Damaris: Most days I don't change out of my PJs until after lunchtime....hehe.
california_moon: same here. but in my case, I usually don't wake up til lunch
Cafe de Flores: Yep, same here! And so why even both changing out of them? I've gone for days just changing from one pair of pj's to the next when I shower....
I was going to just feed you guys some song lyrics or a quote or such, but I just wrote this e-mail to a dear friend down in Sydney and figure it'll do fine as an update here, too ;)
Hey Channah,
I love getting your e-mails *grin* You're such an encouragement. This week I've kind of gone "abscent" from the world, which is just what I do when I get real tired and totally brain dead. I just kind of disappear...This is the first time I've sat down for a veg at the computer in three days, when usually I can spend up to four hours a day on here.
I've just been so exhausted. And still trying to think of a reason for it...ok, so that sounds kind of funny 'cause of course I'm always tired. But hey...:P lol This is *doubly* tired where I wake up after my lovely 11 hours sleep and still going around yawning and falling asleep at the tea table, when the week before I wasn't. It could be GF (the glandular Fever), but I haven't had a fever. I did just drop my T3 (thyroid stimulation medication) about half a week ago, though, so it could be that. Or just PMS. Either way, I just realised it's somewhat interesting that I'm writing someone an email while being abscent. Hmm...hope you feel special ;)
I'm reading heaps at the moment. Just read The Snow Goose today. That story is so beautiful. Have you read it? It's a famous short story written by Paul Gallico (sp?) about an ugly hunchback who lives on the coast of England and a little girl who brings him a wounded Snow Goose one day, and about how through the recovery of the La Princesse Perdue (The Lost Princess which is what they named the bird) they came to know each other. In a way it's almost haunting. Hauntingly beautiful.
And you know how I haven't been doing school? Well, despite that it turns out that I'm going to still be able to pass grade 11 this year. Just how cool is that?! I was talking with Mum and she says since I'm reading through so many of my school books this year that it'll pass for literature and social studies (history); then because I'm writing on my blog and such that counts for English; I'm reading some books on Apologetics which count for Bible; all of the HTML that I've taught myself counts for a web design ellective; and if I read through this huge Biology book it'll do for Science. The only thing missing will be Maths. But I'm doing a bit of number stuff in my secretarial duties for Matt, and anyway it turns out I only have to do this one book on Algebra and I'll have enough to graduate grade 12 so it won't matter if I just put that off and do that next year.
I was under the impression that I was going to enter next year a year behind in school, but to find out I'm going to pass grade 11 in my "sabbatical" year is just insane. God is so wonderful. But perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised. In Leviticus when God is explaining to the Israelites about taking sabaticals he promises that in the year before he would provide above and enough food for them from their crop to feed them through their sabatical year.
I think I'm going to go have a shower and then maybe watch a movie or something...being so tired just fogs up my brain so that I just can't concentrate on anything. Do please tell me about what you've been doing and how life is going. I'd love to hear.
Amor,
Lyd :)
Before I go anywhere with this post let me make this quite clear: I dislike blood tests. I never used to say that, but I've now come to the conclusion that I shall. I've only had three in my whole entire life (the third one today) and I thought I'd be quite calm about the whole thing. Like I'm generally a calm collected kind of person...and my first blood test wasn't actually that bad. Maybe the fact that my Mum and Hannah had been there and were making me laugh so much that I wasn't really taking note of what the guy was doing at my elbow. And the second time was by an old nurse over on the coast, so she was really swift, quick , and painless.
But today....*shudders* it was like going through some bizarrely thought up Chinese torture. First I thought I had to fast (I still don't know if I really had to or not) and so I hadn't eaten, and I always get slightly weak when I'm off food for a while. Then of course is the fact that I had to go all the way to town just to get this blood test, so the 6:30 wake up call and two hour long drive to town wasn't the greatest start. If you can avoid it, don't even do it on an empty stomach--it isn't overly nice.
