I’m having a really tough week! Not only am I trying to deal with an increase in pain but I have a lot going on! We are in the final stages of finishing our basement and hopefully furniture will arrive from storage in a few days. I’m in a bit of a funk however because I’m having problems dealing with the pain side of things at the moment! The flare ups have been getting worse and my nerves have been on edge more as of late. Wait just a second, isn’t that a typical day for a person living with CRPS!

There isn’t a day when your dealing with this illness where you don’t have to battle through a day. Some of those days are easier than others, and with me I always try to stay positive no matter how hard a day I’ve been having. Lately though I’ve been having a tough time in doing that with the increase in symptoms. It’s almost as if all the alarm bells are ringing and you can’t get them to stop. Have you ever had your security system go off and when you punch in the code it doesn’t want to shut off. Or it just goes off for the strangest of reasons. Sometimes this is what CRPS does, all your symptoms starts going crazy off and you don’t know why! I continue to stand in faith that God will heal me and that the testimony in all of this will be used for His good.

I stopped asking the reasons why a long time ago and focused my attention on managing the symptoms. Focusing on the “why” only seemed to stress me out more and make things worse. If I’m having a bad day I chalk it up as just that and move on to the next day in hopes that it’s going to be better. Some days are easier than others but I always try to move forward. I get asked a lot about what I do in order to stay positve or see the good when your dealing with an illness like this. There is no one answer to this question but let me back up for a minute so that maybe you can draw some conclusions to this question.

You might be asking yourself where is he going with this? Or what point is he trying to make? That will all become clear in a moment! When I was first diagnosed with my CRPS I used to think about how the next forty years of my life was going to play out. With no cure and not a lot of hope for treating CRPS it was hard to see anything good about my particular situation, in fact all I kept focusing on at the time was all the “why’s” that CRPS forces you to think about. Now fast forward eight years and that type of mindset has changed. Why do you ask? I could either spend the next forty years of my life in misery trying to figure out why all of this happened and where my life was headed or I could live in the moment and appreciate the small things!

Still wondering where this is going? I find my joy and my happiness in all the small things that I have in my life. Like a smile from one of my kids when I’ve made them laugh, or when they tell you that even though you have a body that doesn’t work right that your still the best dad ever! That moment in time is all I need to be happy and can turn a bad day into a great day on the turn of a dime. It can be through the power of words that I hear in a song that I’m listening to on the radio as I’m driving to one of the many doctors appointments I have each month. As I listen carefully to the words they can encourage me or just plain make me feel good! Or it can be an amazing wife who encourages me every moment of every day telling you how much she loves you and believes in you!

My point is that it’s the very small things that are a part of every day that allow me to find the positive amongst all the craziness and allow me keep fighting! It’s knowing that God is walking through all of this with me that brings a smile to my face! He wouldn’t allow me to go through anything I couldn’t handle. Those small things in our lives are so much bigger than we think and you don’t really appreciate them until everything else around them is stripped away. So live for today and find something positive in each day because it’s there you just have to find it.