Seasons of Change

I've been so incredibly busy this year and so much has changed. I haven't a moment to breathe and write. The beginning of the year was devoted to helping take care of my Aunt Tina until the night that she passed. It's still something that regularly weighs on my heart. Seeing the pain she was in when she was such a godly and loving woman. How can that ever be ok? Seeing and hearing the pain she was in just applying lotion to her dried out skin. How will cancer ever be ok? The answer is, it wont. It wont ever be ok that people have suffered at this level. It wont ever be something that I can come to terms with no matter how many times I have to watch it. My life and many other lives have been permanently changed. Literally the same day that my aunt passed, I met the kids that I would begin to nanny. They have quickly and fully become family. They have changed my life for the better in a time when I desperately needed it. I lost an aunt who I loved and valued deeply. I became a mother to my cousin. I finally decided to leave a very toxic workplace. Then came the Ally's, my lifeline. I finally have a healthy work environment that I love and look forward to going back to. I have skipped my first English Camp this year. We moved it to the fall instead of spring and I thought it would be hard on me that Im not going but honestly I'm so glad I said no. I spent probably about 3 months in Russia already this year and I'm burnt out from hopping back and forth. I need to find a system that can support that habit without totally draining me. I was in Russia for the summer and while there were a lot of awesome moments, there were also a lot of hard moments. I think it really changed my mindset and relationship with Russia. I don't think things will continue to be the same. I have no issue with the current ministries that I have partnered with in the past but perhaps I am beginning to be called in a different direction. It terrifies me and excites me to see that God is continuing to work with Russia and to begin to wage war with an entire country and culture. Bring it on.

No One

For many people it’s not worth their while to hide everything they’re dealing with. For others, they use everything they have in them to keep people from noticing. I’m the second. I grew up in an environment where I mostly had to raise myself. I had to be self sufficient at a very early age. My sister had pretty severe learning disabilities and a serious mental disorder. My parents had their hands full trying to take care of her. So I was mostly left to figure this out for myself. I learned quickly not to be an extra burden and to keep my problems to myself. I don’t blame my parents, they did what they had to do. Somewhere along the lines I took this mindset too seriously. I can not burden others with my problems. I need to be the strong one. Always ready to help others. I learned how to turn off my own emotions and my own needs for whatever I perceived as the greater good at the moment. What was once a coping skill and a defense against my situation, soon became a serious hinderance. I don’t know how to depend on anyone else. I don’t know how to not be guarded. Every time I’ve been open and honest, I’ve been burned. I survived my childhood mostly on my own,  I can survive adulthood the same way. I know I can get myself trough most things. What happens when I’m too burned out to be strong? What happens when I’m the one who needs help? Where do I turn to? Who can I really trust? No one. I am alone.

Breakthrough

A breakthrough in the psychiatric world is not necessarily a positive thing. To the general public it means something exciting has been discovered. For a psychiatric patient, it means your symptoms are breaking through the barrier your medications put up. This is something to always keep an eye out for as it can have consequences. Recently I was unfortunate enough to have a breakthrough with my medicine. It becomes so difficult to think straight. All you can focus on is your level of anxiety and depression. Everything becomes so clouded. Yes I used to deal with this daily before, but I'm not used to it anymore. It feels so much worse when you're no longer prepared for it. You begin to feel like you're losing your mind. However you feel the need to resist that fate and try to come out alive. It's all consuming and absolute pure torture. Your life falls apart before your very eyes all within your mind. You can't see a way for your misery to ever stop. So you take more medicine than before, just hoping that will somehow calm your mind.... and wait. 

A Crisis Of Reality

It's been several months since I've gotten on medication. The confusion has passed and I'm fully experiencing normal. However this was an earth shattering process for me. Once the first couple weeks passed and my body adjusted to my new levels, it was time to start processing everything. See it's a very strange experience to have everything in your mind change but everything around you hasn't changed at all. You start to see the world with a new clarity and calmness that you never had before. For me personally, that was extremely rattling. I had a crisis of sorts. Suddenly I started to see what normal people felt and lived like. I was in shock and so frustrated. Is this what you people live like!? It's a paradise! You have it so incredibly easy! I had to fight every single day to deal with the most basic issues. I had horrible anxiety over insignificant things. Confession: I had a full blown anxiety attack over the wrong dickens village being set up at our house. Normal people don't deal with these problems. I had to live my whole life with this undiagnosed while people enjoyed easier lives. Why had I waited so long to get help?  It's hard to understand just how crazy you were thinking until you take the meds and you're not thinking crazy anymore. It was a several month process for me to stop and look at every aspect of my life and decide exactly how I perceived them now. It was time to realize what was anxiety talking previously and what was reality. This rattled me to the core as I fought with my new logical reality and the chaos I left behind. It's hard to realize that only you are changing.

