Stupid Side Effects

Despite feeling quite upbeat the end of this week, it's been a hard weekend.  I didn't follow my routine and skipped breakfast yesterday and today.  It just slipped my mind.  When I forget breakfast, I don't remember my Zoloft (anti-depressant/anxiety), which means that I'm hysterical mess at bedtime when my body itches all over and I can't stop trying to make it stop.  A blessed side effect of Herceptin and Perjeta.  Another side effect of these two drugs is lack of appetite.  I realized about 10:30 tonight that it didn't occur to me to eat today.  I at 2 brownies that Brooklyn made about 2:00 after my nap.  Then I left to go to Ogden to see my friend Michelle, a typical Sunday activity for me.  I ate a bag of doritos in the car, to offset the sugary brownies.  At 10:30, because I was starving I binged on nachos and cereal after realizing I never ate and didn't drink nearly enough water today,   Now I've taken Lorazepam to off-set feeling nauseated.

I'm going to start taking Gabapentin tomorrow.  I've had the prescription for a couple of weeks but haven't started yet because, I guess I needed to wait until I felt more desperate.  I'm desperate!!!  I hate having to take drugs with their own set of side effects to treat side effects from the other drugs I take.  Everything I take is a side effect of having cancer.  I never took anti-anxiety meds until cancer got me the first time.  I never took pills for anything before I was 40, except Ibuprofen type stuff.  😢

It's going to be a crazy week.  I have lots of consultations and landscaping to do, which means I purchase and place out plants in peoples yards.  It can be fun for me, but when I have so much to do . . . .  It's not like it's unusual to be really busy this time of year, I'm just having a harder time managing it all this year.  My brain doesn't work like it always has.

I met a really nice couple last week who have taken an interest in what's going on in my life.  It's kind of obvious something is going on in my life.  People don't usually ask me, but they did, and I could tell it was out of genuine concern for me.  After placing out trees and shrubs last week, we sat down around their fire pit for a few minutes and the husband told me a story that I will try to retell without butchering it too much.  You'll have to let me how I've done, Dean!

He grew up in Syracuse, back when Syracuse was a farming community.  He talked about when he as a kid noticing an old farmer beating his old apple tree with a shovel (or something) one year in the fall.  He wondered what in the world this farmer was doing, beating an old tree like that.  Later, he asked the farmer why he was hitting the tree with a shovel.  The farmer said it was to stress the tree just enough to make it want to have a bumper crop of apples the next fall.  Sure enough, the tree harvested a large crop of beautiful apples the next fall.

Then Dean compared the tree to us.  Sometimes our trials are that proverbial shovel that beats us to our breaking point.  God allows us to experience hard things.  It's not because He doesn't love us, it's because only HE knows what we need to experience to become our very best selves.  Only HE knows which path to send us down.  Everybody has that "thing," that thing that makes us feel like we're being beaten by an old farmer with a shovel.  But we can get through anything that's thrown at us, with God's help.  Now, even if I got some of the details wrong, I got the gist of a great story that reminds me where my faith and trust must be.  💕