Happy New Year

Happy new year to one and all!  I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas with those you love.

I wanted to just pop in for a bit to give a little update on what has happened since my last post here.  My mother is back in the hospital once again after experiencing some seizures for the first time on December 23.  Two weeks prior to that, she had fallen and hit her head hard, but the tests done in the ER at that time showed no injury other than the cut above her left eye and the bruises on her left arm.  She was released a couple of hours after she was seen in the ER on that visit.  An MRI was done in the ER this time, and there is evidence of one or more small strokes sometime in the past, possibly in the two-week period between these episodes.  The seizures were controlled after a couple of days with medication, but she is still not responding very well mentally and has a feeding tube at this time to receive some meds and her nutrition.  The plan is for her to be transferred back to rehab as soon as the move can be arranged, likely early next week at the soonest.  Therapists will try to work with her to see if they can get her to take nutrition and meds by mouth again and see if they can make any progress with her mentally.  I will be honest and say that two different doctors have shared with me that they are not very hopeful of making progress with her, but the second doctor told me that he is “not ready to give up on her just yet.”  Those were his exact words.

Needless to say, we are now in uncharted territory with her.  If you are a praying person, I hope you will lift her and her doctors and therapists up in prayer over the coming days.  I’m praying for God’s healing for her, in whatever form that needs to happen, as well as peace for her soul right now which is sorely needed.  I would also appreciate your prayers.  This is hard.  Very hard.

We were able to still spend a couple of days on our planned “Camping Christmas” trip with our daughter and son-in-law from California, as well as our son that lives here.  It was the first time in three years that we were all together, and some family members here at home covered for me for those first few days until we returned home early from our trip to see about Mom.  We were already out-of-town, and God works everything for a reason.  I believe it was a good thing for these relatives, including my sister, to be with Mom at this time, as almost all of them do not spend much, if any, time with Mom regularly.  Some had not seen her in many weeks, even months, and it bothered Mom terribly that they did not come around very often.  Now that I am home again, I am truly sad to see that they have all dropped out of the picture once again, too.

Even though our holiday together was clouded by this unexpected event with Mom, my little family made the best of our brief time, and I feel so blessed that we at least had those days to be together.  It was a trip that had been in the works for months, and I know now that this is something I would love to continue to do in the future, if possible, even if my whole family cannot be there each year.  We even had a dusting of snow on our drive to the area, making the landscape uniquely beautiful in a way we had not seen on previous trips.

I’m sorry that I have not been able to catch up with my blog reading here, but hopefully things will settle down a bit here soon so that I can start catching up on many things, including Reader.  Life is most definitely throwing curve balls my way right now, including ice and snow on the roads all this week, which is making trips to the hospital extremely challenging.  I’m taking great comfort in familiar routines right now, such as Bible reading and my gratitude journal.  If you have never kept a daily gratitude journal, perhaps this is the year you might give it a try?  I’m not sure where I would be these days without mine and my daily time in my Bible.  It is so easy to become ungrounded during times like this, and I just do not want to go down that road at all.  I cannot even begin to say what my dear friends mean to me right now, too.  God bless them one and all.

As I take a quick glance back on 2014, I am probably most grateful for the change in my overall physical health for the better.  It took some time and patience to make those basic changes last year, but it was so worth it.  I cannot begin to tell how grateful I am for better health and hope to continue and improve in 2015 even more.  The gift of health is forefront in my mind today as I care for my elderly mother, and I realize that the gift of health is something we should never take for granted.

Once again, Happy New Year, and may this new year bring a fresh spirit of joy, peace and love to each of us and those we love.

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