Week in Review: A Renewal

Well, howdy. It's time again for another Week in Review, and let me say that it has been a topsy-turvy kind of a week. Hitting some low notes and peaking at some fantastic highs, it has been another week in keeping with the trend this summer has been setting.

We both had appointments this week, and so we worked around those in our social engagements. However, we managed to fit in a treat on Tuesday evening as we went to Famoso pizza for gelato, and was generously given our scoops for free! The manager, whom we speak to often when we are there (or even walking by), told us we were such great customers that it was on the house. My Salted Dark Chocolate Caramel gelato tasted even better because it was free!

We did help friends with the renovations of their business on Wednesday, to the extent that I made cookies and gave my opinion while Matt did all the helping. On Thursday, Matt's dad arrived for a week-long visit, and we have been taking in the sights with him. Saturday was a rainy day, and we spent it walking around the West Edmonton Mall, getting some dry exercise - something Matt and I do quite regularly if it is a rainy weekend, since it's a nice flat surface for me to walk on and it usually tires me out nicely.

On Sunday we had made an appointment at Fort Edmonton Park to take part in their "Weddings Through Time" celebrations with the renewal of our vows at St. Michael and All Angels Anglican Church on 1905 St. It was an overcast day, cool and breezy, but that didn't stop us from dressing up in period-inspired costume for the occasion. During the ceremony, we took advantage of the opportunity to get the officiant to work "even through Time And Relative Dimensions In Space" into the vows (which is epic, btw: we are now sealed to one another again by our vows and TARDIS).

It was a very nice ceremony, and Bob was eloquent and well-spoken, easy to speak to and easy-going. He made us feel as though we were celebrating much more than just being married 10 months ago (which of course we are although he didn't know anything about that). Nonetheless, it was a wonderful way to spend the afternoon. Wandering through the park afterward, we were able to see a 1920s era wedding re-enactment and partake in some homemade raspberry and coconut wedding cake after the 1900s era wedding celebration. Matt's dad enjoyed the visit to the Park as well, and was happy to be a part of our small re-dedication ceremony.

Today I have a very important appointment in Calgary with a doctor specializing in occupational medicine. I have no idea what to expect when I'm there, so I'm nervous about the whole thing. I am just hoping that this will result in the definitive diagnosis that I have been missing in my ongoing lawsuit, and that it ends up being exactly what we need to get things moved along to the next stage.

You'll notice I didn't mention the "low periods", but really, I don't need to. There were tears, many many tears, but I'm working on it and through it and with the help of Matt, my mum, and my therapist, I'm learning things about myself I didn't realize until now.

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Flat-Out Friday: Don't Ever Stop Writing That F**king Blog

So yeah, the last month or so has been harder than normal. And yeah, I've been sporadic about posting on the blog. But I was told by someone dear to me, "seriously, don't ever stop writing that f**king blog", so I'm hacking away at today's post with the determination of a termite in a wooden house. Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw, etc.

I've been seeing my new psychologist for a few weeks now, and she's good. Really good. But it seems like every time I see her I spend the whole hour crying uncontrollably, and then I've effectively drained myself of any energy I had to begin with, walking around like a puffy-eyed zombie for the remainder of the day. Which would be okay if the appointments weren't on Fridays, which really puts a dent in your summer evening plans. I am hoping today's appointment will be less so, but I doubt it. We are going to try to see a concert tonight at K-Days, so I hope to be less... bleary.

What we've been going over (and through) is my grief surrounding the accident itself. I did mention before that I hadn't really grieved for what I lost, and it's true: I lost that innocence and spontaneity that comes with being young, head over heels in love, and having very few limitations. I was 30, newly moved to Alberta, working two great jobs. My then-boyfriend was thrilled to have someone to experience life with. We had plans to visit the US, weekend in Calgary, tour vineyards and historical sites; we were living every day to its fullest.

And then everything changed.

I am far from innocent now. As for being spontaneous, we can't do anything without thinking four steps ahead. We bought K-Days passes for the entire duration of the Expo. We wanted to see concerts and play games on a whim, but quickly realized that I can't stand in a field to watch three hours of music and had to find lawn chairs for sale. Suddenly it's not that pick-up-and-go experience that a young couple with no children should have. We have to plan to pack the chairs, take a bag with supplies in case I need painkillers or extra sun protection (the pills I'm on make me super sun sensitive), and plan to go a different day to walk around and play games because I can't sit for hours and then walk around for a few more.

