Tag: Facebook

The decision to be tooth-less?

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It’s not like I am planning another wedding or something.  I’ve done that twice and twice is enough!  If a couple of teeth are missing I just can’t smile or laugh really BIG so the void in my mouth is noticeable.  Not that anyone would be looking at my molars anyways!  I suppose there are the exceptions for some of you out there . . .

Then my beloved teased me that I might have trouble eating bacon and potato chips.  Not!  I grew up with a GIANT bag of Better Made potato chips on the refrigerator and a dad who had to have a generous helping every day plus ice cream.  When we visited his parents where they lived in the Irish Hills, between the view of the lake and the country kitchen was another HUGE bag of Better Made potato chips on the frig.  So if I have two opposing teeth anywhere in the yard then there will be Unsalted Kettle Chips too!  And bacon, just because we can.

Don’t you love Facebook?  Or maybe you hate Facebook?  Perhaps you would love to hate Facebook a little more since it can be such a “time eraser” extraordinaire.  Well anyways, I have joined many groups who have the answers to this or that ailment I have faced over the past few years.  Recently I joined the “Bottoms Up” group to learn more about digestive health, only to realize that I did not want pictures of worms in feces gracing the screen of my smart phone if I were to check it when dining out somewhere.  Yuck!  TMI for sure.  Delete!  The mercury, root canal, mold avoidance, Lyme disease, methylation, candida, etc. peeps have all greatly contributed to my vast brain swell of mixed anecdotal/psuedo research information.  There’s a cause and cure for everything right there in my newsfeed.  Even business opportunities, rudeness and meanness fit in where pretox/detox really should dwell.  But I digress.

These forums have been part of my lifeline too.  I have made some sweet friendships with gals who run in the same groups.  Members have helped shorten my learning curve and evaluate relevant research, news articles, and success stories.  Many folks really do get well!  Then they drop out of the group and the rest of us left behind try to figure it all out before we also leave the comfort of the group nest as well.  Hey, I won’t mind moving on if I can take a few happy FB Friends with me, eh?  Currently they are helping me navigate the potentially painful decision of whether or not to have two teeth with root canals extracted.  These puppies may be a source of years of discomfort from hidden infection, possibly contributing to some of my chronic health issues.  I am already in the preparation stage of mercury chelation which certainly wreaks havoc in one’s brain and body.  Gratefully my brilliant functional medicine Doc is leading the way along with acute spiritual discernment from the Lord and my beloved hubby.

This treatment crossroad is more confusing than some others.  Extensive testing has not revealed hard data on the need to extract two teeth (yet it just doesn’t seem like complications of a sinus infection or trigeminal nerve inflammation either).  Travel would be needed to a skilled biologic dentist who can meet my needs for extra TLC should we decide to proceed.  The requirement for all of this extensive screening became extremely clear this afternoon after a very bad appointment with a recommended, local oral surgeon in a musty office!  Bad, bad.  Steve and I prayed about all of this as we navigated a particularly rough evening for me tonight, placing our trust again in the Lord to guide us.  I’ll make a few more phone calls tomorrow.  At least a dear friend gave me the tip of a concoction with cloves to manage the moderate pain in my gums.  Cool beans.  It worked quite well!

So for now I’ll be eating bacon and potato chips on the right side of my mouth and cutting up other delicacies into small bits so as not to trigger seizure attacks or pain.  Thank the Lord for our VitaMix which chops, whips, cooks, and practically washes the dishes for you afterwards!  Like teeth, little things can mean a lot to a gal like me.  See how good my Jesus is:  providing for my every need and heart’s desire too.  Avocado-coconut smoothies anyone?

As I close I must profess that through it all God is good.  All the time.  God is good!  JJ

Toothless smile girl

 

My Facebook Family Understands

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Thank the Lord for Facebook!

Remember that John Lennon song from the 70’s, Whatever gets you through the night . . . it’s alright . . . it’s alright by me?”  Well I am not endorsing riotous living by any means!  I am saying that for me this past weekend, having a Closed Group in which to vent some drama was my “whatever” that got me through a couple of unusual nights and days when everyone else was asleep.  Thanks for being there Cyber Friends.  Here they are, out in the open:

Friday

Up very late again after the Lord added His increase so I could do some baking. There’s one more day to go entertaining in our home while trying to: avoid toxic (chemical & mold) exposures and squirrel away when the convulsions come. My hubby’s kids have done a reasonable job following our precautions, thankfully. I’ve missed some activities again this year. (For example, a partial Skype date with more family when I had to leave for an hour-long noxious episode!) Sometimes I feel like I have disappeared and other times it’s just me spending so dang much time in the kitchen preparing my special diet. Guess I’m glad I finally got my stuff done! I’ll have more food prep help tomorrow. Hey thanks for listening!

FB Tree

Saturday

Strangeness abounds! Still alone again after not being able to get up to join family due to wretched convulsions. Instead of making a nice honey maple ham dinner (for which I had prepared last night) my husband’s daughter made a different lunch for everyone. I was still in bed seizing! Now I’m up eating my special food alone with you and the Lord in front of our pretty tree.

