What a difference a year makes.

What a difference a year makes.

 

 

When I first started this blog it was December 2011. I started the blog after a terrible bout with shingles. I was bedridden and when not crippled over in pain it gave me time to think. I was actually forced to think because I couldn’t really do anything else. I got shingles on the left side of my face and top of my head. There was no real reason for it as it tends to typically affect older people or people with weakened immune systems. I was 34 years old and pretty healthy. The third reason the doctor and various other websites listed was…stress. I never fancied myself a stress-case but I did have to allow myself to give this reason some weight mainly because I had so much time to think about it. When I’m confused or muddled or stressed I always turn to my pen and diary. I have stacks of them, dating back to middle school, which is around the time I first came to Canada. And all that writing somehow brought me to this blog and the idea to start one seemed only natural.

However, sharing the blog (which is the whole point of a blog isn’t it?) I still wasn’t comfortable doing. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to because I know that sharing experiences is therapeutic for the writer and entertainment for the reader. If the article is really good, it obviously offers more than just a cheap thrill.  My problem was that I was skeptical about how much I would expose and how vulnerable that would make me. So for all of last year, I wrote my usual stuff, posted some stuff but told no one about the stuff! How crazy is that?? With that being said, it’s time to fight my insecurity and tell people about this blog, hoping that it is the start of some dialogue between me and any reader. I suppose that because I’m a year older I should act a year wiser ;)

And this year I have learned 3 very valuable lessons. I’ve learned that pain, no matter how painful won’t kill you. I’ve learned that faith, will and action are the triple threat when you want to achieve something. And I’ve learned that dreaming big is not for the faint of heart.

 

Lesson 1

I had two really big headaches between December 2011 and December 2012. Almost exactly to the date.  The first one was…you guessed it…Shingles. This felt like a constant stabbing of a hundred daggers into the side of my head and forehead. Or better yet, it felt like maggots or some flesh eating critters penetrated the inside of my head and was eating me alive from the inside out. It was really that horrific but after a couple of weeks of this cruelty, the clouds finally parted and I was as good as new. Actually even better because now I had a fresh perspective on my life and how I wanted to live it. 

The second time was in December 2012 where I suffered from a post-diural headache from my epidural which I got when I was delivering my son. The post diural headache occurs when the anaesthesiologist screws up the epidural and accidentally punctures something near your spine that they shouldn’t. Some liquid leaks out and travels upwards into your brain and messes with it and gives you these massive crushing headaches. As is evident, I’m no doctor so for a more clinical explanation feel free to look up Wikipedia or something but what I will tell you is that whenever you lift your head from a lying flat position you feel like there is a heavy weight on the top of your head and it is just pushing down on your head. And if you try to fight this pain by continuing to sit up (which I did a few times since I was trying to breastfeed my baby) the pain is so bad that it makes you throw up. But again, after 10 days of advil, coffee and water I was back to normal.  In trying to figure out what lesson was I supposed to learn from this God awful 10 days what I’ve come up with is that whatever hell you’re going through, keep going and it too will pass. It’s like that saying, “Tough times don’t last, tough people do.”  Now, I’m not calling myself tough or anything but definitely tougher now than I was before.

 

I’ll discuss lesson 2 and 3 in the next couple of entries.