"I told my daughter not to marry someone she couldn't leave her kids with every other weekend!"

Ummmmm......where do I start?!

I go back to work Monday for the first time since the middle of September. I hope I remember how to get there!

Here's wishing a fantastic week to everyone!

I love New Year’s for the same reason I love Mondays: nothing’s messed up yet.

New Year’s is my favorite holiday. At a New Year’s Eve party, I realized that I really wanted to marry Kevin. We were playing a game at his ex-girlfriend’s home (another story). A question in the game sparked one of the other men to go on & on & on & on about the hostess’s dog and its behavior and what kind of medical treatment it should have. You know the type. Other people chimed in, but Kevin never even hinted that, as that dog’s veterinarian, he might actually be qualified to speak to the subject! He just watched—self-assured, amused, and curious.

Twenty-odd years later, and I’m still aiming for that mindset. It’s more than just putting aside your own ego to listen to others. It’s being completely unwilling to even start the process of drawing attention to yourself. It’s the thing that my dad liked most about Kevin.

Well, here’s to 2009 and all the possibilities it holds. Happy New Year!

I have a cold!!

I felt it creeping up yesterday. You know that uneasy feeling in the back of your throat that you try to ignore, but it won't go away? It was there. I did the usual: vitamin C, Zicam, Sudafed, liquids. But at 4:45 this morning, I woke Kevin up to say, "Wake up!! I have a cold! This is important! This is the worst cold anybody has ever had in the history of the world! Wake up and say 'Poor Baby!'"

Kevin was not amused. But he did say the required, "Poor Baby!"

To reiterate a previous post, trigeminal neuralgia is not life threatening, and I'm thankful. But it's invisible and it's painful, and the fact that it's abated enough to make a cold feel miserable--that's a happy milestone.

So I wish for you a fun, happy, healthy day. But me? I'll go enjoy my not-so-common cold and hope Kevin's sense of humor holds out.

This is not an anniversary I wanted to have.

One year ago today I admitted to myself that I had a headache. A constant, nagging, mean little headache that I’d been ignoring for I don’t know how long. It had been living for awhile on the left side of my head. In fact, it had carved out a nice little home for itself and had several regular visitors in the form of electrical lightning strikes along my left temple and cheek. I remember thinking on December 15, 2007, that I could probably rest enough during the two-week winter break from work to get rid of it.

And here we are one year later.

Make no mistake: I’m not bitter, or impressed with my ability to suffer, or even feeling sorry for myself. Nor do I think this is part of some cosmic “meant to be” experience. God doesn’t just decide to haul off and make us hurt. It’s just one of those things that happens. If life were perfect, we wouldn’t want to go to heaven.

Every single night when we pray, Kevin thanks God for the blessings we’ve had in the day, and I pray that with him wholeheartedly. We have many, many blessings, but right now living pain-free is not among them. And that’s OK. I have had exactly two days when the constant part of the headache stopped for an hour or two, and those days were memorable: May 26 & December 10. I’ve had a handful of days—most of them recently—of relief from the excruciating sensitivity to the slightest touch, breeze, or even sudden sound. For that I’m grateful, and I fervently hope and pray for more times like those.

Finally, here’s my real point. Several of my doctors (I have nine) have told me that they routinely refer patients with this kind of chronic pain to a pain psychiatrist. The specialist told me she’d never seen someone with my particular combination of atypical trigeminal neuralgia & chronic daily migraine who wasn’t depressed. I won’t say I haven’t had lots of self indulgent pity or times when I felt deeply discouraged. I’ve even had two days when I felt complete despair. But certainly it’s not my amazing, super-human, steely constitution and attitude that keep me from coming completely undone. It is, though, my amazing, super-human, steely support group/safety net that keeps me from coming undone. I have the most spectacular husband who has ever lived (please quote me on that). I have extraordinary friends who lift me up, and I have a 300-member “support group” that meets twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday. If you’ve managed to keep reading this missive, you’re clearly part of my safety net, and I truly thank you.

We all have stuff to deal with. Some people’s stuff is physical, and some people’s isn’t, but nobody’s stuff is any harder to take than anybody else’s. What matters is how we react to it and who we look to for help.

I promise my next post will be a lot more chipper, but thanks for the opportunity for catharsis.