to write, for myself. If it inspires people, cool. If it doesn’t and everyone hates it, that’s cool too.

Newest update on my life?

My daughter is 11. She has been diagnosed with Sensory Processing Disorder.

We got a pupper that I am training to be her service doggo.

My mom is dying, quickly. She was diagnosed with ALS a few months ago. They do not think she will stay with us very much longer.

I am taking a leave of absence from my job to take care of her.

I am not working out. Or eating right. And I don’t care at this moment in my life.

I’m bitter and resentful and completely lost in life.

I am still me.

Good-Bye Confidence It Was Nice Knowing You

FYI: This post has very personal things in it…so if you don’t want to know about my sex life…stop reading here lol

Up until now, I was a badass bitch and I knew it. I had the attitude that said I love myself and if you don’t like the way I look then I don’t GAF! But then…I got naked in front of a man and my confidence was nowhere to be found.

I have always thought of myself as a pretty confident woman. I was never confident growing up but the older I got, the more my confidence grew. Yes there are parts of my body that I would like to change but in general I am pretty OK with it. In my situation, with the fact that it is so hard for me to lose weight, I kind of have to be ok with where ever I am in my journey. But apparently when I am NAKED in front of someone else it changes my self-image completely!

For me, I have not been with a man in 5 years. It started as getting over a breakup, then I was too busy with my kid, then I just got scared because by that time it had been a few years and now here we are. I felt ready. I don’t have a boyfriend or anything but I NEEDED to sleep with someone lol how desperate does that sound but 5 YEARS?! Come on! It was overdue haha. So I decided to sleep with a man that I trusted. A good friend if you will.

This really has nothing to do with the person I was with. He is nothing but a sweetheart and would never say anything bad about my body. It has to do with the way I viewed MYSELF.

The sex was great. But there was this little voice in the back of my head saying awful things to me…about me! “Not good enough” “Fat” “Huge” “disgusting”. The self-doubt and total self-consciousness filled my head. I felt those awful things afterwards. Not because of having sex, but because I felt like my body wasn’t good enough. Like my looks and my weight were all that mattered in the equation and they felt not good enough to me.

I am fine now. That self-conscious feeling went away and I am back to my Fabulous self again, but what the hell? Why does that happen? How does that little voice in the back of our heads sneak in there when we least expect it to? When we are feeling great about ourselves, 100% confident and fabulous. I want to tell that sneaky little voice to shut the F*CK up.

What I have learned from this experience; I will have sex AGAIN because let’s be honest, I am never waiting 5 years to have sex ever again lol. The other thing is…I need to love myself MORE. I found out the hard way that I didn’t appreciate my body as much as I thought that I did. That is going to change.

As I have written before, I AM ENOUGH. I am MORE than enough. I am amazing and wonderful and beautiful and sexy and the list goes on. I know that about myself. I just need to reconfirm my own self-image. To remind myself that I am an amazing woman with, or without, clothes on. 🙂

A picture that I feel pretty in ❤

 

 

 

Getting My CRAZY In Check

I am not to much of a beat around the bush type so I am going to come right out and say this..I suffer from depression. I have for the past 13+ years. If that makes me crazy, then so be it. This is a bit of my story of combat against my own demons.

It has been 11 years since I started taking medication to combat my depression, and almost 8 years since I have been on one specific med (the only one that I ever found to work). I haven’t felt depressed in years because of this medication but I was always scared and worried that I could fall back into depression at any time. A depression that does not make you feel sad but actually makes you feel nothing.

I have been there before. The beast that kills all emotions. Never happy, never sad, never proud, never scared, just numb. Always numb.

I used to lay in bed and stare at the wall. What was the point of getting up to do anything? It didn’t make me happy. It didn’t make me FEEL at all. Unless you have felt that black hole of nothing-ness yourself, there is no way to explain it so that someone who hasnt experienced it will understand. I was a zombie, moving about my days copying others expresions, copying their emotional responses I remember, on several occasions the feeling of my cheeks aching from smiling with my friends. But I wasn’t smiling because I was having fun, I was smiling because everyone else was smiling and I knew that that was what I needed to do. In reality I was thinking the entire time ‘how much longer can I hold this smile, and fake this laugh, before they notice that I am a fraud”. .

A little over half a year ago I decided (with the advice and help of my doctor) that I would come off of my medications to see if my body still needed them. For me depression was so much more than just sadness and I was so scared to come off of the medication that regulated my emotions for so long.

I was scared but I knew that it was something I needed to try. I knew that if I didn’t I would regret it for the rest of my life. So I did it. I came off my medication and I am doing great. But that doesn’t mean that I am free of depression or its claws forever.

I can still feel it trying to get me to slip up every once in a while. Not too often but every now and again. I feel the anxiety, the irrational fears, the restlessness, the EXTREME irritibility, the complete lack of motivation to do anything. Those are my warning signs. The warning signs that tell me that I need to get my butt in gear to keep my head on straight and not fall back into that black hole of nothing-ness. 

Do you know what I do now, when I begin to feel those symptoms creeping up on me? I excersize. I walk, I run (even if for only a few minutes 🙂 ), I go to the gym, I lift weights, and I work my body hard until I dont feel the claws grasping at me anymore.

I know I’ve mentioned it before but for me, the gym isn’t just about GAINS or weight loss. The gym or excersize in general, for me, clears my head. It helps me to think straight and get my ‘CRAZY’ in check lol. When I am finished a good workout, I feel relaxed and fearless. I feel balanced and stable. I feel strong and motivated to keep doing good.

The fact that I actually feel those things though, that is the biggest accomplishment in my books.  Working out is NOT the only thing I do to keep my ‘Crazy’ in check. I have to make sure that I am also doing things for myself, eatting right (for the most part) and making sure that I am honest with myself, doing self-checks to make sure that my ‘Crazy’ is not slipping.

Today, I feel great. Today, even when I have my low moments I rise up. Today, I have my ‘Crazy’ in check.

I chose this picture because it can be interpretted for so many different things. While it does speak to my personal recovery, I chose this picture because I am thinking about my friend today. He will know its for  him when he sees it.