Songs for the Sick: A Chronically Awesome Playlist #NHBPM

Today I'm having a little fun, putting together a list of 18 songs that remind me of my chronic illnesses and their symptoms: chronic pain, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, dysautonomia, sleep disorders and Hepatitis C.

King of Pain - The Police

Still Ill - The Smiths

Everybody Hurts - R.E.M.

Doctor, Doctor - The Thompson Twins

Shake the Disease - Depeche Mode

Lime in the Coconut - Harry Nilsson

I Can't Stand Up for Falling - Elvis Costello

Up All Night - The Boomtown Rats

Sick and Tired - The Cardigans

Infected - The The

My Heart Goes Bang - Dead or Alive

Sick of Being Sick - The Damned

Take Me Down to the Hospital - The Replacements

Brain Stew - Green Day

I Wanna Be Sedated - The Ramones

I'm So Tired - The Beatles

Oh My, My - Ringo Starr

Fever - Peggy Lee

What do you think of my selections?  And which of your favorites would you add to my list?  

Let me know by leaving a comment below.

Wondering What the New Year Holds in Store for You?

Welcome to another Question of the Week.

A new year seems like a pretty good time to contemplate what is going to happen over the next 366 days (err, make that 363.)

Let's face it; we all want good things to happen to us.  I know for a fact that some good things will happen in 2012.  I also know some not-so-good things will happen too.  But I chose to focus on the good things because it's the good things in life that help me get through the not-so-pleasant stuff that shows up uninvited on my doorstep.  

But if you are thinking about the new year and saying to yourself, 'It's just going to be the same thing, day-in and day-out, like it was last year.' well, that's not going to fly with me.  If you don't think anything good will happen to you this year, I'm going to challenge you to think otherwise.

Yes, there are things we can control and things we cannot control.  And it sure seems like it's the unpleasant circumstances not within our control that grab hold of our attention and won't let go.  It is all too easy to get demoralized, depressed and worn down by the stuff we can't do a darn thing about.  I completely understand if this is where you are at, because I have been there too and it sucks.

Here is the thing.  If you spend your time trying to fix the things that are unfixable, you are going to be a very unhappy camper.  On the other hand, if you switch your focus onto the things you can control, you will start to feeling better about yourself and your life.  Nothing is more empowering than reclaiming your potential and doing everything you can do to better your situation in life in spite of your health problems. I promise!

To get you started, let's assume for a moment that the Mayan prophecy is true and the world is going to come to an end on December 21, 2012.  If you truly believed this, what would you want to do between now and then?  Hint, hint!  Maybe it's that something fun and life-affirming you've been holding off on because you have been waiting until your feel better...

Me?  I want to go on a vacation with my husband, somewhere pleasurable, where we can take a leave of absence from the daily grind and just enjoy ourselves and each other.  A couple of places come to mind as I think about this, but the one place I know we can both agreed upon is Las Vegas.

Now because I live with multiple chronic illnesses, going on vacation takes a lot of planning and preparation.  I start with a Special Event worksheet.  It helps me start thinking about all the extra things I need to do before, during and after any event that will ensure I can participate without causing a huge flare-up of my symptoms. It also gets me thinking about modifying how I do things given my health challenges.

Chronic illness does impose limits and restrictions on how I do things, but it can't stop me from doing the things I want to do.  It is a lot of work, but it is so worth it when I am able to do something fun AND really enjoy it despite my chronic illnesses.  Plus having something fun to look forward to really helps get me through the sucky stuff in my life.

So what about you?  What does the new year hold in store for you?  What can you take charge of in your life that will help you feel better about yourself and your life?  What is something fun and life-affirming that would bring you more laughter and joy in 2012?

I'd love to hear from you, even if you are struggling with this challenge.  Perhaps, together, we can engage in some problem-solving and come up with a plan of action that lets you do something you didn't think possible because of your chronic illness.  So please leave a comment here or over at the OMA&P! Facebook page.

If you are really stuck, feel free to contact me via email.  I'd love to take this conversation further if you are willing to be featured in a future post here at OMA&P!.

Nothing But the Truth

Image by miss kim marie via Flickr
Last Friday I had a little fun and wrote five stories that I shared with you in my post Would I Lie to You?

If you haven't yet read that post, I suggest you go there now so that the answers I reveal below makes some sense to you.

To recap, I asked readers to guess which of the five stories I presented was 100% the truth. What made this a difficult challenge was that all of my stories contained an element of the truth. As I mentioned last week, I got the idea for this post from my blogging friend Laurie over at HibernationNow who presented me with this challenge when she gave me The Meme-tastic Award a few weeks ago.

