Breakfast Club Comes to Mind...

I'm going on a little blogging break.  I'm in the hospital.  It's for my asthma and its many complications.  I don't know how long I'll be here, I don't know how much energy I'll have.

Some days I may post something, but instead of what used to be a M-W-F blog, then as you saw became a random blog, will now be an even more random blog.

I just don't know what's going to happen to me next.  I have to take it one day at a time. For Schedule Woman not be able to schedule? Torturous...

I, in my vanity and selfishness don't want to do this.  Stupid thoughts run through my head:

"You worked really hard to return almost all of the A-Z comments and got a lot of new readers and they're sticking around and you're going to lose them."

"If you're writing sporadically, only those who use feeders will know when you post."

Then reason and sanity sorta return and say to me, "It's a blog.  Or it's your health. Choose."  So at this time, I'm focusing on my health.

~Tina, who chose that opening song for obvious reasons...I'm a hopeless attention seeker and don't want you to go away...sigh.  

P.S Email returns will be hopelessly late...but that you've probably gotten used to already ;-)

In Case of Emergency...

It didn't used to be complicated. I've been using inhalers for a long time for asthma. Here, let me explain in a few simple steps.

This is an inhaler.

You push down on it and suck in the medicine.

Then they decided a lot of the medicine used to get stuck in my throat so they gave me a spacer.

This is a spacer.

It has a hole to put the “suck here” end of the inhaler into it.

And a new “suck here” place. 

Put inhaler in opening A, put lips around opening B, push button, suck in medicine.

However, now they have a new kind of inhaler, which I get to use because the old kind doesn't really work so well for me anymore.  You remember how medically "special" I am...

It looks like this. 

See anything resembling anything familiar from the other pictures? Me neither. Good thing I got instructions.

These take up, I kid you not, ¼ of my bed. See all the pictures? See how complicated it is? Now imagine you're having a breathing emergency. Do you have time to decipher all these directions? No. You do not. You want to suck up some medicine right away. NOW. 

You don't want to find slots A,B,C, and D. You don't want to figure out how to get the bottom half of the inhaler off to insert the cartridge.  Correctly.  Which they explain.  In detail.  You don't want to have to repeat steps 5, 6, 7 FOUR times. (These involve priming the inhaler by turning the bottom half until you hear a "distinct" click, then depressing the "activation button".)  I'm quoting directly from the brochure here. And get this. These steps need to be performed EACH time you want to use your “rescue inhaler.” 

I think it would be faster to call an ambulance, go to the hospital, wait to be seen in the ER, and get a nebulizer treatment. Oh well, I guess I'll have something to read next time I'm in carline.  I'd better memorize these instructions if I want to have any hope of being rescued in time...

~Tina

A-Z Reflections 2013

Time to reflect. I HAVE time to reflect! Wow, what a month! I won't bore you with the details, but in addition to participating in the Challenge, co-hosting the Challenge, wrangling my wonderful Terrific Team of assistants who helped me manage the Challenge, it was also a very challenging time for me medically. But I survived! The badge - you have picked yours up, right? It's at the A-Z Blog, or right there in the top corner of my sidebar - really fits me this year. I was in survival mode.

I went back and read my reflections from my first two challenges, and realized that this year's reflections would be very different. No sex analogies. No sports analogies. Just the truth, in plain format.

While Life is Good, sometimes life is very hard. Sometimes God puts us through ordeals that seem insurmountable, un-doable, unconquerable, UNPLEASANT, and unending. However, He also gives us an out. This year, The Challenge was my escape. I needed it to survive. I needed the distraction. I needed the camaraderie that this community provides. I needed YOU.

I am humbled and awed and grateful for the way you responded to my stories of my first year as an immigrant. You empathized with me, you understood me, you told your  own stories in the comments, you held me up when I felt like falling down. You encouraged me. You kept me going. I had some posts pre-scheduled, but there were times I was writing my post at 4:30 am while shoveling scrambled eggs into my gut so that I could be picked up by The Swede to go to the hospital to be tortured, um, tested, for the root cause of my asthma.

I also needed my co-hosts. They came through for me as they always do, even though it was a year where many of them had challenges far worse than mine. Still, they were there, ready to help out. Of course, Tina's Terrific Team proved why they're terrific. The behind the scenes work they accomplished was phenomenal!

I suppose I should also talk about some pros and cons of the set up of the Challenge. The categories thing...dying to hear what you all thought of it, because it was last year's Reflections that prompted that change. From a co-host's perspective, that caused more grief than it was worth, in my opinion. Alex deserves a giant round of applause, and to be flown by private jet to some remote island with his wonderful wife for some R&R. How he managed that long list and all our emails about what to fix simply amazes me. All hail the Ninja Captain!

Please don't miss our annual Road Trip announcement post coming on Wednesday May 8. The Road Trip is simply those of us who aren't giving up on the visiting, and will continue to visit the participants using whatever schedule fits our lives. Please join us – it's a great way to stay in touch with friends you've made, and there are more friends out there just waiting. They may turn out to be just the friend you need to get you through the tough times. I'm blessed to have friends like that in you, dear readers. Thanks for holding me up.

