WELLNESS

Months have gone by since I last posted about the past. I told the tale of what happened the day I had the strokes that changed my life.

Our lives.

I went from being a whirlwind of activity with goals of family-happiness, blog-success, and building a new life in Georgia, to having the goals of family-happiness, blog-success, and building a new life in Georgia BUT IN A WHEELCHAIR.

So, you know that expression, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead?” Yah well, it’s this expression that has pretty much sent me into overdrive. I look at my peers around me, and many of them live by this attitude. The husbands are A athletes, cyclists, skiers. The wives are tennis players, exercisers etc… (and so are their kids, by the way). They are from this mindset– I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. They Go Go Go. Hard. They are in words of Charlie Sheen, Winning.

And then there’s me… I guess somewhere in the middle– an A player or flat out D player, on any given day.

Alright, I’m doing something today I rarely do… comment on tabloid gossip. A lot of you asked my opinion on Charlie Sheen’s recent antics. I watched pretty much all of it yesterday… The Today Show, Good Morning America, and The Piers Morgan interview last night. And here is where I differ with 90% of all of you out there. In my Facebook feed, I read things like, “Pompous, asshole, nutcase, arrogant, putz.” And see, I didn’t get that feeling AT ALL. You just had to watch his eyes. This man is obviously sick. Clearly ill. While I’m no Dr. Drew, I’m merely a psychology major and intuitive woman, and I know this may be a bold thing to say, but I have mental illness in my family, and it looked a lot like that.

Why stay stuck on the fence? Life is filled with decisions– our own, others, and even those others telling us what decisions to make. But the fact is, deep down inside, we usually know exactly what we should do. The trick is getting in there to access that wisdom.

Working with dreams is a wonderful and very simple way to get to that deep-down place and consult our inner advisors for solutions to waking-life dilemmas. It’s not that dreams have some magical wisdom about the absolute right or wrong thing to do in any given situation. Rather, they let us know what we are most comfortable doing, what we really feel or need or want. Dreams give us the opportunity to tap into our intuition and to be in touch with our whole selves when making decisions.

As I look back on my life, I think about why people have called me amazing. I certainly don’t feel amazing. I feel like I’m just like everyone else– living life. But another survivor friend of mine summed it up this way; she said, “Kelly, when people see someone has become a victim of a traumatic injury, they expect you to quit. We didn’t quit, we persevered. And we didn’t let our scars stop us from accomplishing our dreams, hopes and passions. We went on to get jobs, husbands, kids and whatever we wanted. We became survivors, not victims.”

I debated whether or not to share my story. Many of you will wonder why I am sharing it. My goal is that by the end of this post, you will understand why I have chosen to share my journey– one that is still in progress. I’m scared. I’m scared shitless. And I’m praying.

Self-care is one of those; “I should but, I could but, I would but,” areas often neglected by us busy women, moms, wives, sisters, friends, nanas, caregivers, business owners, and employees. I constantly see this issue addressed, not only because it’s my area of work, but it is also frequently a topic of discussion in many women’s magazines. So why is this area of concern so overlooked and underutilized? “I don’t have time” is the answer I hear most often.

I once heard on the news that everyone would eventually know someone with AIDS, because the disease was spreading so rapidly. In 1994 it would hit close to home.

I met my future husband in 1990 and three years later, I became pregnant with our first child. I developed high blood pressure and delivered Katie by C-Section on November 24, 1993. She was just 3 lbs 14 oz. As any unbiased mother would claim, Katie was adorable! She giggled and made happy noises but she often missed developmental milestones. She couldn’t hold her head up and by age six months, she was unable to roll over; I thought it was due to her being a preemie.