So without further a do, find out the truth by clicking the image below which contains all the answers. And thanks for playing my little April Fool's game.

Would I Lie To You?

Image via Wikipedia
So since today is April Fool's Day, I've decided I want to have some fun.

Based on idea I got from my blogging friend Laurie over at HibernationNow, I am posting five tales about myself today. Here it the kicker: only one of them is 100% the truth. The other four have elements of truth in them, but all contain a falsehood.

So have fun guessing which story below is 100% true and leave me a comment with your best guess. I've leave this up all weekend long for you to ponder and reveal which one below is the 100% true story sometime next week .

1) Lost In The Cornfields

My aunt lives in a small town about an hour and a half south of Chicago. One summer during my college years, back in the 1980s, I decided to go and visit her. That trip was a real adventure.

What I didn't realize is that her location is right in the middle of America's corn belt. There were literally miles of of cornfields stretching out in every direction. My cousin, her daughter, was gracious enough during my visits to drive me around to visit other relatives in the area. However, on a day she needed to work, I decided to venture out on my own to visit one of my uncles who lived in a small town a few miles away.

Armed with the directions she had written down for me, I headed out the door with my aunt's car keys in hand, confident I would have no problem finding my way to my uncle' s house. Boy was I wrong. I hadn't noticed when I was sitting in the passenger's seat that street signs for the country roads I was traveling on were few and far between. Without any mountains in the distance to use as a reference point, I got a hopelessly turned around. I stopped the car and got out in an attempt to figure out where I was; I even climbed onto the car in an attempt to get a better look over all of the cornfields and wound up putting a small dent into the roof of her car.

I was about to start panicking when I saw a truck coming towards me. As it got closer I started waving my hands wildly to get the driver to stop and help me figure out where I was. Turns out, the driver was my uncle who had gotten worried when I hadn't shown up and decided to come looking for me. He led the way back to my aunt's house, which took just a few minutes to get there.

Turns out, I had been driving around in a big circle because my cousin had written down the wrong directions!

2) Miserable In The Greek Isles

The summer after I graduated from college I decided to take a solo trip to the Greek islands.

On the first leg of my trip, I joined a tour group, which departed from Athens on a seven day cruise through the Greek islands and to ports in Turkey. My roommate on the tour was a young woman from South Africa who befriended me. We hung out with several other young people from Canada who were also part of our tour group. We all had a really good time together.

After the tour, I plan to travel by myself to a group of Greek islands we had not visited while on the cruise. I took a two hour bus ride north from Athens and then jumped on a ferry for a eight-hour ride to my destination. Tired and hungry I arrived on the island at two o'clock of the morning. All I could do at that hour was secured a hotel room. After I got settled, I collapsed on the bed and fell promptly to sleep.

The next day I woke up famished, so I headed down to a café for breakfast. It was there that I realize that I had traveled so far off the beaten path that I wound up somewhere where it seems no one spoke English. I went to the local tour office, the only place where I did find someone who could speak English, and learned that this island was actually a vacation destination for the Greeks.

At first I thought to myself ,'I'll just try to make the best of this.' But after several days without someone to talk to, homesickness hit me hard and I decided to head back to Athens early.

After that experience, I decided that I never wanted to travel all alone by myself ever again.

3) An Encounter With a Cactus

My recent trip to Scottsdale, Arizona, reminded me of the trips we took as a family when me and my siblings were growing up. We actually made several trips to Arizona to visit places like the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest and the O.K. Corral.

Seeing the tall saguaro cactus in the Sonoran Desert out the passenger's window of the car reminded me of an incident with my brother on one of these trips. Our mother told us that if we messed with a cactus and got the spines stuck in our skin we would have to go to the hospital to have them removed. My brother, however, seemed to not be paying attention. On the hike we took on a trail through the desert, he decided to kick a piece of dead cactus that was in the middle of the trail. Since he was wearing canvas sneakers, the spines went right through the fabric and into his foot.

I saw what happened and reminded him what our mother had said. He pleaded with me not to tell her. Instead, when we got back to the campsite, he headed to the restroom to work on removing all of the spines in his foot himself. I'm pretty sure that he got them all out himself, because he never complained about having any pain or needed to fess up to what he did because his foot got infected. Which made me wonder why, in the first place, our mother warned us about the whole cactus spines and needing to go to the hospital thing. Maybe it was just a ploy on her part to keep us from messing around with those plants.

4) Our Dog Nixon

When I was a teenager, my mother took us to a hairdresser who worked out of his home in Northridge, California. I'm not sure how she found him, but he did an okay job cutting my hair. After going to see him several times, he let us know that he was moving.