~Tina

How to Deal with Chronic Illness - You Tell Me

I'm feeling blue and introspective this morning, so if you're not in the mood for that, feel free to leave. I just have the need to be brutally honest about what life has been like for me lately, so that maybe in some cathartic way, I can get this all out of my system and not be such an emotional basket case all the time.

Chronic illness changes you. I've dealt with chronic pain, and the depression that goes along with it, but chronic illness is a whole different animal. I didn't know that. In the past, when I've had the chronic illnesses (and you can search to your heart's content, you'll find a lot of stories here – I write as therapy) I've ALSO still had the chronic pain. So it was just another layer, oh look, it's not just snowing, it's a blizzard, well ok, let's hunker down and wait it out.

Some of you are new, so you don't know that a true miracle has found me, and I'm now 100% PAIN FREE. Never thought I'd see the day, but it's here, and has been since about January 2012, so I think it's here to stay. What changed my life is The Feldenkrais Method. I started on 10/3/2011. So three months and then I could walk and move and bend over and tie my shoes and crawl under the kitchen bench to retrieve the errant grape, etc. I was “real” again.

Wait, not so fast though. I was just getting my body back, getting active after three sedentary years (quick catch-up for the much appreciated slew of new followers – I was supposed to have a full hip replacement for my advanced osteoporosis, at age 47) and then I was slammed with asthma complications. Spent a good part of 2012 on bedrest. Am just coming off of round number two, as of 9/7. It's slow going. It's a snail like one step forward three steps back sort of thing. Good days. Bad days. No medium days.

Here's what chronic illness does to you as opposed to chronic pain. It takes away your self-esteem. I can't get out of bed. I can't nuke a burrito for my 12 year old. He is more than able to take care of himself food wise, this boy wants to be a chef for pete's sake. He can make dinner for the family no instructions needed. So can Jake, but there's something nurturing about your mother preparing your food for you, of her doing your laundry and folding all your clothes meticulously (yes, there's a post about my un-natural love of laundry) and filling the drawers once again with clean clothes.

I couldn't climb the stairs, I couldn't sit at the dinner table with my family. They brought dinner downstairs, onto my bed. (We're remodeling our master bedroom, there's a post about that. Put old carpet in the search box...) Life has been upside down. For a person who is a go-getter, a doer, an organizer, a leader, a take charge, a non-stop kinda a girl, there is no punishment worse than bed rest.

Now I'm free to do what I want, as long as I don't get out of breath. It's not a lot, but it's a start. Life is slowly returning, but not my sense of self. I'm still the girl in the bed, reluctantly accepting help from one and all. I don't sleep, even with sleeping pills. When I have a good day, I sometimes see the real Tina. On the bad days, she's nowhere to be found. Last week she was so far away she didn't even blog.

Have you ever dealt with chronic illness or pain? How did you handle the depression? Any psychiatric types out there with a few words of advice? Just don't tell me how great bed rest is and how many movies you get to watch...I'm likely to throw my nebulizer at you. It weighs enough to cause some damage...

How to Get Your Room Remodeled the Hard Way

This is what my house looks like now. But I don't mind.

Because this is what my bedroom looks like now.

Because this is what is no longer in my bedroom. As it has been since 1974. I had some dust in it. When I got sick in February, we stopped using our wood burning stove and The Engineer installed in floor radiant heating for this year.

When I got sick this time, he said, “This carpet has got to go.” Mind you, we've been planning to remodel our bedroom for 12 years. We've lived here 12 years. However, it always gets shoved to the bottom of the list because things like hospital stays and kids breaking arms and needing surgery and cars breaking down and gas prices going up and other urgent matters take the money we try to save. I haven't minded much. I just close my bedroom door when my mother-in-law, The Boss, comes over and hang a sign saying, “This room is not part of today's tour.” Not kidding. It's more important to me that my asthmatic boys got their rooms done the moment we moved in (we also have that wonderful “popcorn” ceiling all over the house...well, not in the boys rooms.) Yes, I have asthma, too, but didn't until a few years ago.

Once we had the carpet out, we talked about throwing down some rugs and towels and saving for the Pergo I'm dying for (maybe literally now that this illness has gone on so long) but we decided to just go ahead and do the whole shebang.

So we used this

To remove the HIDEOUS (look up at the empty room, you'll see it) wallpaper.

YellowBoy and Swissie had fun in here. We ended up choosing the lighter color for three of the walls, and the darker for the accent wall which will be the window wall. The colors are misty, foggy, bluish-grey with hints of lilac. I'm in love. And I hope, on my way to wellness. In a new room. 

 Here's some of YellowBoy's silliness. He'd written the Pythagorean theorem (good) but spelled it wrong (bad) so I made him re-write it (like any good math/English teacher would) and then he went nuts...

To ponder, for those of you who are in the “everything happens for a reason” camp: did I get sick so that I could finally get rid of the carpet and stop having these recurring asthma episodes that last for a month? Am I on my way to some semblance of wellness? I think so.