The fam went indoor go-kart racing! Before they left and whilst praying the spiritual warfare would end, I got a text that my ex-husband needed to contact me for the first time in 10 years! Could he have gotten saved? So my time alone now has been tranformed into a prayer time.

No worries. The Lord has me and you gently in the palm of His hand. I see He may have “others” there too and it is all good.

Update to follow . . . With love, J

Sunday

Finally stabilized and was able to go out to eat with relatives after a wretched morning (aka husband carrying me to the bathroom then bringing me some food before I crashed for another 2 hours while he went off to church). No, the ex did not get saved so I will continue to pray if he comes to mind and in the meantime block further communication for sanity reasons.

Sometimes it just helps to vent the drama that characterizes a life with serious illness. I’ll bet that many of you reading this get it. Our “new normal” never really feels normal at all. I rest in the fact that the Lord sees all and carries me though each breath. When I couldn’t breathe later last night in repeated seizes, I reminded myself that I ain’t dead yet so it must be all uphill from here! “Trust in the Lord and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your paths.” Proverbs 3:5-6: you rock! It’s gonna be a better week! :J

Addendum:

Have a blessed couple of days, Gentle Reader, making the most of whatever is remaining in 2014.  With a ton of yummy leftovers in the frig and sweet Christmas memories too, it’s going to be alright, alright, alright by me too.  :JJ

Left behind. Not forgotten.

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One of the great things about Facebook is that it is timeless.  Your event lives on after it is posted and no one knows what happened before or afterward just that you were there online at one moment in time.

The wedding of my husband’s son, Daniel, is a great example.  I am delighted to have worn a gorgeous dress to the outdoor ceremony at the Lakeside Rosegarden downtown near where we live in Indiana.  The weather was idyllic:  sunny and 80 degrees with a slight breeze in the abundant shade.  The nuptials were exchanged in front of the fountain and reflecting pools:  the groom dressed impressively in his Marine blues and the bride aptly adorned in white chiffon and satin.  The red roses in her hair were a lovely touch in the regal garden setting.  A small contingent was invited to witness the event early in the afternoon and an even larger one would attend the reception 5 hours later.  In the interim we snapped a myriad of photos then headed off to various restaurants in the area.  A few crashed at their hotel rooms in anticipation of the reception at a restored train station called Baker’s Street.  Surely there would be dancing, eating of gourmet finger sandwiches and cake:  festivities that are the hallmark of American wedding traditions.

You wouldn’t know that the reception is happening right now and I am not there.  I am sitting here in a Polartec sweater, pajama bottoms and my evening dress shoes (as the daytime slides have already made their showing in the soft grass around the park nearly landing me into a wardrobe malfunction!).  This was my comfort garb I selected for a short rest before I redressed for the evening.  Yeah well you can probably guessed what happened instead:  the tic attacks that had begun at the quiet restaurant I selected and enjoyed with select family members escalated into a continuous episode as soon as I lain on the bed at home.  Nope.  No nap just some more shakes.  Crap.  Crap.  Crap.

Just because we have hosted 2 gatherings (doubling the wretched symptoms over these past 4 days), got Skyped into a bridal shower (to minimize exposures to 2 dozen ladies wearing fragrances of all sorts), and attended one of the most lovely outdoor rehearsal-style receptions followed by an equally lovely wedding the next day, why would I be too weak to go to a reception?  “Why” indeed.  All of this celebrating was way too much for me a few days ago!  Such is the nature of Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS):  a complication of Lyme disease and biotoxin illness.  The fact that I made it this far is a miracle for me.  I am grateful.  And I am also sad that I could not finish the festivities with everyone, dancing the night away in the arms of my beloved.  So my beloved and I did something else instead.

Just before Steve left to join his family for the wedding reception back downtown, I asked him for 5 minutes.

That’s when I put on my other pair of dress shoes so we could dance.  Oh how I love my Stevers.  (We played this song at our own wedding DURING the ceremony, before the Lord and all of our guests 6 1/2 years ago.)  Afterwards with a kiss more passionate than many of late, we parted this evening.  Later I looked at the photos we had downloaded from the wedding and posted a bunch on Facebook.  Clearly there are more memories being created at the reception as I typed.  Oh well.  I had the most romantic dance of the evening right here in our living room.  My beloved will return and all will be right with the world.  Have I said that I love Steve so very much?  My heart broke and the tears came easily as he prepared to leave.  Rest assured I needed to be left behind in the comfort of our home tonight to rest for the eighth large gathering of the week that is tomorrow night:  the wedding of a son of some dear friends of ours.  This evening Steve will have danced with his lovely daughters and mother (here from California).  Tonight it will be his turn to sit alone while his ex-wife dances with her new husband.  So much not the way it should be.  I’m sure Steve will be fine.

Perhaps another one of those great kisses will be coming my way a little later?  Hope so.  We each do what the Lord calls us to do on a night like this.  At least the pictures are really nice, eh?  Thank you Lord.  How could I ask for more?