Skipping all of the little incidents that happened and all the explanations thereof and going right on to the time when I stepped into the doctor's waiting room (it was empty at 10:15 in the morning of all things) I discovered the doctor wasn't actually behind schedule. Put it in the history books, folks, 'cause that's got to be the first time ever that I've had that happen before! Josh (he needed to see the doctor about his back which he's been having real troubles with growing pains lately) and I only had to sit there snickering over the pathetic show in TV for about five minutes before she came out looking for me.
This is the part where I think I was the most unagreeable person for the whole morning. Like, I don't see the doctor's in town (the one that's treating me lives about 12 hours away over on the coast), but they're the closests place I can go to get a blood test. So, I was trying my best to find the nicest way of saying, "Stop asking me questions; I just want a blood test!" and finally she said, "Okay, just go the door on the left down the hall and Shelly, our nurse, will take your blood."
Shelly is actually one of our sort of neighbours (see, they used to own the property beside us until they sold it a few months ago. They didn't live there, however, but on their other station that's closer to town), which was nice 'cause we'd met before. Predictably the first thing she said when she started probbing around looking for a vein was, "My, your arms are cold." I had three layers on and thought I felt nice and warm, but eeks, jolly thyroid problems...sometimes it's embarrassing to even shake someones hand 'cause I kow they're just going to say, "Wow! You're hands are like ice." I remember once my hands were so cold and we were going some place where I knew I was going to meet heaps of new people (and therefore have to shake many a hand) that I sat on my hands all the way there in a hopes of making them slightly warm.
But, anyhow, back to that white-walled room. Shelly was having trouble finding a decent sized vein. She reckoned it was probably because of the cold and the fact that my veins would have gone hiding to keep themselves warm. After a good few long seconds of her fingers probbing around inside the crook of my elbow, my hands were covered in cold sweat (isn't it weird how you think you're calm, yet you're showing every outward sign of nervousness?) when she said, "Okay, sharp jab." Trying not to look I noticed that one whole vial had filled up; she quickly removed it to push in the second on (she had a total of three!). A little splatter of blood spilled out into the vial and then nothing. "Oooh, that's weird," she muttered. She kept the needle in whilst trying to somehow coach blood into it by pushing around just above it. Nothing going. The seconds became longer and my hand began to tingle, then looking down I see my whole lower left arm start to take on this ghastly colour. I was like "*nervous laugh* My arm is going blue!" And it was...it was freaky. There was little spots of purple and blue, and all the while my hand is tingling from lack of blood and soaked in cold slimy swet. All this on an empty stomach--I began having these notions about how nice it would be just to faint.
Finally, Shelly was like, "It really doesn't look like this veins going to be cooperative and give us anymore." she slipped out the needle, "I'm going to have to try in the other arm." Oh, great...All I was thinking was how much my arm hurt after my other blood tests and how if she punctured both arms then I was going to be eating breakfast with my feet for a week! Prospects didn't look good...then my stomach bagan to get that real sick drop-gut feel. My head was feeling lighter. "I feel sick."
Shelly was the epithamy (is there such a word?) of calm. "Ok. Do you need to lay down? 'Cause just tell me if you ever do." At first I was thinking, "No, I'll be okay." but of course that's just that silly little voice that comes out and says one thing when two seconds later you realise it was the wrong thing. "Actually, laying down sounds like a good idea."
I had both sleeves of my jumper pushed up as far as they would go by this time and without her even having put the needle into my right arm yet, it looked an unhappy grey colour. She released and slipped off the little band that they wrap tightly around your upper arm, and bundled me onto one of those well-padded bench thingies.
When I go without food for a long while I usually start to feel weak and shake. I hadn't really hit that stage by then, but with the combination of sweating hands and lovely ideas of fainting, my legs had begun their own kind of trembling act.
