Did you miss me? I missed you!

Hey everyone. I’m sorry that it seems I’ve fallen off the face of the earth. I really haven’t. I just fell into radiation and chemo. Wow, that can zap you a lot faster than you’d realize. Every morning I would go to my radiation treatments, come home, and crawl into bed for several hours. Then I’d get up long enough to set up meds and feeding, and go back to bed. It was rough.

My last treatment was September 2nd – just after I spent three days in the hospital from the side effects of chemo and radiation. I am SO glad that it’s over.

However, I’ve got to be honest here. The effects, exhaustion, sickness, and overall difficulties have stuck with me. I’m still working through a lot of it. We started homeschooling our kids this week and every day as soon as I’m done, I crash for a while. It’s tough!  This has represented the hardest part of my journey. After surgery, there’s so much overwhelming your health, you can’t help but push just to do minor things. Now that I’m able to be up and around more, and I can recognize my limitations. That makes things harder emotionally.

So the big question – am I eating  yet? I’m working on it. My taste buds were damaged in the radiation treatments and for a long time everything has tasted like I have a mouthful of salt or jello that’s about to ferment. That’s not really  appetizing and it makes it tough. The other night I did have some ice cream and tasted nothing – so I’m going to claim that as a minor victory.

I’ll skip over all the sores in my mouth, exhaustion, nausea and unpleasant parts for now. I’m trying very hard to get those behind me. It’s been hard and I don’t want to sit in them or think about those things too much. It hurts my mental state too much because it’s easy to get into a ‘woe is me’ state of mind. I’m blessed. I’m here. I’m not in extreme pain all the time anymore and the other night I fixed a meal for my family. (Love that slow cooker!!!!)

I plan to start sharing more recipes and things I’ve learned on my journey. Is there anything else that you’d like to hear from me? Let me know! Oh..and I have some fun work projects hanging around too that I’ll be sharing soon.

In the meantime, I’m SO glad to be back. Thank You Lord for grace to get through the tough times and energy to begin to enjoy the good times.