them sparkles

Tomorrow is a big day. Nearly 8 months of one health disaster after another, I finally get to go back to work. While I'm going back to my same job, it's been so long that it will feel unfamiliar, almost new again. The transition will be slow but exactly what I need.  Very excited!

October 7 th marked 4 years since I was diagnosed with Lupus, four years since my body decided to wage war on itself, four years since I started to actually learn to listen to what my body was telling me, four years since I learned to be kinder to myself. That last one is still a work in progress but I believe I'm getting better at it every single day.  This year has been quite challenging. It’s tested me and made me feel more helpless than I’ve ever felt before. It has left me feeling raw and vulnerable and made me rely on people quite heavily – something that has always been hard for me. But it has also taught me to fight and be strong and to appreciate every little victory. Some of these, though seemingly small, are that I can walk around without assistance, get up the stairs in my house at a normal pace, open up a drink bottle on my own most of the time. The latest and one of the most exciting victories: I have finally been cleared by my doctors to s...

The year 2018 has not been kind to me. I was just discharged from the hospital for the third time since April. Another 17 days. My health has not been great and each time I think things are looking up, something else happens. I'm finding it harder to keep on the positive side of things with all of this going on. The progress I made getting my strength back after my last admission feels like it was for nothing. I am weak again, fighting to just get up a few stairs. I definitely cry more, frustrated by all of it. Through everything though, I've been lucky to see how much I'm loved and cared for. The people who have taken time out of their busy lives to check in on me, text, send a kind note, visit, call... It really makes it feel like I'm not going through this alone. There are few things more lonely than being stuck in a hospital for days on end, by yourself, being poked and prodded and checked on throughout the day by strangers. Those visits, calls and texts really do...

Not too long ago, I put on make-up for the first time in weeks. It doesn’t sound like a big deal but I hadn’t done it in so long that it was almost foreign. My hands were shaky. I had lost a lot of strength while in hospital so it was a tiny bit more difficult that usual. A couple of days after I was discharged from the hospital, I drove my car for the first time in almost a month. I needed to go to some medical appointments during the week while everyone else was working so I needed to take myself there. I had terribly anxiety about it. I drive a manual transmission and having lost the strength in my legs made driving difficult too. It felt like I was driving a car for one of the first times after receiving your license. The other day, I was crossing a busy road and to try and keep the traffic from waiting on me, I thought I would quickly jog across. My legs almost gave out and I almost fell. I’m still having issues walking up the stairs, opening bottles or jars an...

I'm home! I was finally discharged from the hospital yesterday, 19 total days admitted. It was a long stay but necessary for my health. They figure I had a very severe Lupus flare but given everything that had happened to my body in the months leading up to this, it made it more complicated. They still don't have all the answers from my bone marrow biopsy but I have been doing so much better and able to walk on my own without much trouble finally, that they didn't see any reason to continue to keep me while they mull over some of their unanswered questions. They did rule out the very serious, like cancerous cells and what-not so I'm very relieved. My body has changed. I lost a lot of strength while being laid up in a hospital bed. Most days, it was a battle to get up and go to the washroom or even sit up in bed. But this body, the body that felt like it was giving up at one point, the body that has been fighting to get better, the only body I have... It's he...

Happy Canada Day, friends! I hope you all get a chance to get out and enjoy some of the great festivities around the city. Today is day 13 in the hospital. The doctors are getting closer to finding out just what's causing my blood levels to be so low so I'm thankful for that. I've endured some pretty intense procedures. One of them was a bone marrow biopsy where they basically drill (by hand) into your hip bone and extract bone marrow with a syringe. That part of it was certainly uncomfortable but they were able to use local anesthetic to ease the discomfort. The second part of the procedure was not at all fun. They had to take a small core sample of my actual bone. They unfortunately are unable to freeze the bone itself so I felt everything. Apparently, depending on your pain threshold, some people have no issues. I wasn't one of those lucky ones. But it's over, I feel only a little discomfort and they feel that they will have more concrete answers once they get ...

I spent my 35th birthday in the hospital. I'm currently writing this little post from my hospital bed, one week after being admitted. It's been a really rough year. As of right now, they're not sure what is happening with me. I came in severely dehydrated with incredibly low blood pressure. I thought it was from the harsh antibiotics I was on to treat the pneumonia I developed after leaving the hospital the last time. But even with fluids and different treatments, there's still things the doctors can't explain. I feel like a pin cushion at this point, I've been poked more times this week than it feels like I have in my life. My veins have gone into hiding and so any 'routine' procedure is anything but. Through all of this, the nurses that have been attending to me have been the most warm and compassionate people. Yes, they're here to do a job but they don't have to make you feel like they actually care about you. These ones do and I appreciate ...

Taking care of yourself is one of the best things you can do for you. In doing so, you will also be better to those who matter to you. I recently learned this the hard way. While I thought I was taking care of myself and listening to my body, I wasn't listening hard enough. I was letting my frustration and anxiety build up, thinking if I just pushed it aside, it would eventually just go away. It didn't. As a result, I actually ended being up off work for 7 weeks and in the hospital for one of those. My lupus had begun to flare up and it manifested symptoms I hadn't experienced before. Some so painful and/or uncomfortable, I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Eventually, I developed a couple of blood clots, (pulmonary embolisms) in my lungs which, I'm told, has the possibility of being fatal. I've never been in the hospital before, other than to visit people. It was probably the scariest experience of my life. Through all of this, I got to see just how much people ...

I'm just going to leave this here. Worry about what is important. ❤

I had the absolute pleasure of spending the weekend in the mountains with some really amazing women. Before this weekend, they were my work friends. After this weekend, they are just simply my friends. We were brought together to celebrate the last few weeks of unmarried life for one of our girls before she flies across the ocean to marry her true love. I feel we learned more about each other than we all knew and we've grown a stronger bond with each other than we ever had. We shared a lot of laughs but we also shared some serious moments. We discussed some things that have been bothering me as of late and I realized that I wasn't the only one feeling this way. It was a huge relief. Before this weekend, I felt a little bit alone. Like I was possibly making more out of something that wasn't really a problem. But many of my concerns, were concerning to them and having people share similar feelings with you feels like they are helping carry the weight, it's not so heavy....

The other day, I was reminded of this quote by Will Smith (or so the internet tells me) and it has resonated with me since. In the last little while, I have had a harder time trying to stay positive because there seems to be so much negativity around me. You see it in the news, on social media and you hear about it through the mouths of the people you talk to daily. I've noticed that most of the negativity surrounding me personally is coming from people that are currently dealing with something upsetting in their lives. Whether it be that someone is ill in the family, they're having relationship issues or some other kind of unhappiness, these are the people that I'm noticing it from the most. I believe it's easier for us to distract ourselves with what is wrong in someone else's life than face what is bad or sad in our own life. It keeps us distracted. Perhaps why tabloids are so successful. In realizing this, I found my bit of sparkle. Both of my parents a...

For years, I struggled with my own negativity. I sought out the worst in every situation and I believe it manifested an illness within me. In 2014, I was diagnosed with Lupus. In the months leading up to my diagnosis, I was tired, achey, sick and just plain miserable. It took everything out of me, and my negativity was only making it worse. It wasn't until I was given a name for what was happening with my body that I had an "aha!" moment. Stress and negativity wore my body down, so I decided that stress and negativity didn't deserve a place in my life. Something changed within me and I realized that the things that most of us stress over aren't actually worth the energy we give them. From that moment, I decided I needed to stop worrying about things I could not control and I learned so much. I wanted to make a real effort to not give in to the negativity that others tried to rope me into. I learned to listen to my body and to take care of my health. I learned th...