Gratitude...

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. " (Melody Beattie)

This quote keeps coming back to me. It plays in my mind and its truth continues to sink in....I so work to find gratitude as a daily, moment by moment part of my life....and yet I struggle, a battle, with how to embrace gratitude while I define the areas of my life that indeed lack by my own measure....while at the same time knowing so deeply how blessed and fortunate I am each second I breathe....

I believe the life God has for us involves a lot more of God and a lot less of us. Our ambitions, our desire for power, wealth, for control, all take us further from that which God created us for...humility, obedience, loving others, sharing, caring for what God puts before us...

I struggle daily, weekly, with my own ideas of what and who I should be...of my shortcomings, failings and lack of progress to be the person I thought I would become...

and then

I ponder the scale that Christ measures me by and once again realize that most if not all that I mourn about who I try so hard to become so often overcomes becoming what God built me to be...

and each day I work on listening more and talking less.






Adventures All Around

Tuesday did happen. I think the word is more survived than thrived, but success is success isn't it? Homeschooling is about the only area of life that improves with this new normal of not seeing. You see, if one's mom is the teacher, and limited in what else she can accomplish, and she taught forever before she homeschooled, she can almost recite every lesson from memory.
We are learning that our boys can and will sweep, mop, and load the dishwasher with minimal complaining. Les is amazing with the going to the store for me enroute home etc. The funny moments come too, like when our four labs and powder puff dogs open their way into the house and I don't see them coming. They are always on the prowl for doors left unlocked and Drake will open the handles for them.
Phone conversations are sweet, but there is this problem of if a child has moved the phone....I simply can't find things that are out of place, no matter how logical the place is. I find that I don't venture very far from my desk to the couch to my room on my own....after that its like going through a fun house of shin hits, corners I didn't expect and a feeling of "get me home" back to my spaces.
My eyes definitively dry out if not moistened by an hour later. At night we use a heavier medication but we generally still have to get up in the night to make sure the corneas don't dry out again ...its easy to tell, if they are dry blinding pain returns, light sensitivity happens, and she gets fussy.....its a comedy...you need lights to do the medicene, the lights huts the eyes that need the medicene, and the husband does his best to help.
Today we're having an adventure. Long ago I agreed to cook spaghetti for a church event...and sure enough, they are bringing me the raw ingredients to cook today, so we will have our own adventure. Madison will help and we are both spaghetti proficient. They will pick it up as well, so I don't have to find it a taxi.
If being domestically challenged was already one of my proficiencies, vision impairedness makes for a whole new level of value in learning how tnot to be. Thankfully I had just rearranged my filing system a few weeks ago, so necessary paperwork has been easy to find. I have a friend who continually sends me links to look at, most of what I "look" at, I end up "listening to" through the accessibility options on our computers. The program is slow as molasses but you can have pages read to you.
We really do not notice others in most of our daily lives. My friend's husband is facing a cancer diagnosis this month....they deal with it daily. My mother was ill for three years before her death, for the most part, we were alone with that reality. A friend of ours at church deals with pain daily from lupus and foot problems, yet we who are not facing that reality so blithely go forward without appreciation for what we do not face daily. I am aware this is an awfully inconvenient situation I am in, but I am also aware daily that my situation is going to pass, that it is painful, but manageable, that so many others deal with such harder things and I try very hard to keep a perspective of thankfulness.
One thing is clear to me. I will become purposefully more aware of those around me and how to alleviate their trials.....just because I am busy is no excuse not to reach out and help other people who need assistance, more importantly, how defeating it is to struggle alone...I would not wish that on anyone.

God is good.

Tuesday

Good Morning! Today's tasks are lined out. Review auditorily some editing I need to do. Type up some marketing ideas I have for a client, and manage to do something with the chicken in the fridge and put a pot roast in the crock pot, I can't ignore the groceries that are thawed forever. Simple daily goals along with the usual daily chores....somehow it all seems taxing though...but that's part of it, perservering through the new normal.
I find myself choosing to simply close my eyes more. If one is going to see fuzzy and unfocused, after a while you get to the point where you'd just prefer not to see. This morning it occurs to me that I do this alot when I am not visually impaired, simply in different areas of my life. Kinda like my dog in Arkansas, he couldn't do anything about a threesome of raccoons in our backyard at night, so he simply didn't "see" them no matter how obnoxious they played at his back window.
We learn to be blind to some things. Oh, we see what someone else does or did with accurate, discriminating vision, but our own behaviors? Lack of efforts? stumblings? no, we simply don't see that at all....and often we simply choose not to look at ourselves at all in our reflections and evaluations.
If you were to take 3 minutes tonight and close your eyes and simply listen to what was said verbally around the table, or during family time, what would you hear? What would you say differently if you knew the only way your children and spouse would "see" your love was to hear it?

