Holly Gauper »

Stress, Worry, Pain & Priorities.

The past 7 months have been difficult, to say the least. I’ve experienced more pain, frustration, stress and disappointment in just these 7 months than I have in my entire life. Just the past 2 months have had a whole slew of misery attached to them.

I’m not going to get into it all right now, but here’s a very brief summary. Kidney stone, tons of work to be done while in insane pain and exhausted all the time, quitting our jobs, tons of dental work, botched root canal, financial ruin and we have been living in my parents basement for a couple months now since we couldn’t rent out our nice condo in Ohio. That’s how much we don’t want to be in Ohio. We are paying $1,100 a month in rent for a really nice condo yet living in one room with Duma at my parents place.

So thats the VERY short version of what has been one of the most difficult times of my life. However, I finished all my wedding work for the season, the kidney stone eventually passed (3 1/2 months later!!) I’m still dealing with lots of dental pain but I’m not on daily pain medication any more and I’m glad we no longer work where we were working even though there is a lot of financial uncertainty since this years medical/dental bills have ruined us financially. But most of those things have somewhat been resolved. Well, resolved enough to not be the most urgent thing in my life.

Then I had this bump on my left leg, right on top of my bone. I thought it was a bruise early last spring and didn’t notice it much. Then It hurt a little more a few months back and the Doctor thought it was a shin splint and sent me on my way but in the past couple months, the pain got worse and was spreading throughout my whole leg. So I made another appointment with the doctor to get an x-ray. They said it should get over there the next day but took 6 days to hear back from them because of the weekend. Let me tell you, that was a stressful 6 days.

It caused me to think a lot about my life and how one phone call from the doctor could change everything. “We need to see you back in the office for more tests” kept haunting my mind and I prayed to God those words wouldn’t be said to me. Because I read about things online way too much, I was mostly worried about bone cancer. That led me down a bad path of what would happen to Ryan if I was no longer here. Out of everything I could feel worried or sad about when pondering on what would happen if I died, the only thing that hit me really hard was leaving Ryan. My parents would be devastated but they have each other and would eventually move on, I don’t have any friends that are close enough for it to impact them that deeply but Ryan and I are everything to each other.

Well, after much worry, on Monday night I heard back from the Doctor and they said everything looks normal. My chiropractor examined the leg and said it’s the muscle. It is insanely painful to work on that muscle, it’s like torture but it’s not going to kill me so I’ll get through it.

I feel like I dodged a bullet. It very well could have been something life threatening and something may happen someday that is but for now, I’ve still got a lot of pain and a lot of problems but none of it is going to take my life.  I want to be able to experience the rest of this life with Ryan and grow old with him. Ryan, kids and a house is what I so desperately desire.

Stuff like this does make me think about how I spend my time though. It causes me to notice the time more and think to myself, if I don’t have a guarantee I’ll be around tomorrow, what should I really be doing at 10pm? Still working at my desk is not the right answer. So I leave my work and go and hang out with Ryan and I feel good about that choice. The work will get done  but if something happened to one of us, I’d have to live with my choice to work late every night and I’d hate myself for the rest of my life. Choosing to spend time with him is a choice I could live with.

So one bullet dodged, now many other things to focus my energy on. I need to find a new chiropractor and medical massage therapist closer to muskegon so I can start getting healthy again. It’s incredible how much medical massage therapy  decreases the amount of pain I’m in on a daily basis. I just need to figure out how to afford it all after the devastating costs of all the dental bills. For the cost of 3-4 teeth, I could get all the chiropractic care and massage therapy I need for a year. That is crazy.

I also need to finish my taxes… yayyyy.

But all this other life stress is somehow manageable because I’ve been given grace and live to see another day.

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