Recovery from Serious Illness: Lyme, CIRS, & More – Page 66

When there are no words

Published on November 19, 2015November 19, 2015 by Jesus is for the WoundedLeave a comment

“Look up. Look waaaaaay up,” were the words of The Friendly Giant in 1986. This American children’s television host invited the viewer into his miniature living room where he pulled out a chair just for you by the fireplace. Then an image of his fake leather boots appeared 10x the scale of the scene on the television as he invited little Sissy or young Bobby to follow the camera up to the smiling eyes waiting to tell a story, waiting to introduce you to a host of characters. Rusty the Rooster was a silly-looking puppet yet their banter held my attention all the same. Even though by 1986 I was not a kiddo anymore!

We often look up to see the wonder beyond us: gazing at the twinkling stars so visible in the crisp Fall air or maybe oooing and ahhhing at the bright ornaments adorning the department store Christmas trees already on display before Thanksgiving. There is something magical about a beautiful sight just beyond our gaze, just above our smaller human frame. When that object is but ordinary the wonder may be less yet the opportunity to reflect may be just as profound too.

The ceiling above my bed of sickness holds much thought these days. On a Monday I might see a simple popcorn ceiling in the same building contractor’s white paint of every home built that very year. A few days later it may be the seam tape of the electrical lines painted to match the composite panel lining the roof of an aluminum travel trailer. Two months ago it was a bright blue shade sail floating softly up, gently down above my patio chair when the weather was still sunny and warm. Such simple forms that served to give me pause from the mayhem of the hours that dragged on before . . .

shade sail patio summer 2015

Times like these are best spent dwelling in the presence of the Lord. No words fill my mind in those kind of moments. The tears are already spent; the energy almost completely drained away. Such is the aftermath of uncontrollable seizure attacks that plague my weakened frame day after night after day for hours without end. The pattern continues despite new anti-microbial treatments, tests, consultations, prayer, tears, strategies new and old. New pains come and find a way to stay. There is nothing left to say. There is nothing left to do but to dwell, I guess.

Even love can be like this I suppose when it hurts so bad and you still can’t seem to shake the pain away. All you do is focus on the form that you knew or still know that stands in front of you when only a blank slate emptied of your future together remains. Turn to the left, turn to the right, stand up, sit down, and unlike the cheer song at the football games in 1986, there is no fight! Fight! FIGHT! when love goes away for good. Oh how I long for the familiarity of the pains I had known long ago. It would be so much easier to handle than the emptiness of my heart this night. Yup. The joy is gone! Gone! GONE!

So what’s a middle-aged gal to do in the middle of the night and there is nothing to look up to anymore? When I have written more words from every angle that my heart can imagine and no new inspiration comes to fill the page, gosh, what will I do? Not much, really. Just wait I guess. Tomorrow is a new day and it will be here before you know it. Maybe something good will happen, eh?

In the meantime, won’t you hang in there with me? Here, I have pulled up a chair for you too Gentle Reader. The Friendly Giant is now known as Immanuel and has a special story to help us end this little time together. It’s a great read for a bedtime story at any time of the day, I promise.

I do hope you enjoy it. JJ

Psalm 121

Let the numbers tell this story

Published on November 16, 2015November 17, 2015 by Jesus is for the WoundedLeave a comment

While the numbers in my college statistics courses were fascinating and I applied them well in my Master’s thesis, I must admit that math was never really my forte. I’ll blame it on Mr. Courtright! Our Algebra II/Trigonometry course in high school was a constant source of frustration! John and a couple of the other male students would pour over the text book with him at the front of the room trying to understand the lessons he was supposed to be teaching that day. Yeah, you got that right: high school seniors trying to figure out advanced mathematics on the fly! I am so very glad that I never again had to sit through a traditional math class after that one!

Statistics are a different genre though. Statistics often tell a story that we can use to make sense out of the stuff of life. For example, landing one standard deviation from the mean (the average) in a bell-shaped curve can help us feel like things are going to be o.k. most of the time, in the right scenario of course! Enter here special numerals applied to my recent trip with Steve to Georgia and South Carolina that will tell this story better than I can even without a calculator! Oh how I wish some of these were more comforting than the majority of them though . . .

Over 7 days of camping in 2 locations, I was unable to leave the travel trailer 3 of the days due to illness.

My beloved Steve attended 2 of the 3 family wedding-related activities in Georgia and I attended zero.

