Am I crazy or what?

I have been WAY too busy this past 2 weeks. Like I had to "force" myself to stay home one day this week and have a "study" day. Not good. But I know what it is. I don't want to be tied down now that I feel better than I did before.

So I've been sometimes.."over booking" things in my life lately. Which isn't good. Balance Joyce, Balance.

That is why I haven't written on here much either. I haven't had time. I haven't had the energy even. Ugh!

I don't like to talk about my "health" stuff much. But today I am going to for many reasons. Maybe I can convince some of you to "take heed" now. Change somethings in your lifestyle while you can. Do NOT wait until you are sick to do this....do it now. Lighten your life load and spend more times taking care of yourselves. Eat better, get plenty of sleep.
RE-EVALUATE what is "important" in your life. Because if you don't see your health as important. Then you need to think again.

When I first became so ill, I slept for days. I was in so much pain and tired all the time. I had to gain my strength back. Then we had months of ups and downs and trying to adjust to my "new" lifestyle. I had been working full time before that and was a busy person with church and other outside activities. Just raising these people in my house makes ones life busy.

To become so "home bound" was never normal to me. I mean at first I LOVED it because I was soooo tired and didn't feel good. So I relished the fact that I had to stay put and not go anywhere and do anything. Besides, I couldn't even push a shopping cart at that point.
But after months of it. It got very old.

On "pain days" as I called them...those were the days when I could not move much at all...I HAD to stay in bed or on the couch on those days, no exceptions to that ...but then I hated the pain, it was horrible.

It was like..."choose your devil" pretty much. If I did too much....I paid for it. IF I laid in bed too much, I became weak in my muscles. AND I was BORED and felt like I was wasting away my life. I had no purpose. People have GOT to have purpose or they rot. I mean it works that way for me.
I HAVE got to have purpose in my life, and I had none. All the purpose I had on a nearly daily basis was....."to get better at some point and cook something for dinner that night." Big goals huh? But that's about all I could handle at that time.

I would have to say that ALOT of last year I was pretty much "out of commission"....and it was a drag. I would lay in my BED for days...awake, reading or watching TV ( I loved that QVC, I had never seen it before nor "shopped at home" HA!).....but that sure gets old.

My thinking regarding laying in bed on such days was "at least it was the best overall "pain free" place to be" and that was pretty much my goal then. To "stay out of pain." If I moved something and it hurt...then I tried to not move it at all.
So that made me just stay in one spot for a day or more.

Now many things have changed and I have "adjusted" to pain.....although does anyone ever really adjust to pain? I mean it hurts!!! And I hate it. But I have learned to get past it. Plus ibuprofen sadly....is a great friend of mine. I buy it by the bucket loads. Which in turn causes other problems. So we deal with it all. Thankfully my new diet has helped me greatly but I'm still not 100% yet.

Today is a pain day. Today my fingers barely bend and my ankles and feet and other such needed places hurt badly. I took my "regimented pain relievers" and now I will wait for the effects to kick in. They may work and they may not. That's another thing. Sometimes nothing helps.

There are several reasons why today is a pain day I am sure.

First, stress, second, stress, third, stress, fourth, humidity, fifth, humidity. AND so on and so forth....the weather greatly affects me.

Oh, and I ate some of Don's famous homemade popcorn last night which I am SURE had way too much salt on it for me.

Ugh....and I have a bit of a sore throat and when my body tries to go after that and bring healing...it misses greatly and goes after other parts of my body instead. That's how it works with a messed up immune system.

Stress, I have learned......greatly, greatly, affects our lives. So stop it. For your own sake.

Dr Glen, my Dr. in Texas.....who treats many famous people I might add....like a Football guy you would all know and that guy that liked to ride bikes in France.....told me that he TREATS many, many, MANY, people in ministry.

Why so you wonder?
Because they abuse their bodies. They over do stress. They eat wrong, they don't sleep enough. They don't have enough "down time." Name it. It's all true.
I've done it all myself.

If you can do anything about removing stress.....then do it.
Start now to save your health. This is no joking matter.
At the time I became ill I had WAY too much stress on me due to a job that I was working. SO...I quit it.
It was tooooo much stress and besides I was so damaged in my body I wasn't much good at it anymore.

I could go on and on about stress but haven't the time.
Us Americans need to knock it off and slow down. I personally want to move to a cabin in the woods somewhere. Maybe that will slow me down because I need help doing that. We all do. It's in us to be busy I think.

Unless you are a born sluggard. Then that is different.
If that is the case...."GET BUSY you sluggard."

Humidity is one reason why my husband and I will move away from Louisiana as soon as the last two kid are out of High School. We are almost there, THANK GOD!!! I wish they would leave now but I understand that they want to finish out at the High School they started out at.
Gabe and Caleb didn't get to do that. It was a tad hard on them. Gabe was a Senior and Caleb a Sophomore when we moved here so I know that was a rough. Gabe is so flexible that he can do most anything....Caleb though had a harder time of it. He needs a lot of stability in his life, as do our younger two kids. So we will wait for them to finish up High School here.

My Dr.'s ALL tell me that we live in the worst state in the Union for humidity. Humidity affects me BIG TIME.

This is how my Naturalpath Dr. in Austin,( he's a real M.D..he's a "Nutritional Oncologist and he's helped me big time) explained it to me......"It's like the diver that's been down in the deep water coming up too fast, it causes the "bends," that is what humidity does to you." It makes you have pressure in your body. Lovely.

