Salty Zebra

  Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing regular posts about how I'm preparing for radiation. I'm hoping these can help someone else, as I struggled to find a conversational source like this that dealt with the subject. For more information on my brain tumor, check out these posts .  Today I head into the City for my first radiation treatment. I'll write a post for next Monday to tell you all about it, but I don't know yet what that's going to look like, so today I'm going to write to you about Zora. I would super  appreciate your prayers as I head into treatment though!  When you're going through something hard, it's nice to have a buddy, a friend, someone who will be with you through thick and thin, someone who can even come into the room with you during a radiation treatment, in other words, a stuffy. My husband first suggested it shortly after we found out that my treatment was being moved up . We've taken a small stuffed animal with us on ...

Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing regular posts about how I'm preparing for radiation. I'm hoping these can help someone else, as I struggled to find a conversational source like this that dealt with the subject. For more information on my brain tumor, check out these posts .  I don't know why, but with me, there's always a catch. Before my brain surgery, I ended up with a horrifically painful sinus infection that blew out the back wall of my sinus, leaving tiny pieces of bone floating in my head, and preventing me from getting the surgery that was critical to my survival. Turns out, it's not a good idea to perform brain surgery on someone with an active head infection 😬. That delayed my brain surgery for a full month, and it weighed heavily on my mind as I approached radiation therapy and, yet another, bizarre, unexplained complication arose.  I've struggled with scalp issues for months, I don't know why. Perhaps it came from reverting to comme...

  Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing regular posts about how I'm preparing for radiation. I'm hoping these can help someone else, as I struggled to find a conversational source like this that dealt with the subject. For more information on my brain tumor, check out these posts .  From the time I was given my setup appointment for June 2nd, my husband and I felt like a clock was ticking. On the one hand, we felt like we would get more information at the appointment, including a promised schedule. On the other hand, this appointment would start to make it all real, and it certainly did! I think I came out of it feeling a little shell-shocked. For those interested, and perhaps those who might come after me and want to know for themselves, I'll walk you through our day.  As per usual, we arrived for my appointment about an hour beforehand. My husband is a big proponent of being early! I factored this in, though, and packed us a lunch to eat since my appointment time w...

  Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord. Psalm 27:14  Have you ever found yourself in the Waiting Place? I wrote about this last April with regard to waiting for Jesus to return and take us home to be with Him. This week it’s taken on a different connotation for me. Two weeks ago, I heard a speaker share about when Jesus asked the man at the well, “Do you want to be healed?” (post coming soon, once the song it discusses is released 😉 ). This last Sunday, God followed it up by a teaching, at a completely different church, on healing, specifically discussing the story of the man born blind and his healing we read about in John 9 . All this stirred up in me the old questions I have about healing. Things I thought I had resolved and found peace with are churning once more in my heart and mind. I *think* this is God’s doing, that He wants me to revisit these things and explore them with Him in light of a new season of my life. It’s uncomfortable. I d...

  A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. Proverbs 15:1  Almost three years ago now, I was facing brain surgery. I had been diagnosed with a tumor blocking my 4 th ventricle and it needed to be removed right away. I read up on the type of tumor they thought I had (they were wrong), the location, the surgery. I tried to prepare without inducing too much fear, but one fear took shape in the back of my subconscious that survives today – the fear that my personality would be inextricably changed. I had heard horror stories from friends and family of their loved ones who, typically through traumatic brain injury, went from loving, kind, grace filled people to nasty, bitter abusive ones. I was terrified that would happen to me. At first, I thought I had been spared this outcome, but now I’m not so sure.   The first 25 years of our family, this verse was my job. In fact, when my health had brought me to a place where I literally couldn’t contribu...

 Last year about this time, I wrote to you all asking for a little help from my friends , and you showed up! We raised $357.68 in donations over the month and I wanted to share with you today how that has influenced my blog this year.  First, it showed me that there were real people out there reading what I was writing who actually valued it enough to contribute financially. That means more than I can possibly express! I love  writing, but it's hard when you put things out into the blogosphere day after day and you wonder if anyone sees it, if anyone cares, if it's making a difference. When you all showed up for me last December, it encouraged me to keep writing, to keep traveling, to keep learning and sharing things with you. THANK YOU!!!  Next, by having some level of financial income, my blog was legitimized as a business. This enabled me to open five different credit cards and two bank accounts earning me 365,000 points/miles and $1,200 in account signup bonuses....