We travelled over 2,000 miles in my truck with our 67-pound German shepherd, Elle, settled sweetly behind the jump seat of the King Cab. Such a great traveler she has become!

I prepared about 96% of all of my own meals making this trip more of a “business as usual” affair than vacation in the realm of food.

One hour of the five that I spent in our friends’ home on Monday was spent in continuous convulsive episodes on their couch. Thankfully the two young children had already gone off to bed when I crashed; graciously the three adults prayed over me for the Lord’s tender care as we all go forward from the significant stressors in our lives.

The kids and I planted 32 daffodil bulbs the morning we left South Carolina, overplanted with dozens of anise hyssop seeds. Hooray! By Springtime the view from the kitchen window of their log cabin will be alive with flowers interspersed amongst the numerous towering pines.

daffodils, mini daffodils, buttercup flowers, Spring flowers

A threatening wind storm with gusts up to 40 MPH forced us to leave a day early for safety towing our Camplite on the highways to get back home. Just a few minutes after we arrived home at 4:00 a.m., the winds increased again closer to the estimate of 50 MPH by morning. We had blown in just in time, praise the Lord!

Nearly 4 days have passed since we got home and I have yet to clear out, clean out the rest of the trailer as needed after a week of travel. Steve completed the first 5 loads of laundry and about 3 more are left to go. I have been sick in bed for most of the past 3 days, sleeping in late to recover from the nasties which characterize this wretched illness.

Over a dozen doses of a new anti-microbial treatment (Biocidin LSF) have brought both relief and a flare up of symptoms at times: begun when travelling and continued back home when seeking a new direction, new relief, new hope for a future without illness. Two violent convulsive episodes followed on Friday after an appointment with a new specialist and a new lab test, respectively. Many more filled the 2 days that followed. Perhaps this week (and 2 weeks shy of the 4-year anniversary of the first waking seizure attack) there will be an answer to end this suffering? The odds are wearing thin lately for sure.

Yet through it all, I am reminded of the 3 days that my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ died and paid the price for all the negative numbers, the heartaches from what is not right in our world. He knows the mathematics of it all greater than I can ever imagine and holds it all tenderly in the palms of His hands, ready to redeem it for good when He comes again in glory. I choose to believe the promise that His precious thoughts towards me and you too, Gentle Reader, outnumber the grains of sand on the earth (Psalm139), giving us hope for a better tomorrow. For as He thinks fondly of the ones He loves, He also promises to wipe away our every tear someday (Rev 21:4) when the time is right: when time is no longer numbered in eternity with our Heavenly Father, God.

And that my friend is a story worth writing about. A world without limits. A love beyond measure. I just hope that when all is said and done, when it is time for rejoicing in the heavenly realms, that you will be there with me there too? Let not these numbers be wasted! Won’t you accept the love of Christ into your heart this day, this night too? Oh how I hope so dear one.

With love, JJ

Four-Wheeling in a Travel Trailer

Published on November 16, 2015November 18, 2015 by Jesus is for the WoundedLeave a comment

getting lost, moon at night, moon, camping, campground, campsite, Georgia, November sky, October sky The River Falls at the Gorge Campground promised to be a lovely place to be along the Tallulah River this past week. Our reservations and multiple modes of directions were in tow with the GPS programmed to get us there, MapQuest directions handy between the seats, US Atlas turned to the State of Georgia, verbal directions written on our reservation confirmation sheet, and a back-up of directions from a Google search if needed. But it was the map linked to the website of the campground that eventually got us there around 6:00 in the morning. Yes, the River would be beautiful at sunrise . . .

But it didn’t go the way we had it planned! Of course we knew that it would be a 12+ hour drive from Indiana but not over 15! Well that sum includes completing the hook-ups once we arrived of water, electric and sewer. O.K. so it’s kind of a modern way of “camping” yet still more rustic than the Bed-and-Breakfast accommodations to which I had become accustomed many years ago! This is my version of “roughing it!” There still is a lot more interaction with the elements than you might expect, (more on the mud another time!) especially trying to find a place in the dead of night on a long and twisty dirt road somewhere in northeastern Georgia.

“Something just isn’t right,” confessed my beloved Steve when the horse paths we were travelling on for almost 30 minutes ended in in 3 driveways, 2 of which were blocked by metal gates. All of them had signs posted next to them from respective security companies. Oh dear. That would not be typical for a campground for sure! It had been raining for hours and the dirt road was largely ungraded for heavy traffic, especially for a wide range of local to out-of-State travel trailers and motor homes. How in the heck would a bus-sized RV ever make it up the road we had just traversed? Yes indeed something was very wrong!