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So where ya been?

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O.K. so I’m still sick and that isn’t my excuse this time!  So where have I been?  Editing, that’s where!

This past month I’ve poured and prayed over the decision to turn these blog postings into an eBook.  I want to make sure I have the right intentions and that the end result will be something useful to others as well.  In the process of reviewing this past year of New Hope Beyond Lyme on WordPress, it became clear that my followers enjoy messages that are particularly encouraging to persons recovering from a serious illness.  Matters of faith generate the most comments and I’m pleased for that.  To Him be the glory!

I did some research on various publishing formats and have decided to proceed with a no-cost eBook format where I can do virtually all of the formatting of the manuscript and cover art myself.  I have a lot to learn about all of this, for sure!  Lyme Disease will be prominent in the text since the treatment of Lyme was my primary focus for most of this past year.  But the take home message won’t be about a disease . . .

The truths borne out of the trials, struggles, illness, and strife these past two years have once again served to strengthen my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.  About a year into this season of illness, I began blogging to keep myself sane!  Now looking back over this past year of blog posts, I am grateful to write, has actually brought more hope than tears.  I was so scared of everything in the beginning, particularly when the tic episodes began escalating into full-blown seizure attacks.  I didn’t even write in complete sentences most of the time back then.  The crazy thing is that I generally have more hope and peace now when the attacks exceed 3 times per day, than when they were less!  I have the Lord’s work in my heart to thank for that!  He works in amazing ways for sure.

While I am grateful for the gift of writing, keeping my eyes fixed on the Lord through reading His Word continues to be the most important survival strategy for me in this season of life.  The cool part is that I get to look up all kinds of scripture verses as I pour out my heart onto the computer screen.  I do hope, however, that the New Hope Beyond Lyme eBook will never be a replacement for a fellow sojourner opening His or Her Bible.  Reading a verse here or there in a blog or eBook, on a Facebook Newsfeed, in the signature line of a friend’s email, Tweeted, or in a Pastor’s message is not as valuable as soaking up God’s Word in our time alone with Him.  We can’t dwell in His presence, linger before the throne of grace in the same amount of time it takes to hit, “delete!”  His grace requires a bit of time to reach our weary souls . . .

I do hope, Gentle Reader, that your own faith in God and in the person of Jesus Christ has grown as you have joined me on this journey.  I was reading today in the first chapter of 1st Corinthians where the apostle Paul teaches how we come to understand God through faith and not through an intellectual discourse.  We choose to believe that Christ died on a cross for our sins so that we may become forgiven for our sins, right-with-Him, and begin an amazing spiritual journey rich with meaning as sons and daughters of the King.  To receive the blessings and the promises of a relationship with God through the person of Jesus Christ requires faith.  If we have faith in Christ crucified, it will make a difference in our lives for all of eternity.  That will help us cope with virtually anything, today and tomorrow.

With the testimony of God’s Word as my witness, I submit to you that only with a personal relationship with the Lord, Jesus Christ will any of the stuff we endure in this life make any sense at all.    If we do have this sweet fellowship with Him, the lover of our souls, all of this stuff will be worth it.  And for me, all of this suffering will be worth it as well.  I would not be writing anything if I had not gotten sick two years ago.   Nothing I write will make any difference either if it doesn’t point someone, somewhere to something more than recovery from an illness.

How humbling that Lyme Disease may be used for good.  Such is the, “new hope beyond Lyme,” after all . . .

 

To Blog or Not to Blog, That is the Question

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Shall I blog for my own aggrandizement or to edify the Lord?

If I sign my name and not His with His Word, have I turned the attention to my finite mind and wisdom instead of His omniscience?

Will the cutsy comics and quips create a stir in the moment and not an eternal fire in the hearts of men and women?

Can coping for the moment or finding the next cure become a substitute for finishing the race of life well no matter what, for His glory, His purpose, His plan?

If suffering is my best result in this life, will it still be wasted if I do not see the fruit of my labors and toils in the next 24 to 48 hours?

The apostle Paul wrote many letters inspired by God while in chains, in prison, in recovery from tortuous beatings and deplorable conditions.  If we own a computer and can read this, we will not be able to fully understand how God used this broken man to change the world forever.  He had His own infirmities on top of this such that others had to record the words for him so that we would know the heart of God centuries later.  God’s Word, though Paul inspires me to look beyond the blog, the news headline, the Facebook posting for real, enduring answers and truth.

9 And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10 so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.  (Phil 1)

The questions noted earlier are among the important questions for Christian bloggers no matter what the topic of conversation.  I doubt that each of us will ever really know the answer to the question, “why do I blog?”  Oh we might think we have a purpose, a theme, a mission for our works .  .  .  I just hope that for me, my words have little to do with my drama and more to do with the One who created me!

24 but let the one who boasts boast about this:     that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness,     justice and righteousness on earth,     for in these I delight,” declares the Lord.  (Jer 9, NIV)

Your thoughts?