My Mysterious Mind

My personality is one that leans toward being uptight and anxious.  If things are going smoothly, I'm calm and satisfied.  Who isn't?  But throw a stone in my path, and I may look at it and kick it out of the way, or (most likely) I will see it and think what am I supposed to do to move this?!?  It may then grow to the size of a boulder in my mind so that I can't move it at all.  I'm afraid I may be a pessimist.

Even as a kid, when things would happen differently then I thought they would, I would be nervous about what was going to happen.  Now everything was happening as it should, but in my mind, things were going to fall apart.

Now you would think that upon getting sick and being diagnosed with a chronic illness like Crohn's Disease, that I would have fallen apart and lost my mind.  Initially, it all happened so fast, and I was so unsure of what I was dealing with, that I went with the ebb and flow of it all.  It probably wasn't until the first medication didn't work that I started to lose my sense of childhood naivety and comfort.  Then I started to become anxious with the uncertainty of my illness: 1) how long did I have after I finished a round of steroids until my symptoms return? 2) how often would the symptoms bother me in a given day? 3) would the next medication I try actually work?  Before this, the medications I had taken were for general and more common childhood illnesses where you take an antibiotic, and in a few days, the infection is gone and all is well.  This medication failure was alarming (as it wasn't what I expected).

I also became self-conscious of my physical appearance once the prednisone was back in my system
full force.  Here I am, a 14 year old girl with a face so swollen that I don't recognize myself, acne on steroids (pun intended), and extra body hair.  And then there were the heart palpitations that would come on so suddenly and be so uncomfortable.  I had a lot of unease over this as I had no control over any of it.  These were some of the unfortunate side effects of prednisone.

I don't feel like I lost my mind over this, but it obviously fed into a lot of my anxiety that I already carried inside.  I just had my focus more on my struggle with Crohn's and less on the rest of my world.

With that focus, what I may have lost was a bit of my ambition as I felt held back by my illness and its unpredictable ways.  I didn't have a clear idea of what I wanted to do for a career after high school, and then initially, I chose wrong.  It wasn't until I took time to listen to God and actually focus on this part of my life that I made an actual choice that worked for me at that point in time.  That's when I decided to go into nursing.

I had ileostomy surgery after my career in nursing had started.  After that, things were going great for my physical health.  But mentally and emotionally, I was going down.  Now, I believe this was happening before my surgery, but like I said, my focus was on battling Crohn's Disease.  I went into the nursing career knowing that's where I was supposed to go.  And yet I found myself dreading going to work.  I had great coworkers.  You couldn't ask for more supportive people to work with.  I tried to focus on the people I served daily as a nurse.  They depended on me after all.

Even as I write this, I can't pinpoint what my issue was.  I needed to work because I was an adult, and that's what is expected.  Plus, I had bills to pay (especially medical bills) and for me, health insurance was a must.  But I was so unhappy.  Miserable really.  (And I'm sure even more miserable to be around.  To those in my company, I apologize greatly!)  However, all I could see was a thick, dark storm cloud hanging all around me threatening to let loose at any moment.  In my eyes, I had no one to turn to.  Not even God.  Why would He allow me to go through so much already, bring me healing to my physical body, just to have me go through this emotional turmoil that I couldn't figure out the cause of?

Eventually, I would realize that I had to take initiative and get back in touch with God.  He needed to hear from me.  He wanted to bless my life.  I just failed to let Him in so that we could talk.  No one wants to stand at a door knocking over and over and not get an answer.