We decided to take some time to assess our situation. We had already turned around twice on the main road, trying to find the campground which was supposed to be “one mile past the State park and off Highway 441.” Well that just wasn’t our reality. I reprogrammed the GPS and the scavenger hunt in backwoods was our third attempt to find our river-front paradise. We had no other ideas at that time: about 5:30 a.m. We got out our umbrellas, Sure Fire flashlights, and hiked around. Probably no one would mind at that hour that we were blocking everything with the 40-foot total length of my mid-size pick up truck and our 16-foot Camplite! Steve walked closer to one of the open gates as I exclaimed, “don’t go in there! There’s probably a laser light across the road that we might activate if we cross a line hidden by the trees!” (I had seen this before in the homes of my home health care patients who lived in more remote areas.) We backed away and looked up the rutted road that had led us astray. We would need to re-trace our course.

Steve decided to pull out the manual for the brake controller and make some adjustments right there in the wilderness. The timing was as crazy as it was brilliant. An adjustment was sorely needed to manage the hills and valleys of our obstacle course back to the highway. We were also concerned about the softening of the terrain as it continued to rain; four-wheel drive was already engaged. And what if we were not alone out there? I thought for a moment what I might do if a bear or wild hog might greet us before we had made our decision to get the heck out of there. I was packing a pistol in my pocket but the caliber wouldn’t do much for a beast taller than my knees. Oh yeah, I could flap the umbrella around and make a lot of noise. Sure, that’s it! Gratefully, we were alone out there having another Steve-and-Julie bonding experience and never encountered another soul.

Back down the road we went. Steve made an incredible 5-point turn with the trailer in-tow with me scouting out the lay of the land outside in the dark. I was never so grateful for having decided to wear my hiking boots during this trip. Kind of odd, really, to wear them in the truck. Kind of extremely helpful though in these conditions! We bid our unknown neighbors “good night” as I hopped back into the truck whilst the sky was lightening slightly: morning was breaking.

By the grace of God we found the campground with the re-programming of the GPS and retracing our original steps. Funny, the campground was 1 mile from the State Park in the OPPOSITE direction than we had been instructed. Had not we mentioned we were coming from Indiana? Oh well. We probably drove right past the place on our first pass through the area. Chalk it up to the folklore of giving us directions with landmarks as if we were locals. Sish.

While the light was out that illuminated the lettering on the building, the other lights clearly identified a big building just 200 feet or so from the road. It was the office of the River Falls at the Gorge Campground! We had made it! A little more scouting, misinterpretation of a parking lot for the camp road, and final identification of our campsite out in the rain with the umbrelli brought us to a real stop for the next three days. Steve hooked us up and I prepared the inside for us and our pup, Elle. By 7:30 a.m., we were showered and asleep.

So what is the moral of this story? Probably nothing! We always seem to get lost trying to find our way in the wee hours of the morning in rural Georgia. Yes, this has happened before when we landed at the end of a road in the woods just before daybreak trying to find Phil and Judy’s place a few years ago. Maybe we will wait awhile before heading back to the land of boiled peanuts and peaches. Yeah, that’s it. Hey Babe, it’s time to GO WEST not South, my dear! JJ

True Love, He Says

Published on November 2, 2015November 2, 2015 by Jesus is for the WoundedLeave a comment

Looking into his eyes in the dim light this eve

Knowing how he carried me through the hour gone before,

I had to wince in disbelief then fall more deeply into the blue

He demonstrated his heart once again with eyes that shone on me once more.

How did I ever earn the affections of a heart so pure?

I wondered then left him sleeping, hoping to wind out what was left

As my evening had more hours to go, my To Do list already trashed

No matter the weakness of my days to discover that this part of living is best.

My love understands what it really means to care

When to be strong, to lie within reach, to call just to say, “hi;”

He slays the dragons out there by land and by sea

Then rescues this damsel as needed (no matter how many times)!

To say that I am grateful

Would be too tiny when I am humbled more than that:

A real man has chosen to love me forever

May the Lord bless us both for the journey: true love magnificat. JJ

It Just Doesn’t Matter that much anymore

Published on November 1, 2015November 1, 2015 by Jesus is for the WoundedLeave a comment

What others think of me, especially online, used to concern me to the point of scrutinizing every typo and punctuation mark! Tell you what, it just doesn’t matter that much anymore (IJDMTMA).

