I have been on a long and difficult journey the past few years. I withdrew from society, both physical and web, while I struggled to come to terms with who I had become. I had a serious head injury almost three and a half years ago and became someone else, someone I didn't recognize and definitely didn't much care for. My strong, confident, sardonic self was replaced by a tentative, ill and unhappy shell of a former personage.
I gained a massive amount of weight, lost interest in my horses, my gardens, my life. Dearest husband did not know what to do with me, so he compensated for my disappearance with heroic efforts at holding our life together while he struggled with my disassociation.
I have been through medical treatment and did get somewhat better over the past year, but fatigue and chronic pain persisted in swallowing me whole. In desperation, I sought help from an MD who in recent years went back to school, learning holistic and alternative methods of health treatment. She was twenty-five years an internist with a traditional practice. It was the best decision I have made in recent history.
After extensive blood testing, what should have been obvious to an MD who cared, I am diagnosed Insulin Resistant and have been for several years. Ta Da! I still have residual effects from the head injury and always will, but getting the inflammation caused by over-production of insulin under control, retraining my cells to accept the sugar which gives us our fuel, has changed my life as I had come to know it.
Myself is coming back, a little battered and worse for wear, but me all the same. I'm not as quick witted and definitely not as full of surety, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I got myself into trouble more than once with my certainty.
I laugh. I didn't realize how much I missed laughter. Last evening Mark told me when he first met me I was like a magnet. He said I glowed, I had an aura impossible to avoid. He told me he had never met anyone so happy and full of life (mischief!).
Life, worries, illness, accident all conspire to take the glow away from us. I let it. This young woman, this me of thirty-five years ago is the glowing person Mark spoke of. I had every reason not to smile; divorced from an addict, the mother of a toddler, struggling to support us while trying to get an education, what did I have to smile about? The future and all I felt it held.
Now, again I smile and look forward to the future and all I hope it has in store for me and mine.
Welcome back, Sandra. I have missed you.
