What is it about snow that makes everything feel calm and peaceful? Like there is nothing bad in the world and that there is only love and beauty. Maybe it's the symbolic color white itself. A reminder of something sacred blanketing the land. The possibility that wherever you stand can be holy. I'm not sure, but it was gone too fast. There was little trace of it left by the afternoon. But I enjoyed it while it was here.
Could there be hope on the horizon to finally rid me of my 15 year ailment? It's a scary thing to hope. I've been through it all with my neck and shoulder problems…which have now led to my hip problems. I am a suck it up and move on kinda person. If you can't fix it, don't dwell on it. Luckily I have a husband that doesn't let me stop trying and I have an excellent orthopedic surgeon that did my hip that forced me to go see 2 more specialists and set them up for me.
Could this little scary looking devise be my saving grace? For the first time in a very long time, I have hope, but I'll get back to that in a minute.
I finished up ready Women in the Priesthood and there were 2 stories she recounted that spoke to me. One by Neal A Maxwell, which was my very first spiritual crush, and President Hinkley. They both had similar reactions to illnesses. They were so accepting of the Lord's will that they didn't see the need to fight. Maxwell had a wife that set him straight and reminded him of the Savior in the garden of gethsemane and Hinkley decided at 91 to fight cancer because he wanted to do all he could to live so that when the time came to leave mortality, it was not his decisions but the Lords.
I got a little too accepting of my fate. I've just always figured that I must be an extremely prideful beast that couldn't handle not being humbled. Long trials can either bring you closer to the savior or distance you from him. It has definitely brought me closer. In fact, it has become such a pattern for me to study the scriptures and pray that when I start feeling gloomy and doomy about the state of our world, I immediately turn to my scriptures for comfort. Would I stop that if life were too trial free? Probably. It's that nature of being human. Always quick to forget.
I feel like I am ready to find out who I am without the prison walls of pain. I'll be honest. It's been so long that I'm scared of who I really am. If I don't have to work extra hard to be kind and patient because I've got a headache everyday, will I be kind and patient? Not sure. Will I just be trading this trial for a different one?
If all my other trials weren't enough, I've got weird skin problems happening. The slightest irritation has me in hives. Both of my lower legs are covered the entire way around and it is spreading up to my thigh…because I can't keep myself from scratching. My husband just looked at me with pitiful eyes and said "you really are Job, aren't you?" and then he called me in some steroids. My legs were so inflamed that they were swollen as well. They flared up on saturday and they are now feeling a bit better, but I just had a scratching fit and realized that I actually took skin off and now my legs are all bloody to boot. Fantastic. I'm a mess! But, it's clearing up and I know from the episode on my arms that it will be gone in another week. I think boils last longer than 2 weeks so I really don't have much to complain about…..not to mention everything else job went through...I just like being dramatic.
So back to that scary devise. I've been to quite a few Chiropractors in my search for a cure for an injury to my neck that occurred 15 years ago in a car accident. I've been to acupuncture, a myofascial person, message therapists, physical therapy, creams impregnated with drugs, 2 jaw surgeries, you name it, i've tried it and never gotten any better. The only thing I never did and refused to do were narcotics…unless you want to count my mild addiction to excedrin. Not ruining my life more down that road. All these treatment left me frustrated and made me feel like I must surely have mental problems.
Well, I was leery walking into yet another chiropractors office. As soon as they start telling me about curing colds with a crack of my back, I'm outta there. Not happening. This one didn't do that. She is also the first person to take X-rays of me since the accident. Holy crud, could she actually know what she is doing? Please don't set me up for a fall, was all I was thinking while I was sitting there and she was making way too much sense for me to have suffered this long. Without going into a long drawn out diagnosis post, here is the take home. She's the first person who has taken my entire body into the equation. She was able to explain what was happening in a way that I felt made perfect sense…I've been to a lot of dr.'s and they each had theories and she was saying a lot of the same things. She was excited about what she could do to help me and gave me realistic expectations. She is hoping to get me 50 percent better. That would be miraculous and I'll take it. She was also so good at validating me. I can't tell you what a crazy person you feel like when you have chronic problems. She knew from the X-rays exactly where all my problems were ( I didn't have to tell her- she still made me use those useless pain scales but I get why they need to use them but they are seriously subjective) and couldn't believe I've been doing as well as I have with the problem I've got. I don't present as a person suffering because I'm not overweight and hooked on drugs and I don't like to complain and I never put very high numbers on those pain scales because a dr once told me that scraping your knee was a 2.... hello, that friken hurts! :0)
Seriously, if she can get me to be able to carry my own purse or have the energy to take my kids to do fun outdoors stuff like I used to, I can't even tell you…..I seriously had to really fight off the urge to cry in front of this woman because that would have been embarrassing. I'm trying to have enough hope to be 50 percent healed and not too devastated if this doesn't work, but I've had 1 treatment and it made a difference. I'm not dancing around singing a happy song yet, but there is a sliver of hope and I'm holding on to it.
Now, if I could get rid of this eire feeling I have over the 3 dreams I had about being in a concentration camp with the quote from Scalia out there saying that if we think it couldn't happen here, were crazy….well basically that's what he said. No one seems to care that there has been an absolute run on the government, the gov spying on us, the myra- which is you give the gov all your money and they "take care of it" for you, common core standards that sound like they came from the novel "divergent" , the cancerous mentality of - if you have it, I can take it, and 2.5 million jobs lost and people being more dependent of gov is spun as a good thing and the countless other disastrous problems that if you had just woken from a 10 year coma you wouldn't believe what is happening and yet, here we are. It's crazy town, and I'm not sure I'm equipped to raise my children to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead….I'm thinking very soon here in America it's going to start looking like Russia hosting the winter olympics. It worries me every day and I feel the urgency of time being very short.
Luckily I have hope in The Plan. I know the endgame and I know what my role in that plan is. I know where I'm going after this life and whatever happens here is just the way that gets me back home. I'm actually grateful for this trial of chronic pain that I've had. Being a hermit has its advantages. I've taken my conversion and the conversion of my children much more seriously than I would if I had been pulled by all the shiny distractions of the world.
With that I'll leave this with a quote by one of my newest spiritual crushes, Jeffry R Holland:
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