Passing Through The Tunnel

Adjusting to a medication you'll probably take for the rest of your life is a strange thing. The transition period is nothing I expected. Yes I knew there could be nausea and such while I was adjusting but I still was unprepared. What I experienced was nausea to where I was barely eating, jaw clenching where I thought I'd break a tooth, and so tired that I just wanted to sleep all day. The worst side effect by far was the foggy feeling. I wasn't able to process anything. Everything was through a long tunnel of me straining to process what was happening around me. My ability to translate Spanish back into English in my head was gone. With no cut and dry answer to what would be permanent side effects and what was temporary, this was incredibly discouraging. Would this be my new reality? If this low level of processing was how people normally lived, I didn't want any part in it. I preferred the anxiety. I decided to try half of the dose and saw a slight lightening of side effects but not enough to satisfy me. However I talked to others who take it as well and they encouraged me to push through. With each new day, the side effects slowly started to dwindle and the dark foggy tunnel slowly started to pass. After about two weeks I had returned to my new normal though I was unsure of what all that would mean. How did I know if I had reached normal or if I needed more or a different medicine?

My Medicated Life

   Kids have strange fears and thought processes. Almost every kid I knew growing up in California was afraid of tornados at some point. The threat of an actual tornado hitting our area being closer to zero. Some kids were afraid of dinosaurs even though they've been extinct for quite some time. Personally, I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of the rapture and all the horrible things in Revelations. I was afraid of earthquakes that they were going to crush me even though they were usually small. I was afraid of death and would lie awake at night as early as 6 or 7 years old having full blown panic attacks that I would stop breathing if I went to sleep. I am told these things are not normal. Pacing back and forth in your room and feeling like you're having a heart attack, giving yourself anxiety to the point of getting gastritis, and having adrenaline to the point of feeling like you might pass out were all part of my childhood. To me, this was normal.

   I was neurotic at best as a kid but most just perceived me as painfully shy or awkward. I didn't know how to handle a lot of things so I kept to myself and my family. As I grew older I found different coping mechanisms though most wouldn't be considered healthy. I learned to hide the anxiety and depression but I didn't deal with it. Gastritis and break outs, black out panics and blank stares. These were my adult reality when I was left to my own devices. I knew I could be anxious, my mom always said I worried a lot but the gravity of it was always lost on me. I would make it to work but anything else was too exhausting. I spent my days laying on my bed accomplishing nothing. Not having the motivation to try anything or care if I didn't. It wasn't until my last year or so that I've come to realize that these are not normal traits. There have been multiple factors over this time that have slowly made me realize that I needed to get help. Probably one of the slowest and hardest processes for me; deciding to make the appointment and talk to the doctor. Then finally swallowing that first pill.

Asthmatic Christianity

So today I relearned the meaning of the body of Christ or the church body. While I did go to church this morning, I did not stay for the lesson. It seemed my lungs were on a different schedule. I enjoyed the wonders of breathing treatments and steroids, got thoroughly pumped up. Shaking with excitement if you will. In the meantime I have a friend who's in pharmacy school and has been studying asthma specifically. So she was overjoyed to tell me what she's been learning. Things like the fact that asthma isn't actually someone not being able to inhale; it's a problem of exhaling. So CO2 remains trapped in your lungs. Over time I had forgotten that but I was able to hold onto that when Friday's original attack turned into a relapse today. A reminder to me that yes there is air in my lungs. The new information hit me as well. You see, most people don't understand that the aftermath is just as miserable as the attack. They think we get a breathing treatment, breathe better and move on with our lives. However this is not the case. After the horrible trembling finally calms and you stopped feeling quite so much like you drank a gallon of espresso shots, your body starts to return to normal. Enter: fatigue and pain. Consider how you feel after a very extensive workout, how your muscles ache and are fatigued from work they aren't used to. That is the case with asthma. When your lungs and diaphragm aren't enough to cause normal functional breathing, the surrounding muscles in your stomach, chest, neck and back have to pick up the slack. They all have to tense and relax in an unfamiliar way to force air in and out of your lungs. So your lungs, which have no pain receptors, are not the source of pain but the surrounding muscles meeting demands they aren't generally intended for.
Sometimes in life the lungs aren't  working so well. Maybe they are just worn out or feeling excessively reactive to something. They may not have pain receptors but they have other signs to tell you something is wrong. Pain among other things is a warning sign. It's not just Gods way of saying wouldn't it be fun if I created pain? It's how we know something needs help. Now each part of the body has its own particular job or function and for the most part they do it without complaint. But when something is not fully functioning because it has been injured or compromised in some way, other body parts will begin to pick up the slack. They work with the struggling organ and take on the extra burden while it heals. Sometimes it really is just the other organs who feel the strain of the new set up. Sometimes the original one aches alone. Either way, they remain a single unit and always do their best to help each other. Because the physical body truly understands what it means to be a body. It knowws no other option. It was built to work together. To always do anything necessary to thrive. The organs do not complain that the one organ is injured, they may be tired and sore from new stress but they don't quit cause they want to. They don't willingly let the other fall. You see sometimes your organs are smarter than you. They know that with one injury everything is off balance. They know they need every single one to be the fully thriving form they were meant to be. They know the affect of the entire body, to have just one small part struggle. So no, I don't think of my neck or back as important figures in my breathing processes. But sometimes even your lungs need their support to get them through a full blown attack.