The Life of Glory

I don't know if I would be okay if I didn't have dogs. I have really bad days, difficult but manageable days, "meh" days, and good days. My dogs are unwaveringly there for all of them. To cuddle and play and demand that I think about more than myself. They help keep me going. Even when fatigue grasps me like a chokehold and makes me want to sleep all day. They want nothing more than to be fed, to exercise, and to be near us.  Today I am choosing to be thankful. Thankful for my dogs. Thankful for my partner in life, my husband, who loves to go on the same adventures I do. Thankful for my friends. Thankful for the two robins using the bird bath at work right now, as I sit outside and write this. Thankful for my kayak and all the lakes I live near.  Things are really tough right now, but I have right now  to be thankful still. What and who are you thankful for today? May YHWH sustain you during these very trying times, KELLY ANN

For the longest time I honestly thought my symptoms were just going to kill me someday. I would be laying there completely paralyzed and only able to blink on purpose, waiting to die because doctors had no clue what was going on. And, honestly, I was okay with that. I stopped caring. I wasn't scared. I just embraced each day and stopped denying myself what made me happy.  I have this picture hanging on the wall of my tiny house.  Taking this picture was kind of stupid, but I don't regret it. The falls were so frozen people were ice climbing them that year. So after work on January 14, 2012, I grabbed my dog and we went for a short, late afternoon hike. The falls were so frozen I could only hear a faint trickle of water, and I got this picture from the top of the large boulders around the top. Then it happened. My dog had been a pill the whole 20 minutes it took to get to this spot with my cane to take the picture, but suddenly he really started freaking out. So I stepped back a

We were camping out. The weather had been gorgeous. We were having a great time. I went to bed feeling great. Then the temperature dropped. I was awoken, shivering and convulsing at who knows what time, with a seizure that lasted until the sun was all the way up. The birds were singing and I was trying not to cry loudly.  Seizures are brutal. There is no way around that. But this was the scene when I got back home around 6:30 that morning and amazingly I recovered rather quickly from the spasms. If quickly means sleeping most of the day and feeling sore but alright the next day. People seem to forget that this is my normal. I have NES and Porphyria, which can also cause muscle weakness and spasms. I don’t feel sorry for myself that I had to quit camping early in the morning because of a seizure. I don’t feel sorry for the pain I felt or the tears I cried. I feel elated that my body recovered as quickly as it did when I was 20. I feel like I’m getting my body back on track to being capa