It’s been a while since my last post but I haven’t been feeling up to writing much over the last few weeks. It’s been a really rough go as of late and with my upper implant not giving me any relief, my pain levels have been pretty up and down. I’ve been having quite a few flare ups and trying to get them under control is taking up a lot of energy. My nervous system is so tightly wound up at the moment that it takes next to nothing to bring on a flare up! Add to all of this a cold that I’ve been fighting to get rid of a cold over the last few weeks and I’d say I’m not having a lot of fun at the moment.

It seems that over the last few months things have been more unstable when it comes to keeping my pain under control. With my upper implant not working properly, it’s like the CRPS is trying to gain the upper hand. Any opportunity it has to unleash it’s wrath on my body it’s been trying to take but I won’t let it win. This go around has been really tough but like all the other times I find a way to bounce back and get back on my feet. It’s exhausting both physically and mentally but the only way to win is to keep moving forward. As hard as it sometimes seems I know I’m going to win this fight because giving up isn’t an option. When your learning to ride a bike and you fall off what do you do? Get back on!

So enough negative for today because I don’t believe in staying in a negative frame of mind. Actually it’s morning now because there was a writers block that was going on last night so I gave up. As is so often the case with this disease you go into a mental fog a lot because of the medications and the illness itself. So rather than try and push through it, I just step back now and take a break so I don’t build up stress. So sometimes it means I have to space out posts because I’m just not clear up in the brain.

When your trying to overcome an illness like CRPS it can be so easy to only see the negative things that surround you. As a result people don’t focus on the positives they’ve got going in their lives and it prevents them from moving forward. So you see among all the pain and the difficulty right now, I’ve got some pretty good things going on in my life. Take my family for example. Before all this happened I was a huge sports person, playing sports like golf, tennis, hockey, and others. I have a daughter who shares a love of sports with me who is playing competitive soccer. Even though I can’t play the sport myself I get to live that passion for  sport through watching her play. Not only do I get to be a proud father watching his daughter play something she loves but watching her and listening to her talk about the sport fills a huge void in my life.

Recently I joined a group of photographers who post their photographs on a National Geographic site. It’s a great way to see other photographers amazing works, and it gives me some great ideas for my own work. An added perk though is that two of my photographs that I posted to the site are being considered for publication! It has always been a dream of mine to have a piece of my work published. Maybe that will happen or maybe it won’t but the very fact that its even being considered brings an amazing amount of joy to my life.

The biggest positive is that God is doing is there bringing me strength, joy, hope, and so many things as I walk through this journey!