I know! I know! I haven’t been great lately at staying on time in between posts. Before I get into my posts as I was working on it check out the storm clouds I got pictures of tonight. My wife was checking out the sky and to my amazement this was what it was like after the storm. Tonight’s storm had our family waiting things out in the basement  just to be on the safe side after the tornado watches were posted.

I was away this weekend trying to relax and enjoy my fathers day present! I got the weekend at our cottage with no kids, and the opportunity to get out and do some picture taking. It was also some time just to try and put everything that’s going on behind me for half a minute. Having to see the neurosurgeon every week makes it feel as though I never leave the doctors office! I have to see him every week to check on my white blood cells to check for infection, as well as how I’m healing from surgery.

Everything worked out well last week and there was no change in my blood counts. It’s a step in the right direction and we need that to continue. This morning I woke up however with a lot of pain in the incision site and my neck where the electrode is placed has been quite painful all night. I try not to let my mind wonder but lets face it, that’s a hard thing to do when you don’t know what’s going on inside your body. I just hope and pray that God has taken care of all that infection. This is where I just have to place all of this in God’s hands and trust that He will heal everything.

Although there seem to be a lot of negative things going on at the moment there are also all kinds of positive things happening. The negative always seems to overshadow the positive with an illness like this but I’m not going to let that happen. With my implants my walking continues to improve. The pain has been reduced by as much as 60% and my leg is moving better than it has in four years. It certainly isn’t perfect and there are different things that need improvement but it’s exciting to be getting around without a cane. Will it every be the same? I’ll leave that one to God to work on. I was caught to late but it just shows that if you get diagnosed early there is a chance for great improvement. So don’t go down to defeat because there is always hope!

Another improvement is taking back some of my life that was missing. For the longest time I felt like I was stuck in a rut, having lots of trouble staying motivated to improve and not knowing if I was ever going to start getting better. It took a really long time but slowly I’m making improvements in different ways. This has allowed me to a degree to resume some of the things that I couldn’t do before. They may be the basics of life but I’ll take it! Going for a short walk with my family, or being able to sit through a family function without leaving because the noise made me want to curl up in the fetal position!

I choose to focus on the good not the setbacks or the negatives that come with this illness. There are going to be setbacks and times when CRPS tries to knock me off my feet, and that will happen if I let it and then it wins. Just the thought of this illness winning gets me motivated to rise up and show it that it’s not winning in my body. So just like all the other setbacks this one will be defeated as well!