Living a Full Life

When you deal with chronic health issues, there are simply things you are never going to get to do.

That's okay.  I heard a motivational speaker years ago, and I wish I remembered his name, who'd been in a devastating and crippling auto accident.  He said something to the effect of, "before my accident I could do a thousand different things.  Afterwards I could do five hundred things.  I chose to focus on the five hundred things I could still do than to worry about the things I'd lost."

I love that attitude, and I'd like to salute Adored Wife who largely exemplifies it.  She can't do any real lifting, she can't be on her feet or in a chair for long periods of time, she has to build any kind of activity around "will I be able to lie down for fifteen minutes every hour or so."  She also has memory issues and has to structure her whole life around copious note-taking.  She also has anomic aphasia and prosopagnosia (the inability to find the right word, and face-blindness) which give her some troubles interacting with people.  Plus occasional tics and twitches.  Plus anxiety and panic attacks.  Few other odds and ends here and there.

As you might imagine, there are any number of activities that are simply not options for AW.  There are things that, purely and simply, she's never going to be able to do.

And yet, she has a very full life.  Photographer, highly involved mother, active on social media, great at planning and organizing events and activities, excellent cook, involved in church activities, directs, produces, and manages facilities at the local community theater, keeps up with family, interested and informed about politics, history, and world events, and participates in a few online communities.

She chooses to focus on the things she CAN do, and finds her life pretty full as a result of it.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Consumed by Problems

I was a small-church pastor some years back and I regularly visited an elderly shut in, about whom I'm going to use the word "pathetic."  It's a condescending word, and not one I use lightly.  She was in a truly pitiful condition.

She was severely visually impaired, almost totally blind.  But that wasn't what made her case so sad.

What made her pathetic was that she was absolutely consumed by her blindness.  It was all she wanted to talk about, all she wanted to pray about, the only thing on her mind.  How unjust God was for making her blind, how hard it was to do anything because she was blind, how fortunate people were who weren't blind, how much time and effort she spent trying to get doctors to help her alleviate in some way her blindness.

I don't mean to belittle her impairment--I treasure my eyesight and consider myself very blessed to be able to see to take care of myself and enjoy the beauties of the world.  But there are lots of other people much worse off than she was who are having a much more enjoyable life.  She was in a comfortable assisted living facility with a husband who loved her and took care of her, she had a roof over her head and three meals a day, she had people to talk to and activities she could have participated in and all the music and radio access she could possibly have wanted.  Other than the eyesight her health was reasonably good--she was mobile, had a good appetite, and decent strength and endurance.  She had a lot to be thankful for.

I would even have been happy to have her as an active part of our church's prayer ministry, and on more than one occasion I tried to direct her attention to some need in the church or community that I would have appreciated her praying about.

She would have none of it.  Her vision problems dominated the conversation, and she would talk about nothing else.  I grew weary of visiting her, because I knew the visits would be a litany of complaints about one subject.  I would make efforts to redirect the conversation, even directly (and hopefully lovingly) rebuking her a few times for her attitude, but to no avail.  She was miserable and determined to stay miserable.

I would always end the visit asking how I could pray for her, and the answer was always the same, to pray that God might restore her vision.

Sad, very, very sad. 

Ah, well.

Hope all's going okay out there, friends, and God bless.

Struggles With Weight

With the exception of Graphics Magician (an active thirteen year old boy with an insane metabolism who could stand to put on a few pounds), the family would all like to lose "a little weight."

I'm not, in this post, commenting about anybody's struggles but mine.

Here goes.

I don't struggle with weight loss.

I'm not trying to lose weight.  I've never tried to lose weight in my life.

I would like to lose some weight.  At this writing I'd really like to lose about eighteen pounds.  I'm about seventeen pounds below my top weight and my situation is far from desperate (I was solidly in the prediabetic range then and needed to do something) but I'm still carrying poundage that makes it harder to move and makes me feel a little unwell.

But if I made the choice to lose it, I could.  Not all at once, I'll grant you.  But if I started making sensible eating and activity choices, I could take off eighteen pounds in probably three months.  I base that on my previously demonstrated ability to lose twenty pounds in three months of behaving myself.

All I have to do is consistently make good choices.

And yet, you know, evidence suggests that hasn't been my pattern.  I wonder why.

No excuses, just being honest.  I've chosen not to lose weight.

I wonder if I'll start choosing differently.  It's really up to me, isn't it?

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Accustomed to Abnormal

I came up with a metaphor for my crazy life.

It goes like this.  I'm a terrible plumber.  I'm a halfway decent carpenter and I can do basic wiring and some other household maintenance odds and ends, but my plumbing jobs are usually stressful, expensive, and leaky.  I've just never had the knack for it.

So the other day when I replaced a sink faucet without too much trouble and it's no longer dripping and nothing appears to be leaking, I was caught a little off guard.  Honestly, it's not that I miss the drip, but it's an oddly buoyant feeling that it's not an issue any more.  I'm kind of weirded out; I don't know how to think about it.  I keep checking under the sink expecting a leak--it's like waiting for the other shoe to drop.  (This only relates to plumbing--I can swap out a light switch and not think about it any more.)

But it occurred to me sometime after the fact that this could be a metaphor for my family's life and the lives of a lot of people dealing with chronic health and personal issues.

What if everything were all of a sudden "normal" tomorrow?  What if Adored Wife and Social Hurricane were abruptly perfectly healthy, what if Basement Artist and I weren't dealing with our various psychological quirks (and, heck with it, what if my bad knee was okay) and what if Graphics Magician wasn't trying to survive adolescence AND middle school?

We wouldn't know what to do with ourselves.  It would be a complete change in our lives, one we weren't prepared for and wouldn't know how to handle.  We've had VERY difficult times in our lives here and there, when hoping for an uninterrupted night's sleep or fifteen peaceful minutes to sit down and decompress was wishful thinking.  Things aren't anywhere nearly that chaotic now, and I don't miss the really bad times, but you got accustomed to them.

What would it be like for you, friends, if you woke up tomorrow and things were "normal?"

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

The House Is Still Standing

Happy Monday, friends!

I'd thrown out the disclaimer back near the beginning of this blog that I wasn't a medical doctor or a licensed therapist or anything like that so you should take any advice or information I put on here with a grain of salt.  My good friend and technical wizard Vince suggested I approach it from the position that "this is what we do and everybody's still alive."

I think it's excellent advice and I intend to follow it but it got me thinking about the "everybody's still alive" bit.  The girls aren't so much active babysitters anymore now that Graphics Magician is old enough to stay by himself for stretches of time but the instruction we used to give them was "as long as everybody's still alive and the house is still standing, we're good."  In other words, we didn't want them to worry too much about anything other than the bare minimum.

But sometimes it seems as though we've spent copious amounts of our lives making sure the house was still standing, just making sure we were surviving.  I'm not entirely proud of that, but we've had eras in our lives when we were living in crisis mode, dealing with one problem after another and hoping that we could just keep the bare minimum of existence together.  And to top that off, trying to put on a brave face to the outside world.

These days we're attempting to be more honest with our struggles and challenges with those outside the family and we're also trying to "seize the day," to enjoy our lives and do productive things and make a difference in our community and our world despite the issues we face.  I may tell you the story sometime of a lady I know who's essentially housebound  through taking care of family members but who manages to paint and garden and maintain an active and vibrant internet life regardless.

So on occasion the best thing we can say about a day is "at least the house is still standing."  But we want more of that out of life and by God's grace we're trying to go about it.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.