I can't remember much of what happened next...not visual things, anyway. Like sitting up I can remember watching my left arm and the brown top of Shelly's head as she bent over it, but laying down I can't even really remember looking at the roof. I was kind of half blacked out and concentrating mostly on getting my legs to stop trembling. I can't remember the "sharp jab", just some vague idea of how it took forever from the time of her probbing incessantly around for a vein to the point where she walked to the other side of the room. I then realised she'd finished, and lifting my head a little noticed that she'd already taped a cotton ball over where she'd stuck in the needle.
She hadn't mentioned if she'd been able to get enough blood and I didn't remember to ask her until a good few minutes later when I was sitting up slightly drinking a glass of water. She had...thank goodness. I was starting to finally get my head back together again and it finaly struck me how funny I musted have looked sitting on the edge of the bench with my jumper (sweater) sleeves pushed way up my arms and these two white cotton balls in the crook of each arm stuck on with white sticky tape (she must have had trouble keeping on cotton balls before, 'cause those strips of sticky tape went nearly the full width around my arm...it seriously hurt when I went to pull them off later).
She was real nice about it all...like it could have been way worse if she'd been some crabby old nurse that only wanted to go home and spend time with her grandchildren, but man has that got to have been the worse fifteen minutes of my life. Dad let met grab some food from Penny's; I dozed on the way home (trying unsucessfully to find a way to lay that didn't increase the pain in my arms...); and went right back to bed the instant we got home. It was sometime in the afternoon and I didn't wake up until about 11:30, two hours ago, to a silent dark house.
My right arm doesn't hurt at all anymore, but something seriously went wrong when she was messing around in my left arm. It kills. It seems to have swollen up and I can feel the blood pulsing through it. Just...man. *shudder*
Moral of this rather lenghty story being: Beware all future nurses--Lyd doesn't like parting with her blood.
~~~
I would like to be remembered as a smile, a laugh, a tear, fresh baked bread and homemade soup, hugs and kisses, lilacs in backyards, stories in the hearts of my children, and poems in the hearts of my friends. But most of all, as a lighted signpost on the path to the Celestial City.
~~~
--Miss Bethany
Like sick sick. As in gut sick. And I feel horrible. And my back hurts. And my stomach hurts. And I think I'm going to go to bed.
Oh, and my new lovely medication arrived today. I seriously think I'm going to begin to rattle...
I've been interviewed! Proceed to the Red Buckets website to see my random answers ;) And they even presented me with this (cute, eh?):
Ok, now it feels different *grin* There's something different--psychologically--in being able to say "oficially sweet sixteen" instead of "almost sweet sixteen". lol
Now I'm sure y'all want to know what the large mysterious present was, eh? It was this--a polar fleece blanket. The wolf one, of course ;) I love wolves, but more so polar fleece blankets, and I can't believe that I'd forgotten! *shakes head in wonderment* That photo doesn't do it any kind of justice. First the colours are much more gorgeous, and secondly you can't touch it. Like seriously, it is so soft you just want to melt into it.
It's like I've finally gotten my very own blankie (I've waited 16 years no less *rolls*) seeings as I'm like a little kid who drags it around with them everywhere. Well, it is cold, for goodness sakes! I'd been resorting to wrapping my feather doona around me at the computer, and stealing the little polar fleece blankets that the younger kids have. Now I have my very own and it's better and bigger and altogether softer *wriggles eyebrows*
Hmm...what else did I get. Wait, have I mentioned yet that my darling family let me open my presents Wednesday night so that I wouldn't have to break my routine of sleeping in 'til lunchtime? And Tach rang up to join in on listening to me rip wrapping paper, which was fun. She gave me this hilarious little book called The Blue Day Book: A Lesson in Cheering Yourself Up. She's like, "So you have something for when you're having a blue day." It's so cute and funny.