It's like being a parent, except most new parents get nine months to plan and organize their lives to adjust to the new addition. My life changed in the span of sixty seconds on a sunny Friday morning. I then got two months to re-learn how to tolerate the pain, sit, stand, walk, climb stairs, use the bathroom, wash myself. I was sent home with some mobility aids and a "good luck". I had no time to adjust to my new limitations before I realized I was saddled with them forever.

FOREVER.

That's what I'm grieving about. Now you can understand why it's taken two years for me to realize this. I certainly wouldn't want to confront it if I didn't have to. And now you can understand why these last weeks have been hard. I'm in mourning and yet still trying to celebrate the life I'm here to live. It's a struggle on a good day. On a bad one, it's hard to wake up. But I do because I must.

And I must because there is so much life waiting for me to live it. I just have to remember to pack a bag to take along for the ride.

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Week in Review: Flat and Out

Before you ask: No, I did not forget to post on Friday. I just didn't, or couldn't to be more precise. I spent an hour with my therapist dealing with a break through and the subsequent non-stop crying, and afterward I was too tired to sit down and go through it all again here.

The weekend was fabulous. We went to a baseball game for free, courtesy of the Edmonton Prospects ball club's Military and Service Appreciation Day. The weather was gorgeous (a little too nice according to our sunburns) and we enjoyed some quality ballpark hot dogs. We watched the Prospects lose in a 10th inning overturn by the Melville Millionaires, but had a great time. We also went for a BBQ at a friend's house and enjoyed some giant steaks and corn on the cob.

So in regards to Friday. I realized that, in my sessions I had in Medicine Hat, I was grieving but I wasn't grieving for me. I was grieving for the miscarriage and my grandfather, but not for me. I lost a piece of myself I'll never be able to regain and I didn't even stop to acknowledge it. Needless to say, grieving 2 years after the fact sucks, and probably hurts more than it should. But I have to do it. So I have some upcoming Flat-Out Friday posts that will delve deeper into all this.

Thanks all for your patience and understanding, and enjoy the new blog layout.

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Pie Could Save The World

If you know me as more than just a passing acquaintance, I've probably made you a pie. It is what I do - I feed people because I care about them. In the not-so-distant past I had a dream that some day I would own my own little pie shop where my sister and I could bake and serve pies and pastries to fill the world with love.

Because pie = love.

If you're extra special and I like you even more, I've probably made you a pie that has no recipe. A pie with no recipe? How can this be? It can be if the recipe I use is from MY HEAD. Yep, you heard me: a random, made-up, let's-put-this-in-too concoction of pastry goodness. Not unlike Jenna from one of my favourite movies, Waitress. In fact, one of my first made-up pies was inspired by said movie. In it, Andy Griffiths (yep, that Andy Griffiths) describes Jenna's "Strawberry Chocolate Oasis" pie. I took it as a challenge to see how close I could get to creating something as mouthwatering as his description.

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Week in Review: Get a Life

We have friends! I mean, not that we didn't have friends before, but Matt and I are both the sort of people that have a few friends we really, really like, as opposed to a lot of friends who are just all right. Whatever. The point is that we have friends who like us and we like them and they want to hang out with us, like, twice a week. It's uncanny!
 

Awww, aren't we cute?!

We went to Trivia Night again on Thursday - did not do nearly as well as the first week we attended, but the experience was marred by a malfunctioning microphone and a case of "pub near capacity". We still had a lot of fun but I was jangled by the time we left ("jangled" was Matt's word; it's a good one). Friday night we attended another military party: the All Ranks Dinner/Dance at Schank's, which is this crazy pub with bowling, virtual golf, mini golf, an arcade, pool tables, and three bars for two stories of drinking craziness. Basically, it was huge. Matt was the runner-of-all-things-running that night, so I helped with the technical stuff as his familiarity with and patience for computers is moderate at best. Everything went off well, and we had a good meal, some great conversation, and we won a door prize which we are using for admission passes to K-Days here in Edmonton, basically the city's equivalent of the Expo in Ottawa. It's great because Matt will be on summer leave while they are on, so we can fully enjoy all they offer and get me plenty of weight-bearing exercise walking around looking at it all.

