starting to catch up...

I wrote this back in early December:

Valleys I've been sunk in a pretty deep one all month. November turned out to be quite a doozie. And I've had a pretty awful attitude about it, honestly. September and October held some really "good" days for me. I was more independent. Stronger. Felt more alive. Able to go to church and our bible study group fairly regularly. I got to go to one of our local Lyme Disease support group's meetings. There were a lot of small, yet for me, big victories. It was wonderful! Then I began another cycle of abx the first week of November. It was the same protocol that I've been on for several months, but for some reason that cycle really hit something. I started the week off okay, but by Friday I was completely knocked off of my feet with strong die-off reactions. Miserable and completely debilitating. I thought I'd recover after that cycle during my drug holiday, but after half a day of thinking maybe I was starting to bounce back, I crashed and got continually worse. Being bed/couch ridden was not the way I planned on spending my drug holiday. Desperate for relief, I was pretty pitiful and pitifully threw myself a pity party. Two weeks ago I began a cycle of a new protocol. It's the intense one I was on earlier in the summer, but Dr. J has revised it some, to be even more effective. I continued to be very ill and feel awful from the new die-off. The second week of the treatment wasn't quite as terrible feeling, just debilitating. I slept. a lot. at weird hours and durations. Most days I was too drained to handle anything beyond very basic communication. When I'm quiet, that's when Spencer and I know that I'm really sick. I had a few days that I could handle interaction better and spend time with a couple of friends, which was encouraging, but also very difficult to recover from afterwards. Not including the first few days of November, I have seen 3 people besides Spencer for the rest of the month. Well, okay, I saw my local doctor once and also two phlebotomists last week when I actually left the house to get blood drawn :) November was hard. Very very hard. I've been processing it the past couple of days, writing stuff out, praying, reading. And I'm sad that I had such a bad attitude. Yep, I was suffering greatly. But even in the midst of the delirium and pain, God was working in my hard, hurting heart. I wasn't having a very grateful attitude. God works all things together for our good. All things. For. our. good. The pain, though not wanted by me, was for my good. For reasons I may never understand, right now being very sick is what is best for me. It's such a difficult thing to grasp, that I am better off sick than if I were healthy. I spend so much energy worrying, griping, and desperately trying to escape my situation when I need to just rest and trust that God is indeed giving me the very best. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world” - C.S. Lewis And now I'm done for 2 weeks. I'm infusing IV fluids right now to help hydrate and flush out toxins.