Between all of this the phone with Tach on the other end is passing between Mum and I. Then Hannah passed me this maroon bonbaneer with plastic flowers poked into the ribbons at each end. "I'm gonna pass you to Hannah," I said, emptying my hands. Caleb and I then managed to break the bonbaneer, try unsuccessfully twice to 'bang!' it with just the littel strip of cardboard to hold onto before we got the desired effect. Inside was twenty bucks. As Han puts it, "I've been trying to get you a DVD on ebay, but Mum and I couldn't find it again when we went back to bid on it!" As it turns out, they'd been spelling "muskettes" instead of "musketeers". lol So, anyhow, with the twenty bucks in hand I'm now haunting eBay in search of a good DVD. I'm hoping to get The Three Musketeers or maybe The Man From Snowy River. It's been way too long since I've seen either of them.
This one has to go down in the history books as the time that Dad got me a present! To explain, Dad is one of those men who is lucky to have a wife. A wife that is that are more than happy to do all of his present shopping for him ;) The only time Dad ever does present shopping is for Mum and even then it's the standing joke about how he has to sit Mum down and ask quite balantly, "Now, dear, what exactly would you like for Christmas?" But as it went, when we were in town the other day I was drooling over this 1,000 piece puzzle of these five (yes, five!) bridges appearing one after the other on this river in Prague. I don't think Mum even knew that he'd snuck back and bought it until afterwards when he apparently came back grinning like a cheshire cat (so, no one told me that, but I know Dad and I bet he was!) But just how special is that? *grin*
Josh gave me a hug...which combined with the pepermint chocolates in the fridge and a kiss from my dear Daddy means the only romantic thing I didn't get on my sixteenth birthday was a rose. But since it probably would have been a little hard for either of them to get their hands on one, I consider my 16th complete :D
My pussy cat cake turned out perfect (I promise to show y'all a photo as soon as the film is developed. Sadly that could be months away, but still...). We had mexican for tea *smiles in utter bliss* and played our own version of Mindtrap afterwards. That game is seriously a crazy kind of fun! Then the little boys were begging for a video. I couldn't think of a thing to watch, but going through the cupboards I found Mary Poppins. So, I'm kind of a sentimental sucker, but I couldn't help but think it would be kind of cool to watch the first video I ever saw at home on my sixteenth birthday. So, sprawled around our lounge room and with fistfulls of tangy peppermint chocolate, we did.
It was a simple birthday, but it had all of the good things to make it a happy memory: chocolates, pussy cat cakes (with a candle in each ear for earings), hugs, and fun time with my family. And of course the "happy birthday!" phone calls. One being my first ever phone call from China! Now, you can't beat that ;)
This week has gone so fast (now who hasn't said that before?). I was going to do the whole count-down thing to my birthday, but there's not much point in starting now if it's only to end tomorrow! lol Yes, tomorrow *bounces* I can't wait. The only part of slightly weary of is when the little boys will come wake me at six in the morning...*tries in vain not to remember the time they pounced right on top of her*
But then comes presents :D I still have absoltuely noooooo idea what I'm getting. This "big" mysterious thing that Mum somehow smuggled through the mail even my Dad doesn't know about. Or so he tells me. For all I know he could have been instructed to pretend innocence. You never know with Mum. And apparently there was this other thing too, that Hannah knew was coming in the mail but she can't recall it ever arriving...? *blinks in confuddlement* Tomorrow...tomorrow...
The Bad: being that when I talked to my doctor yesterday I found out there's one more thing wrong with me. My Adrenal Glands (the little fellows that provide the much loved adrenaline) are burnt out. Apparently, it's because they're not working anymore that is somehow making my thyroid resist the thyroid medication I was taking. So, it means that we have to first get my Adrenal Glands working again and then I'll be able to go back onto the thyroid medication.
And of course the first question out of my mouth was, "And how long is it going to take to get my adrenal glands to work again?"
"It could take months..." comes her reply, "depending on how burnt out yours are."
We won't know for sure how long that could be until I do a saliva test (she's going to be sending me out these little tubes that I'm suppose to spit into and then send back *raises eyebrow*).