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Flat-Out Friday: Your Depression is Special

To be clear, the following rant is not applicable to those of you/us that have an on-going working relationship with our mental disabilities. This is for those people who aren't actually depressed at all but think their online self-diagnosis means they are most likely suffering from the most rare and deadly brain tumour possible, or that their depression is so fathomless and unique, when they actually grieving/pissed off/misanthropic.

You know the people. The ones that you want to pat on the head and say, "Yes, your depression is special, just like everyone elses". The ones that, in most cases, walk into the office and say "I'm feeling sad today" while it's pouring rain outside. (Duh. Weather affects your mood. Happens to all of us.) The ones that claim to everyone who will listen, "I'm so depressed", and then spend hours telling you about how depressed they are.

THOSE people.

Since long before all this accident hoopla, I have suffered from migraines, which are (from Wikipedia): typically [the headache is] unilateral (affecting one half of the head) and pulsating in nature, lasting from 2 to 72 hours. Associated symptoms may include nausea, vomiting, photophobia (increased sensitivity to light), phonophobia (increased sensitivity to sound) and the pain is generally aggravated by physical activity.^[3] Up to one-third of people with migraine headaches perceive an aura: a transient visual, sensory, language, or motor disturbance which signals that the headache will soon occur.^[3]

If you've ever had one, you know that the paragraph above doesn't do them justice. I have gotten them since I was a little girl. My teachers used to tell my mother that I couldn't possibly have a headache all the times I said I did and accused me of lying about it to get out of school. I have spent cumulative months of my life in bed with a cold cloth over my eyes trying desperately not to vomit again. You don't understand them until you've really actually had one. In my case, they're a familial inheritance. More than once I've suddenly lost half the vision in one eye - a real hassle while in the middle of a retail shift. But I deal. It's what we do.

And yet, I have met so many people who claim they have them as well but in reality have no blithering idea how to tell migraines from plain old headaches. I detest people who arbitrarily announce, "Oh my head! I'm having a migraine". Please. You might be able to fool the masses, but for people who know the stages you're not passing muster. If you actually had one and were into the third stage (the phase where it begins to cause pain), you'd be prone on the floor, blinded by the light, unable to move in case the world suddenly shifted its axis thereby making you terribly vomitous, NOT walking around, hand on forehead, proclaiming loudly that you were experiencing one.

To bring this back around to the original topic, I equate people who are all, "Woe is me, I'm so depressed" to migraine fakers. You know that The Princess Bride quote? "That word you are using. I do not think it means what you think it means."

That.

Again, those of us who have experienced real depression are not fooled. Real depression would never let you out in public to proclaim your suffering to the world. Real depression is what makes you hide in a corner behind the furniture because you can only deal with the small, tidy space under the bed right now. It makes you cry, uncontrolled and unstoppable, for hours on end, unable to explain why in words even if you knew why, and you never know why. It makes you barely able to open your eyes, and when you do everything is so chaotic and impossible that even if you're sleeping in your own bed all you can do is close those eyes again and fall back to sleep. You cannot:

• Log onto your favourite social media site and soliloquise about your sadness;
• Go back to said site every two minutes to read the comments people have made, proceeding to then make your own comments on those comments;
• Leave the house and attend a social function only to spend the whole time sighing, "I don't know why I bothered coming. I'm so depressed".

Depression goes beyond an uncontrollable sadness. It's something deep inside you that stops you from being you. It throws a huge stick into the gears of your being, causing you pain and suffering and hurt and sorrow. Sometimes when I'm feeling low, I end up spiralling further downward with the realisation that I cannot fix it nor can I stop it. It is a soul-sucking liche that wears a black hooded cloak and has no face, and unlike all those fantasy books, there is no magic sword that can drive it away.

The only weapon we have against it is time and release. Weathering that time might take some pharmaceuticals to get you through, and achieving that release might take hours of time talking about it, but those of us that struggle with real depression understand these are all tools to help ourselves. We don't stand around waiting for other people to sympathize. We take action.