God is good and He has a plan.


Monday

Today was a big day. We loaded up to the cornea specialist in Huntsville and looked forward to good news. Well, the good news is that after 9 days of this, its not any worse. What they know is severe cornea abrasion, severe dry eye with no known originating experience. What this means functionally is my cornea is scarred, very irritated, and opaque for now. The doctor reminded me that he predicted 16 to 18 week at a minimum for the eye to begin to regenerate the cornea and the trauma to reduce. Lovely.
Tally ho. What that means functionally is no focusing with or without glasses. You see out your eyes....but you see shapes, not focused thing...you see waavy where it isn't waavy...and you simply don't see most things. If you bring things 1-3 inches from your right eye, you can focus for about 1.5 inches or 2.5 sometimes. My iphone strangely enough is about perfect size for focus when i can focus...which is not for long...and not predictable. Sunday afternoon it lasted about 3 hours. Today, not so much.
We had an adventure never the less. The Tennessee Walking Celebration Horse Show is going on about an hour north of our home. We met a friend on the road complete with new cowboy hat and very very dark sunglasses to protect me and away we went. I cannot begin to tell you how silly a girl feels in sunglasses and cowboy hats with a skirt and shirt accompanying two men and a daughter through the arena, but then again, why not. It was a delightful day with our friend and Madison had a wonderful time seeing the arena, the barns and a sale barn. I spent my time enjoying the company, hearing stories, and trying to see what I couldn't see well.
Home again tonight, realizing that I will be rediscovering how to live life as a very low vision person for a while....and perhaps if I behave well, by Christmas I will regain the ability to focus my eyes....and the cloudy covering over my corneas will regress. Turns out, the chores still need to be done, work still needs to be accomplished, and I have so much to be thankful for.

Outtakes?

Oh yes.....

having a husband pick out new makeup for you, only realizing later he chose 3 shades too light foundation....

Drinking what you think to be diet mt dew to discover it was countrytime lemonade...yuck!

choosing the salsa bottle from the fridge....the HOT one, not the mild one...

not being able to find a 2nd shoe.....on 4 different pairs of shoes....so much for my organization

learning to fork vegetables, my fork to target aim is p i t i f u l apparently

learning to cut foods the right size for my mouth, just keeping it all still so I can cut is an experience....

Its an adventure here, but one we're getting through.....Les is really patient and we're thankful its not something harder or more permanent.

hugs!
Sweetie



Sunday

Yesterday Les spent the day removing everything from our bedroom, scrubbing it down, and then vacuuming the ceiling, fans, etc. By nightfall we were able to return me to our room and I didn't have a response. We were told to throw away all makeup, rewash all clothes, and scrub all surfaces with ammonia.

I made it through the day with only a few flares and I slept all night.

It is very different to have your vision functionally stripped without warning. A week ago I was at an event hearing a friend speak. The next day I could no longer focus, drive, tolerate light, or function for work as I had before.

Today we're to a place where the 24/7 pain is gone. From time to time something flares my eye response again, dust, light, temperature, and my eyes get red again, but most of the day I can stay inside, away from windows and just be without pain. Without warning I have 20-45 minutes of focus ability out of my right eye when my eyes have been calm enough...and I am allowed to work, write, or do whatever is comfortable. My laptop is on the dimmest setting, which means you'll get spelling errors....or synonym errors....I can't reread what I write for the most part.

I somehow thought I would wake up much better today...yesterday had been a better day for most of the day, then it wasn't. The doctor has said it will be a 16-18 week process, but somehow we thought if we identified the issues, it wouldn't be....but as we identify things that go badly, more come to light. Apparently now that they are irritated, everything gets to them.

You realize you are not getting things handled. You realize that things must be handled...and you keep trying....how frustrating it is to know you are not doing what you need to get done.

I know I have little enough to deal with in this, so many others have such harder lives daily. I am thankful that this taste of ill health and difficulty is indeed a taste and not my daily life forever. How poor a patient I am.

Like all things, one small change at a time....one step as I can to do what I can do and eventually it will be get done.

God is God and He is present in my times of need.