My body will tell you tonight:  it’s quite an accomplishment to finish our Spring and Fall yard clean up projects all within 24 hours!  Whaaat?  Such is life these days.  All completed just in time for the long soaking rain storm outside my window as Winter approaches . . . the maiden tulip bulbs are going to be real happy in their new home!

I am exceedingly grateful to be functioning somewhat better despite the ongoing noxious episodes that occur most days.  Then there were two noxious-free “holidays” within the past four days.  THIS IS HUGE GUYS AND GALS!  I haven’t had more than a one-day break per week since living in the hotel at the beginning of the year when we were remediating our home for mold.  Looks like the IV magnesium treatments (counted #20 today) and sugar/sweetener-free cholestyramine are beginning to work a wonder inside of me.  I am grateful and humbled.

Despite all of this good news for some reason I needed to cry a bit today.  This year has been especially traumatic.  When I’m in one of those hour-long to several-hour-long episodes my ability to think and reflect is gone.  My mind is blank.  No processing occurs of what is happening to me.  I have heard patients with dementia describe his or her mind this way.  There just aren’t any thoughts.  Gratefully I do not have dementia.  I often wonder, however, if there will be synaptic damage from the almost 2 years of seizure attacks.  Then again, maybe the neurons just needed a little Spring cleaning, resetting, and the like.  Anyways, I believe that to grieve the loss of my health is, well, healthy.  Perhaps it will pave a comprehensive path to healing?

The end of Psalm 139 reads:

²³ Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.
²⁴ See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

I have heard an application of this passage that it can describe the need to reflect upon and grieve a past trauma as part of a God-honoring healing process.  The Lord knows me and my circumstances in addition to the outcome.  By opening my mind and heart to His merciful grace under the shadow of His wings, I will find rest.   I have prayed many times to “get” the purpose of all of this suffering and wondered if I was “there yet.”  I asked my husband Steve, my God-honoring spiritual leader, if he thought there was anything I was not seeing.  Was there some sin or character flaw that required repentance?  Steve was gracious when asked these questions.  We both saw the little lessons and unexpected blessings that were the “silver lining” to this illness.  We have not become embittered.  We have drawn even closer together and to Christ.  Whew.  Thankfully.

Blogging started as online journaling and has become so much more. I do hope that my writing will be used for God’s glory and point people who are going through serious trials, to the person of Jesus Christ.   To the Gentle Reader out there, you have also helped me find a plan and a purpose for this time in my life.  The process has become as meaningful as the lessons learned.  One lesson learned yesterday:  don’t leave a wheelbarrow full of mulch out in the yard!  Put it under the covered porch.  Six times it got rained on and rained in.  Geez that was one heavy wheelbarrow!

A little humor helps fer shur.  And my Stevers is a great model of the value of silliness in the middle of the crap-o-la-ski.  (You were missing my Polish, I know, so here ya go!)  Thanks for hanging in there with me.  Wish I could hug ya, eh?  :J