So for all those posers out there: if you stand there in your hipster shoes and proclaim to me how depressed you are, take no offense when I take action and smack your face. It is simply a test of my strength against your apathy.

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When Fairies Come to Tea

One of my summer projects this year is the construction of a fairy garden. For most of you who aren't sure what a fairy garden is, think of it like a terrarium but with miniature accents and tiny landscaping. The Edmonton Journal posted an article a couple months ago explaining the growing trend. I've picked it up from other bloggers and Etsy, my source of inspiration for most things crafty.

I've started with a relatively small terracotta pot, about as round as a dinner plate. I've filled the bottom with pebbles and a foam wreath base. You should use charcoal if all your plants are going to be real, however since I'm mixing my one small fern with a bunch of plastic foliage, I opted for the foam. I'm covering all that with a layer of fertilized potting soil. I have this vision of a little flowery home with a creek and pond, so I've purchased small blue glass rocks to use as "water", and a little terracotta dish I will paint to look like a koi pond. I have a small birdhouse to fancy up and a pottery sugar bowl - I just couldn't decide which I prefered for the house. I'll post some before and after pictures once I have everything put together.

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Week in Review: We Interrupt This Program

“You say you're 'depressed' - all I see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

We aren't talking about Saturday. Specifically, we aren't talking about Saturday between 3-8pm. It doesn't exist. It has been removed by the temporal police and placed in the Nth Dimension. I don't care if something important happened to you during that time, because it actually didn't - it took place before 2pm or after 8pm, you just didn't notice.

The rest of my week was pretty okay. We went to Date Night at the Devonian Botanic Gardens on Thursday night and had a lovely time. We walked around the Kurimoto Japanese Gardens and visited the Butterfly House. We had bison bratwursts and listened to a bluegrass band. Once the bugs started to come out in full force, we left and headed over to Trivia Night with some friends. We had a wicked awesome time, but I stand by my belief that we actually won and the quiz master was an idiot. See, we got 24/30 right, and the winners got 25/30. The contentious point was a grammar question. AND I WAS WRONG?! Yeah, I didn't think so. But apparently the wording wasn't what they were looking for, so it was incorrect. DESPITE THE FACT THAT IT IS THE CORRECT TERM FOR IT AND YOU'RE JUST UNSCHOOLED ENOUGH TO NOT REALIZE IT.

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Flat-Out Friday: ZOMG What?!

Whew. It's been a week. Appointments with both the physician and the psychiatrist have taken their toll on me mentally and physically. Because I could only find a doctor in a small town south of the city, I have to get up in the morning and drive Matt to work so I can have the car on the days I have appointments. Needless to say, it ends up being quite the round trip in the end. And then I went and put the appointment with my psychiatrist on the very next day, deciding that before I see him, I'd go swimming. I went and I did, extending my swim length to 300 metres, and then it was Date Night with Matt last night, and...

I slept all day today.

It's not like I wanted to. But I woke up, made some breakfast and did the dishes, and went back to bed, sleeping soundly until Matt called on his way home from work.

My doctor wants me to be swimming up to three times a week, and as much as I'd like to accommodate her, if I swim one day, I need a day of rest to make up for it. So I could swim Monday, rest Tuesday, swim Wednesday, rest Thursday, and swim Friday, but that would mean Saturday would be a day of rest and as much as I would love to get in shape quickly, spending time with my husband is far more important to me. Is that wrong?

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The Wonders of You (Yes! You, Canada!)

Matt looking properly dapper

Hi all! Long time, no talk. Sorry for the intermittent contact lately. As you know from my last post, I've been feeling a bit undermotivated. However, Matt and I had a great Canada Day weekend, so I want to share some of our photos and memories with you all. Friday and Saturday were spent running around doing errands and watching some movies. Overall, nothing significant to report.

We found an original "Cherry Bomb" (our beloved Ford Fiesta)!

But Sunday we went to the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village! It's just east of Edmonton, and it's exactly what it sounds like: an old-timey village devoted to educating people about the Ukrainian migration and settlement here in Alberta. Also, that particular day was the Vintage Day celebration, so there was a tasters fair to try all the different foods, live music, and a vintage car show.

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