Tag: choices

Health Journey

On June 26th A Year

Teresa Love

Today marks a year.

A year of being sick.

A year of feeling alone.

A year of people not understanding what I’m going through.

A year of willing and wishing to get better and each day it stays the same.

A year of prayer to get better and for something good to come out of it.

A year of tears and crying sessions.

A year of planning things and then having to cancel because I am still sick.

A year of having to stop going to church.

It’s been a whole year. I am not normally a person who remembers dates but I do have a few in my life that really stick out. Christmas: December 25th, My birthday: October 21st, My cancer diagnosis day: October 18th, and the day my episode started last year: June 26th.

This day, June 26th, has been on my mind for a while now. I kept putting goals in place. Last July I was thinking, “I will totally be better by my birthday in October.” Then I wasn’t. Christmas is in 2 months, “I have to be better by then.” Again it didn’t happen. These “goals” made me feel like a failure, like I couldn’t “make myself better.” Like my faith wasn’t strong enough to get me through this difficult time. “I can’t be sick for another month this is crazy,” I kept telling myself. I was almost in a dazed state of confusion that this was still happening.

Then my episode hit the 6 month mark and I was so ready for it to be over. By this time I had been away from church for 6 months, hadn’t been able to leave the house much, finished all the Netflix shows I could think of, and was just ready to “start my life again.” Start my life again? That implies that I stopped living when I got sick. I “died.”

But I DIDN’T die, I am still here. I am still breathing.

Sure, my life looks very different than it used to. But I can use my mind in anyway I want and I CHOOSE to make my own decisions. If I want to be artistic, I can. If I want to text my friends, I can. If I want to tell my mom a long, step by step story of exactly what happened in the show I am currently watching, I can. The bottom line is I can’t control what gets thrown at me but I can control the outcome. If I am too tired to do something one day then I can choose to do it  another day.

It’s all about decisions. As much as we think our days are all mapped out, I am here to say they are not. Even someone who works everyday doesn’t know if something will happen and they can’t go to work that next day. We never know.

That’s why for my life I choose to live in the PRESENT. I base my decisions on the now, and not push and hope looking at the future because in all honesty I don’t have that luxury right now.

Live in the Present.

Health Journey

Decisions

Teresa Love

It’s funny how we can procrastinate when we know we need to do something that we just don’t want to do. Or wish the problem hopefully goes away. Like when we are supposed to be losing weight or eating healthy and just because we have to, we choose not to.

Today I am so exhausted.  I did not sleep well last night because I was worrying about an appointment, and once it was over I was so tired from all the anxiety and stress that went along with preparing for the appointment. I know I need to nap, but I really just don’t want to. And if I don’t want to do something, believe me, I really won’t do it.

I sometimes pride myself in being able to decide what I want to do and I don’t let myself get pushed into anything.  I never give in to peer pressure. If it’s a really serious thing, I need to do (like when I needed back surgery for scoliosis) I did what I needed to to prepare and forged ahead.

Now today, I kept telling my mom that I was tired. So she said, “Do I need to take you in the car, so that you can fall asleep like when you were little”? That just made me smile and laugh. Threw me back to a time when life was just easier. I didn’t have this illness. I didn’t have fear at all. I didn’t have to worry about relationships or money problems. I could just be a child.

There is a bible verse that says “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man (woman), I put the ways of childhood behind me.”

1 Corinthians 13:11 NIV

It was much simpler when we were children, running around outside, finger painting and not caring about the mess, eating whatever you wanted, meeting new friends at the grocery store. Now we are adults and we may have put away childish things, minus things we still like (Disney movies).

I think it’s totally fine to think about the past and the easier times in life as long as it makes you smile and you move on, continuing to move forward to the present and into the future.