He sent me a "FAR SIDE" cartoon via fax that showed these Hillbilly's all predicting the weather on their front porch by their body manifestations and one had this "ballooned up" hand and he said..."yep, it's a gonna rain".....ha!!!

Well.......that's me. Except we have humidity ALL the time.....so imagine what that does to me. Ugh. Now when it storms....I am usually bad off....but the minute the front breaks, I usually get a bit better. Weird.


So as soon as these people get done with High School.......we are soooo out of here. I think. I mean that's the plan. Don't ask me where we are going though. Ask The Father because He's working on the move for us. HA! We have our "requests" in right now.

"Something drier, something calmer...traffic wise (that thing right there causes stress in my life ugh!)somewhere in the world where we can use our "gift mix" for ministry better.

Food is an issue for me.
I have a couple of special diet situations that my Dr. in Texas found out. He had me do some special tests..DNA and such.....and I have a MAJOR "Gluten intolerance" soooo that threw me into "auto immune response" that and STRESS....and I have a "Dairy intolerance" so.....basically.....no milk and several milk products...although I can't complain about this because there are many things I STILL can have....the milk has to be cooked.

I can have DARK chocolate...I can have yogurt, I can have frozen yogurt ( no ice cream) I can have cheese.
So I am saved. IF I can have those three things....I can manage. Couldn't you?

It's the GLUTEN thing that becomes a huge problem to keep up with. Although I have to say and my husband has really commended me on this....I have followed this thing very closely. Better than even I thought I would. But when you consider .....hummmmm "Cancer of the intestines or fish sticks"..."Locked up joints and no walking today without pain or a piece of cake".....well...it's a no brainer.

I basically can not eat ANYTHING with flours in it, or ON it. Some things are easy to figure out, no breads, no pastas, no cookies, no cakes,.....but coatings, gravies and things that are "hidden" in foods are harder to figure out. Soups even.

I have to really investigate things BEFORE I eat them. I can only have "rice flour, corn flours, and buckwheat flour" pretty much. Let's just say I am pretty limited in the flour department.

A person like me really needs to be a "Vegetarian" but that is harder for me to pull off because of the family. IF it was just me.....well I could probably do it.

But then you have to consider "inflammatory foods" as well......such as "nightshade plants" which are "tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and my favorite potatoes"....that last one is hard for me and I DO eat some of them and risk inflammation. Hey, I am from the North, what can I say.....potatoes are a food staple for us.

I hate inflammation. That stuff has given me a huge amount of GRIEF this summer alone. I am dealing with some "special problems" right now as issue of inflammation. BLAH!
But I can take ibuprofen to tolerate the swelling and it does help make it go away somewhat too. Not totally though. Not for me, not right now.

I need some dry weather to come to us. That would help me greatly right now. Maybe that's why I like Fall so much too??? Hopefully it will cool down and the humidity will slide away for a few days until the Louisiana "snow" comes....the rains of winter. Blah. That is killer for me add in that "Season Depression" thing....oh well.

Why complain...I am breathing and life is pretty grand after all. It could be a whole lot worse. I try not to be crabby about this health thing and my diet because a lot of people suffer in a lot worse ways than I do. I try to be grateful for what I can do and what I can EAT.

I'm just limited now I guess and I don't like limits. Who does?

Try going a day with not being able to turn on faucets, not being able to open your shampoo bottles, not being able to do life's simplest tasks. Not being able to open a can good, not being able to lift something....not being able to get a lid off of something. There is soooo much I can't do now or do well or do without pain.

However, don't feel sorry for me....because I don't feel sorry for myself.

Well...honestly maybe a few days I did...or do. But I try not to, it's better to have a "good state of mind." In a battle like this one. I TRY to stay very positive about all this. Because I know in my heart..it soooo could be something more trying.
How about no limbs at all?
Yeah....I'm BLESSED no matter how you look at it.

It does become frustrating though to people like me who like to run headfirst down the mountain at 90 miles an hour, carrying 50 things in my hands and on my head and on my back.

God can and will slow us down if we don't slow ourselves down. Not that He makes us sick because He doesn't. We do that to ourselves actually many times. Sometimes unknowingly. Sometimes knowingly.....sometimes it's just part of the curse of the earth. Regardless.....we CAN "Overcome" and we should. I do. I may not look like much anymore ...but I can still get the job done usually. It may take longer. HA!

I am and have always been an "OVERCOMER".....I don't say that with pride. It's just who I am now, it's part of what I've come out of in my life. We all have to do this if we want to get to heaven. Only "Overcomers" go to heaven.

Check it out in Revelation 12:11
NASB: "And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony, and they did not love their life even when faced with death.

Oh...by the way.....I stared a new part time job too in the past two weeks. Add that in. It's only about 10 hours a week though and pool group will be ending soon......so I figured I need something to do. Right.

"AM I CRAZY OR WHAT????"

That is exactly what I was asking myself on my first day on my little job when my feet were killing me and my ankles were swelling. There was a HUGE thunderstorm going on wouldn't you know. So I was being "tested" immediately.

It's a new challenge for me I guess. I am all about challenges. I'm not one to just lay down and die......although there were many days I wanted to and told God that He could "take me now" but He didn't obviously.

Challenges are good...I just need to choose them VERY wisely from now on as do we all.

Got to go.....I'm helping a friend with a "garage sale" today. I HATE garage sales. What was I thinking????
Right....I wasn't.

God please help me.
Sometimes it's not even the "devil" we have to "Overcome" sometimes it's "ourselves."