 Depression. It makes food taste... bland. Sunny days look... dim. Even comedians don't sound funny anymore. So, what's the point of going on a cruise if you're depressed? Here's my take on it. As with many of my other symptoms, you're going to be depressed whether you're at home or on a cruise, so you may as well be on a cruise!   Depression, at least for me in this season, doesn't mean that I'm miserable. It simply means that I get 40% less enjoyment out of what I'm doing. I see things differently. I experience things differently. How does that play out in real, lived experience? Well, for example, I have found that my interactions with people on this cruise haven't gone as well as I remember in the past. Negativity hits me quite a bit harder, so the lady sitting next to me at my dinner with the officers last night complaining about the temperature of her food and how long it took for dessert to come stood out much more starkly than it would ha...

   On our way home from the beach Sunday evening, I told my husband that I would like to stop by our favorite little hole-in-the-wall restaurant and get some celebratory milkshakes, a way to mark our thanks to God for giving my husband a job. He thought this was a little strange since he has not yet gotten a job, but I insisted that I wanted to thank God and celebrate in advance because I knew  without a doubt that God has things lined up perfectly and has just the right job in store for him at just the right time.   To be honest, I'm kind of hoping that God put this on my heart because it's coming soon, my husband's new job. It's been a rough road of late and we'd both really like him to be employed. God has provided wonderfully and abundantly for us, we're not short on money or stressed about how we will pay our bills. It's just that my husband really  feels like he wants to have a job. The idea of his job being finding a job has worn off and to say he is...

   For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light  Ephesians 5:8  This is a beautiful passage, and a fitting metaphor, that God gave us through Paul. Similar messages are shared in John 1:4 , 8:12 , 2 Corinthians 4:6 and lots of other places . God, goodness, righteousness are represented by light and evil and all it’s tricks and fallacies by darkness. This is helpful for us to understand and gives us insight into a deeper truth, but on its surface, I struggle with it at times.  You see, today I have a migraine, and with migraines, light is my enemy. It causes pain; torture really. When a migraine is really bad, I have to lay in a dark room. Even the little lights from the smoke detector or the outlet next to my bed that has a small blue bulb embedded in it are too much. So far, today, I can handle the outside light coming through the window, but the lights in the house are off and I even had to dim the screen of my...

  Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.  This is the end of a passage that lays out some foundations for Christian living. In it, Paul writes that we should not sin in our anger, we should not steal, our words should be beneficial, not gossipy or mean, and that great big mysterious command – do not grieve the Holy Spirit. I still don’t fully comprehend what that means, and no one I’ve read seems to have a solid handle on it either. Hey Paul, you want to give a few more details on something so seemingly important?!? Finally, just before today’s focus verse, it says that we are to get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. That’s where I got stuck.   You see, I don’t struggle with a compulsion to steal, and I work really hard to make sure my words are beneficial, though I am certainly not perfect, but recently I have had a big struggle with anger. You can...

  Sometimes life isn't ideal. Let's face it, most of the time it isn't! So, we do what we need to, to make things work. In my "Making It Work" posts, I share life hacks and ideas that have helped me so that, maybe, they can help someone else too. I hope you enjoy!  I have SO MUCH DATA about my health this year!!!! It got to be so ridiculous that I couldn't begin to make heads or tails of it, let alone use it to benefit my situation. So I asked my data scientist husband to see what he could do with it, and here's what he came up with:  Pretty impressive, eh? He made lots of other visuals as well that you can look at, and even manipulate, here . Why did I ask him to do this? I thought maybe if I looked at the data in a cohesive, visualized way, I would be able to see WHAT TO DO. I've been tracking my blood sugar , my pace points (spoons), and my symptoms for almost a year now. You'd think that if you look at the data just right , maybe if you squin...