In some ways this all seems so unreal because I'm not the typical candidate for getting these kind of health problems. It's usually the highly motivated have-to-achieve-everything-now people who end up like this (and usually when they're much older) whilst I'm the chick that gets accused by her highly-motivatd older sister *pokes Tach* that I procrastinate to extremes. I just somehow managed to find the one glitch in the system--a weak body. As a little kid Mum says I used to always love my afternoon naps. And when I was seven one of my kidneys actually stopped working because of a chocolate over-load from Esther. But the worse has been my dodgy immune system. I've always gotten cold after flu after cold in winter. The ultimate being when I got a cold in the middle of summer from sitting in front of the air conditioner for too long...*roll*
But the Good News: is that God didn't create me a sporty person. I can't catch a ball for nuts. And as for hitting a cricket ball with the bat--my cricket champion Grandpa will testify to my inability. lol I love the outdoors, though (got that from Grandma) and all the animals God placed in 'em. And like Mum, I'm gonna have to have a house with a million windows just so I can feel the sunlight when I'm having to be inside.
More good news is that we now have more answers. I don't think there's anything worse to any sick person than not knowing what's going on inside them. It's somewhat depressing to find out that more than just my thyroid has been burnt out, but it's also so exciting to know that now that we know we can do something about fixing the problem.
You know, she was telling me that when I first went to see her in January she was suspicious that I might have an adrenal problem as well, but she said she didn't say anything because she hadn't yet found a teenager that had burnt out their adrenal glands. I find that somewhat funny 'cause everywhere I turn I seem to find out that my body has yet again defide the norm.
For instance--I don't know if I've told any of you other than Kaycie this--I'm deaf in one ear. Like totally deaf. We found out when I was around five and I spent the year before I started school seeing heaps of doctors (all the lolly pops, ice creams and presents for being "such a patient little girl" amongst all this was just the best fun *grin*) in an attempt to find out why. They all came to the conclusion that it could have been a virus (if so, it's a miracle that I didn't lose hearing in both my ears) or I was just born like it.
God blessed me with above average hearing in my other ear, though, so in everyday life I have no troubles. I just don't have any directional hearing, but that brings more laughs than it is a hindrance. Like, we have this really long house and say I can hear Mum talking. I'll usually end up at the opposite end of the house to where she is before I realise that her voice is actually fainter...but the funniest is when Aaron forgets that my leaf ear is the one that's deaf and so ends up whispering his top-secret info into the wrong ear.
Wait, I should make a list of the unique things about my body. lol This could be interesting.
1. I'm deaf in one ear
2. I was the only one out of a family of 9 to get the Chicken Pox
3. I had a kidney stop when I was seven
4. I got a cold in the middle of the hottest summer we've ever had
5. I managed to burn my thyroid and adrenal gland out at 15
6. and catch Glandular Fever in the same year
7. But my ultimate claim to fame has to be the fact that I've never had to go to a hospital despite being the sicket person out of my whole family (all of which [excluding the youngest two] have had to)!
Sometimes it's definitely frustrating not being your average healthy human being (then who really is without some kind of health problem?), but it's just like waht I say when people ask me how I feel about having a deaf ear, "Having had it since as far back as I can remember I know no different. Besides it's usually more fun than it is a hindrance."
Maybe I can't say the exact same thing about my current situation, but I can say that my life has the fingerprints of our Father's love all over it. 'Cause think about it. He could have given me the skill to wield a cricket bat, but instead he gave me the gift of arranging words. He could have given me the passion to pursue never before achieved world goals, but instead he gave me a double dose of patience. He could have made me skilled at building things with my hands, but instead he chose to give me a natural eye for colour and design. The gifts He has given me are ones that haven't really been hindered by me being sick. Just how cool is that? God just keeps proving over and over again that He's in control--that He has a plan. He might allow trials in our lives, but never without providing us with the gifts and tools best suited to overcome them. And I praise Him for that :)
