Wishing You a Good Day Today!

It has been Christmas Eve for ten ten minutes as of….now. I am super excited. I am thankful I made it through yesterday without a brain malfunction, the last of the preparations for today are done.  Today is more exiting for my family then Christmas day because the whole day is about being ready for Christmas Eve services, going to one or two and then we come home to a finger food meal (that we just finished preparing) and we open presents and play together till at least one is the morning.

Christmas day is the one day of the year Mom and Dad actually turn off their beepers. It is the one day of the year that we know Mom and Dad will not be pulled away by another family’s emergency or something will come up needing the pastor’s attention.  So we sleep and do absolutely nothing in togetherness. We play games and sit around and stare at each other and then take naps and watch old movies on the projector .

The day after Christmas we clean up our mess. Because that is what a day of hectic chaos followed by the laziest day of the year creates.

It will be amazing if I get another brain malfunction free day tomorrow. There is so much I do not want to miss out on or ruin. Last year a migraine hit as I was opening a very cute and cuddly bear and so my face went sour and I put the bear back in the bag fast thinking I am going to throw up and that is not going to happen on my new bear. Misunderstanding fiasco. I am hoping and praying that tomorrow will be an awesome pain day and my neurons with behave themselves.

I love our four day celebration of Christmas. Christmas is the biggest time of year for us. Christmas is the end of the first season of the Christian holiday. It brings our four week period of waiting and anticipation of fulfillment of prophecy and steady hope in the coming messiah. Then on Christmas Eve we celebrate His arrival, Jesus among us. And we get to imagine the first group of believers, the shepherds. We share their awe and fright when confronted by the angels and the zeal that was planted in their hearts. They react to the pull to Christ and run to Him. When they find them they fall down and worship Him. Their hopes fulfilled and peace flows over them as they look upon their long awaited messiah. Scripture is fulfilled. A new beginning  awaits us. This whole season is preparing us for what is about to come just as much as it is a celebration of the gift of the Christ Child.

Oh, it is exciting.  If I am sick again tomorrow I will be sorely disappointed. I wish you a good day tomorrow filled with joy and hope. God bless you and your household and may he give each of us one of our best good days on the day that we celebrate Christ’s birthday.

 

Have a pill bottle pileup?

If you are like me you have empty pill bottles everywhere. Mine are in the closet, storage bins, craft buckets, junk draws, and on my bedroom floor.  What to do, oh what to do?

Have you herd of the Medicine Bottles for Malawi project?  In first world nations pharmacy have to resort to dispensing medicine in scraps of paper and other unsavory ways. This project sends donated bottles to these hospitals and pharmacies so they can dispense medicine in a more sanitary and safer way. Cool huh?

How to do it:

1. Collect empty bottles.
2. Take the labels off. This can be easily done by boiling the bottle for about ten minutes.
3. Mail them to:

Malawi Project Inc
3314 Van Tassel Drive
Indianapolis, IN 46240

More information go to: http://malawiproject.org/medicine-bottles-for-malawi/

19 Ways to Accommodate an Employee with Migraines

via 19 Ways to Accommodate an Employee with Migraines.

The entire time I was reading this I was thinking are there really employers who would do these things? I think an awesome employer would at least listen to a well organized argument as to why certain accommodations would make you a better, more productive employee. That is why I am sharing this with you. Maybe there is something on this list that could help you that your employer would agree to.

 

Reduce Lighting Triggers:

1- Add fluorescent light filters to existing fluorescent lights to create a more natural lighting

2 – Change lighting completely

3 – Provide an anti-glare filter for computer monitor

4 – Provide a liquid crystal display monitor that has a better refresh rate

5 – Move employee to a private area to allow for personal adjustment to appropriate lighting

6 – Allow the employee to wear sunglasses or anti-glare glasses in the work area

Reduce Noise Triggers:

7 – Move employee to a more private area or away from high traffic areas

8 – Provide an environmental sound machine to help mask distracting sounds

9 – Provide noise canceling headsets

10 – Provide sound absorption panels

11 – Encourage coworkers to keep non-work related conversation to a minimum

Allow Flexibility in Space and Schedule

16 – Provide flexible leave when the employee is experiencing a migraine

17 – Allow the employee to telework when the employee is experiencing a migraine

18 – Do not mandate attendance at after-hours social functions if an employee is affected by a disruption in sleep patterns

19 – Provide the employee with a dark, private area to go to when experiencing a migraine

Attributing article from @MigraineAgain:http://migraineagain.com/19-ways-to-accommodate-an-employee-with-migraines/

Have a Joyous Season

 

I cannot find much joy and gladness in the trigger lined streets and shop windows. Heralding in the season with cheery noises is not how I find happiness in this time of gladness.