Keeping in mind the reason for every significant action in my life so I can justify it, rationalize any lapse in judgment, or simply give me another reason to criticize myself occupies less of my mental space these days. It takes too much energy. Any other reasons would go against what I just said! IJDMTMA.

Cataloging significant records that document the divorce I endured, the major court case I lost, the medical conditions that have come my way, too many artifacts and photos of special events, and purchasing new file cabinets to keep track of these events and more (I have 15 packed drawers in various lateral files, desk drawers and file cabinets, plus quite a few plastic bins around!) involves more-purging-than-storing these days. If I need it that badly surely I can find it online somewhere, right? IJDMTMA.

I now live in a town where the cost of living is so affordable that a few people I know have a second home just to store their stuff! Or folks rent storage spaces in addition to their primary residences (and I am not talking about those living in an apartment or condo!). Gratefully my husband, Steve, and I live in a modest home that requires us to purge stuff periodically! We don’t want to keep accumulating stuff! This Christmas I will need to discard numerous Christmas decorations that were up before we remediated our home for mold damage. The most treasured items will be consolidated into one bin. I’m going to have to get tough and proclaim: IJDMTMA.

Similarly, musty memories, painful flashbacks, grief beyond what most must endure, and the drag-me-down burdens that comprise life’s worries have come to the surface with the wretched convulsive episodes of the illness I have been battling. I simply could not stop the process if I tried. Perhaps these came as a consequence of a few illnesses that have affected my brain? No one knows. What I do know is that If there are to be any redeeming benefits to the nightmares of these past 4 years it must include the involuntary healing that came as these demons were set free. Yes, the seizures helped release some bad stuff going on in my head. Carrying this mental baggage has gone down immensely along with the emotional pain. A different kind of healing has occurred as a result. Joyfully, IJDMTMA.

The losses of what I once held so dear (i.e. many relationships, my occupational role of 32 years, more financial freedom, certain activities, physical fitness, and the ability to function normally) has been heartbreaking. But just like learning to let go of other people, places, and things in my life, these intangibles had to be released to the care of my Heavenly Father as well. At this point I do not know if any of them will come back. Amazingly I have discovered that I still can have some good moments, make new friends and memories, have everything that I really need, and experience love like never before even with a total life makeover. To the need for having things be just so I say, IJDMTMA. Life goes better when held more lightly in the wonder of the moment . . .

How do I convey that “IJDMTMA” is a relatively peaceful, not a sad or angry place in which to be? I simply have to be here right now. This attitude has become like a protective coating to keep me from falling apart, from losing what is left, from thinking that my Jesus has abandoned me. He has not! IJDMTMA is the construct into which I must retreat lest the grieving of what is no longer here overtakes me and blinds me to the goodness that still remains. In Ezekiel 3:8, the Lord shows His prophet that He will indeed allow him to become “hardened” so that Ezekiel may not lose heart as he carries out the work of ministering to the nation of Israel still in exile. Wow! A God-ordained rebellion of sorts will help keep Ezekiel from discouragement. A toughening will help him and his gifts to continue to be used for God’s glory. Yes, I want the will and glory of my Lord too. In the cocoon my Lord has woven for me I can say to all that other stuff: IJDMTMA.

It just doesn’t matter that much anymore that things aren’t the way they should be or used to be. I am still here and that matters to me. Much goodness still surrounds me as I look around this room where I am sitting and see the pictures, handiwork, awards, furniture, and records that tell the stories of Steve and Julie. Cool beans. Better yet, just look into our eyes or sit and chat a spell to see more closely what real life looks like in those who are grounded in trusting the Lord for each hour of the day. It isn’t perfect. We don’t want our lives to be perfect anyways. I have a sense that maybe yours isn’t perfect either. It’s going to be o.k. for those who are in Christ Jesus. One day soon we will be in His presence and the real stuff of life will be revealed. And with His glorious light shining all around us we will be with our Lord and Savior for always . . .

Coming to faith in Christ does matter to make this all possible. Dwelling in the presence of the Lord for all time will bring lightness of heart for all of eternity. I will be there. Will I get to see you there too Gentle Reader?

I’m tired. Goodnight all. JJ