Thursday, July 2, 2009
a little history on me..
8:39 PM | 
Posted by
Melanie Davis Bolden
I am 36 years old. From my early 20s I had been sick with one thing or another and was always bothered with aches and pains. I caught every infection out there. I went to drs who told me over and over that there was not anything wrong with me, that I was just depressed. Take these pills and they will fix everything. This went on for years. 10 years ago when I had my son Joshua, I got real sick. Septic shock from my c-section caused a heart attack.
Thank goodness there was no lasting heart damage. Also something good came out of it. I found out a few weeks later that I was not crazy. That what was wrong with me all the time had a name. 10 years ago I found out that I have Lupus and Fibromyalgia. As scared as I was, a part of me was relieved. Finally I had some answers. Finally there was something real that I could fight. Finally I knew that it was not all in my head.
I wish that I could say that it has all been uphill from there. That they were able to give me some magic pill and made it all better. We do not live in that kind of fairy tale world. But I came to terms with it and decided that I would not let it beat me. That I had to get up every day if I wanted to or not. Working has been sporatic at best. Mostly I am able to work for about 6 months out of the year, but its better than nothing.
Some days are better than others. Sometimes I wake up and realize that I actually slept for over 5 hours in a row! I can do that morning stretch and it doesn't trigger spasms from my neck down through my back, hips, and legs. I can actuall get up and my feet don't feel like I am walking on glass. Other days I am not so lucky. I wake up every hour, get up and walk around because the restlessness in my arms and legs make me feel like I want to scream. I try to stretch before I get out of bed and I am torn apart by spasms from head to toe. I can't walk without thick cushion house shoes because of the pain in my instep and heels.
Other than the pain, are the rashes you get for no reason. The little blisters that pop up that resemble the acne, but isn't. The itching and swelling you get. The fact that you can tell when a change in weather or pressure is coming without even turing on the news in your muscles and joints. And don't get me started about how sometimes for no reason at all you go to walk and after you fall, you realize one of your legs just decided not to move. How you go to get a plate out of the cabinet and your hand stops working and it breaks on the floor. And you gotta love it when you know what you want to say or you know a song by heart because you have sang it a million times, but the words just will not come to you. My eye sight failing, my teeth are a mess, and aseptic lupus meningitis took most the hearing from my left ear, but hey! I still have my hair...Oh wait, that falls out by the handful too.... sigh...
After all this, I think the worst part is the fact that on the outside you look just like everyone else. Like there is nothing in the world wrong with you. And people just can not understand why you don't get things done. Why you are "lazy" or you don't work full time. Why you don't just snap out of it or just get more exercise and loose weight to fix your energy problems. How if you would just put your mind to it, everything would be all better. Ah, why didn't I think of that?? After a while you just learn to tune all these people with their best of intentions out and figure out for yourself how to keep on keeping on..
10 years later I still hurt. I still catch infections from every source out there. I can't go outside in the sun without gobbing on sunscreen +30 proof to keep me from getting rashes and getting sick. I still won't take pain meds unless I just can't take it anymore. I still get up every day even if I don't have to go to work and put one foot in front of the other and keep moving. Through the pain and through the depressions, even when I just want to sit down in the floor and cry (well not the floor because I can't get up as easy as I used to and since I started back to work again it needs a good moping and I am too tired at the end of the day to do it) I keep trying to see the good in things and keep a good sense of humor even when things look like they are at their worst.
Right now I feel like I am in a good place in my mind and in my heart. More at peace with myself and with God than I have been in a long time. Over the last 10 years that is another thing that has had its ups and downs. I have been through the why me's and why didn't God take the pain away for good.
It took a long long time for me to realize that I could blame God for not fixing me and become bitter and depressed and shut myself off from the world or I could just accept that everyone out there has trials and problems they have to go through. What makes me think that I should be any different. After all, didn't I have a house over my head? Didn't God give me 4 amazing kids? When things got really tight with money, didn't He give me a job even when I didn't know enough to ask for one? When I really need something, isn't He there for me to make sure that my kids don't go without ? The answer is Yes.
In the end, what more could we ask for? Its through the trials and the pain and the hard times that we are truely able to see the amazing blessings we should be thankful for. If everything was perfect and wonderful all the time we wouldn't have the need to look for them.
"Life isn't about how to survive the storm, but how to dance in the rain. ..."
0 comments:
Post a Comment