Biologically happiness makes no sound. This video shows what happiness really looks like: Molecules of the protein myosin draging a ball of endorphins along an active filament into the inner part of the brain’s parietal cortex, which produces feelings of happiness. It looks like a happy noodle dude playing with a ball. Hands in the air guys.

I leave many of the old trigger filled traditions behind and find happiness in the quite and stillness of the wee hours of the morning. Or family time when we watch the old Christmas movies or reading the stories and bible. Decorating an unlit tree. Getting little ones excited about Santa. Gossiping about who got who what. I think about things that bring on happiness that also minimize triggers.

I wish you many playful noodle dudes and very few electrical disturbances.

Stop saying ’sorry’ if you want to say thank you: A seriously insightful cartoon

via Stop saying ’sorry’ if you want to say thank you: A seriously insightful cartoon.

Yao Xiao has a message about expressing ourselves positively when we want to thank someone. And thanking someone is never apologizing for being you.

We do not have to apologize for our bodily limitations or the fact that we are not going to get better no matter how hard we try. When the doctor told me I wasn’t going to get better the first thing I did was apologize to  my brother and assure him that I tried as hard as I could. His first words were you don’t have to apologize to anyone, it’s not your fault, you didn’t do anything wrong. I was apologizing all the time, sometimes I didn’t know why I was apologizing. I still do sometimes. It’s important to remember and be reminded that you should thank the person what they have done for you and not apologize for any type of inconvenience it may of caused them. Why? Because we did nothing wrong.

This Must Be Serious

I often see “everyone remembers exactly when the pain began.” What they were doing, day, minute, even to the second.

But do you remember the day when the seriousness of what was happening hit you? A moment of clarity. When you realized you were screwed over by your own body?

That moment is clearer to me then the day the pain began.  Which is understandable I suppose because the pain made me pass out.

I have a twin brother. We did everything together growing up, almost inseparable. I was the crazy imaginative irrational rascal and he the stoic rational calm brat. We made a great team. When something was amiss Mom and Dad automatically yelled for the “twins”.

Collage and the Air Force separated us for the first time. I had been trying to call my brother since my first seizure with no avail (time zones, phone tag), so a week later I e-mailed my brother the details of my adventures and warned him that I needed to speak with him the evening of my first neurologist appointment and to call me with no regards to the time. The appointment did not go well.

Brother demanded a full account of my pain and why he wasn’t told the seriousness of it. He sounded angry,  he never sounded angry. He was talking fast and rambling a little. That is what I do when I get emotional. He has a facial expression and a slight tone, not a slightly raised voice and short pauses.  I hadn’t even told him how awful the appointment had gone yet. When the time came that he paused for that account I was surprised by my calm tone and reassurances that we had a game plan. It would not do. I needed to transfer to university down the road and live with him. He needed to care for me. Suddenly I am reminding him that he was awaiting orders to ship out. That the plan is irrational. For the first time my brother said something irrational and had deviated from his calm air. For the first time I told my brother no without being persuaded or reaching a compromise. (If he was not awaiting orders I would have transferred.)

My brother was scared and at a loss of what to do. It scared me. It made everything that was happening sink in. I realized that my internal dialog was referring to myself in third person. I wasn’t going through this, it was “Crystal” from “The story of her life.” I was confused, why did my brother just behave so?  Why do did we to go against our characters? I wanted to go but couldn’t, he should have said that. It was the first battle lost to my illness. I realized my illness is forcing my relationships to change. The illness had taken a few things away, this made me acutely aware of them. That brought it all together. The reality, seriousness, gravity, life changing tragedy that has darkened the doorstep of my family.   This moment was worse then the moment the pain started. The wave of emotions set off a migraine and I cried myself to sleep.

 

To give you an idea, I remember him loosing his calm and treat me this way only once before. I almost drowned while white water rafting when I was about 8 years old. He pulled me out of the water and when I woke up he was rebuking me. I did not respond with rationality.  I saw I lost my oar, afraid of getting in trouble, I tried to go back into the water to retrieve it.