My Person

The beginning is sometimes difficult.  It's only 8:45 AM, and there's a good bit I want to to say.  First and foremost, happy birthday to my breathtakingly wonderful grandmother.  Today would have been her 89th birthday, and I so wish she were here to celebrate it.  However, grief is a strange thing.  My grandma was (in the words of "Grey's Anatomy") my person, and I miss her every single day.
But now the remembering is filled with all the happy, incredible memories I had with her but not so much the anger and sadness I experienced for a long time after she died 12 years ago.  She was a good person in the sense of being a good Christian who taught through example, and for me I remember her forgiving, generous, loving nature ... someone I was incredibly close to and couldn't actually believe  would EVER leave this earth until she did. So today is so special, a day to reflect on the amazing times I had with her and mostly to thank God that He blessed me with her.  I'm choosing joy, but today it's not that hard. (For anyone who might not know, Annie was named after my grandmother :)

Switching gears, my daughter lost a tooth this morning.  I'm excited for her, but it's so hard for a non-morning person (that would be I) to generate the necessary excitement when the tooth-losing occurs before 7 AM.  Sheesh.  She's at camp all day so I'll work on whipping myself into a tooth-losing frenzy of joy before she gets home.  It'll pretty much take all day so I'll start soon.

I had a dream last night that Anthony and I were on a cruise (odd since we watched the end of "The Hunger Games" last night) and woke him up to talk about the huge breakfast buffett we were about to enjoy.  He fell back asleep and informed me we weren't on a cruise. I looked around and sure enough, we were in our own bedroom with 2 of our 3 dogs in bed with us, just like always.  Yes, judge us if you will: we're not good trainers of dogs AT. ALL.  The smartest dog of the bunch is Bonnie, who came to us already knowing commands like "sit" and "paw."  Oh, well, waking up with Bonnie and Harper snuggled up to us is fine by me.  Then again, I'd love to have a giraffe and zebra living in the backyard if we could.  Anthony says absolutely not.  Plus I believe it's illegal. Sigh.

Aspiration Amputation

Today was a challenging day to choose joy. A debilitating migraine to start the day will do that to you, but I took my medicine and moved on.  I decided to do something lovely for my lovely child and start cleaning her room while she was at camp, but entering her room rarely ends well, and today was no exception.  I swear a natural disaster entered our home unbeknownst to me, hitting only Annie's room.  I just sat there staring with absolutely NO idea where to begin cleaning.  Disturbingly, I found a Barbie leg with no Barbie in sight.  Just the leg.  Was she going for amputation?  Is her aspiration to be Callie Torres on "Grey's Anatomy"?

Yep, it was difficult to choose joy today, but I did.  Sort of.  

Choose Joy

     Well, well, well.  Here I am again having a Lupron epiphany.  I've mentioned it before (maybe here, maybe in my own head) but having incredibly supportive friends and family is the ONLY way to get through this wonderful experience.  I've discovered that despite the persistent physical pain sometimes it's the mental strength that forces you to live your life anyway.  I had to return to the doctor last week for pain, and he was very surprised that after 7 weeks of Lupron I'm still having pain.  Turns out I still have endometriosis in an area that is surgically unreachable and the Lupron was supposed to "calm down" the pain.  My doctor said (as I already knew)  that my case is exceptionally rare and puts me in a group of women, a group of 1 in 100, 000 women who continue to have pain while on Lupron.  I  have to finish this cycle of Lupron (about another month) and then we'll re-evaluate.  We discussed options if the Lupron doesn't do its job, and each one was just a little more frightening than the one before.  The best one was a referral to a doctor on the east or west coast who specializes in very rare cases like mine and needles going places you really don't want a needle to go ... basically a nerve block.  However, as my husband says: we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.  Just the possibility makes me cringe; this is where mental strength comes in.

      Mental strength is what forced me to ignore the physical pain so I could enjoy my beautiful and funny daughter's dance recitals this weekend.  Not only mental strength but as a very smart woman in my family told me: choose joy.  So from now on (when the Lupron can be overcome) I will do my very best to choose joy. And now: pictures from the recital.  Some are just of Annie; some are of Annie and Caroline.  They're joyful :)