Now I can't remember this hairdresser's name, but I do remember that he had several big dogs and I guess he couldn't take all of his pets along with him when he moved. That's how we came to own a German short-haired pointer named Nixon.

Now I was always a little scared around bigger dogs, having been bit by a standard poodle while selling YMCA Christmas tree tickets in our neighborhood. German short-haired pointers are what I consider a big dog. But Nixon had a pretty laid back personality and, once I got to know him, I wasn't scared at all.

The longer we owned Nixon, the more we realized he wasn't the smartest dog on the face of the planet.

One particularly funny story has to do with Nixon and our sliding glass door. That door also had a sliding screen which we kept in place when the glass door was open. The four of us kids were sitting inside the house when the glass door was open and the screen door was shut. Nixon was on the other side of the screen door on the back patio. We all decided to call Nixon at the same time and he came running full tilt towards us. We all burst out into laughter when we saw the dent a stunned but unhurt Nixon left in the screen door.

Our dad, who had to repair the screen door, was not amused.

5) Fall Down, Go Boom

My sister will never let me live down this moment and to this day she bursts into laughter whenever she remembers it, much to my chagrin.

My sister decided she wanted to go to the local library and I decided to join her. She had just gotten her driver's license so of course she wanted to drive. The trip to the library was uneventful and we spent about an hour combing the stacks for books we wanted to read during our summer vacation.

After checking out, we headed back to the car, jumped in and were ready to head home. She pulled out of the parking lot and up to the traffic light which was red. Now at this particular intersection, which crossed Ventura Blvd., it seemed like it took forever for the traffic light to change so we could go. My sister got impatient and asked me to jump out of the car and head towards the traffic light pole so I could hit the walk button and trigger the light to change. It was no big deal, so I unbuckled my seatbelt, opened the door and headed out into the crosswalk.

I was in the crosswalk almost to the curb when all of a sudden the light decided to change without any intervention from me. Seeing the light change somehow sent a signal to my brain that I needed to turn around and get back into the car, pronto. Apparently there was some confusion getting that message from my brain to my legs, which resulted in one foot turning back towards the car while the other foot continued heading towards the sidewalk. This resulted in my legs getting all twisted and me falling to the ground in the crosswalk.

Embarrassed, I dusted myself off and got myself back on my feet as quickly as I could, while in the background I could hear my sister saying, "Hurry up! Hurry up!" between her giggles. By the time I got back in the car and put my seatbelt back on, she was laughing hysterically. "Stop laughing and let's get out of here," I said to her, as I started getting really annoyed. "And by the way, how about asking if I'm okay instead of laughing at me?" I chided her.

She says there was something about how I was standing one moment and on the ground the next that just makes her laugh uncontrollably. Over the years, I've learned to just be a good sport about it.

Image: I'm not lazy ... I'm pacing myself.

Here is the Post-It note that inspired my blog post from Tuesday: My Routine: I'm Not Lazy, I'm Just Pacing Myself.

Video: My Cat and Dog Playing

Here is a video of my dog Theodor and my cat Ra "playing." It is the funniest thing! The video quality isn't great ... I took it with my Blackberry smartphone. I'll try again if I can catch them playing again.

My Routine: I Just Want to Have Fun!

Image via Wikipedia

I became a young adult in the 80's and fell in love with 80's music. I remember going to dance clubs in Hollywood when I was an undergraduate in college and dancing the night away ... and I know they played the 1983 Cyndi Lauper song Girls Just Want to Have Fun.

My days of clubbing in Hollywood are long gone, but my pursuit of fun remains. In fact, fun is one of the most important tools in my bag of tricks for dealing with my life with chronic illness. Where pills, patches, injections and procedures have failed to bring relief, fun is an escape to somewhere better, where the focus temporarily shifts away from my chronic pain and fatigue. Fun is a great distraction.

Distraction is my number one coping mechanism. Fibro-friendly activities like reading a book, watching a movie on TV, listening to music, writing a blog post, gardening in my container garden, spending time with my pets and arts and crafts projects redirect my focus onto something other than the symptoms of my illnesses. Fun is a respite, fun is rejuvenating, fun feels good. Fun is a reminder that there are other things going on, both internally and externally, besides my fibromyalgia, dysautonomia and chronic fatigue.

I believe that my pursuit of fun, despite my chronic illness, is what keeps me from feeling discouraged, defeated and dismal. Being in pain and fatigue every waking moment can really wear you down; fun brings me back up. On the surface, it may seem impossible to have fun when you constantly don't feel good. Quite the contrary, I've found that fun is exactly the prescription that has worked for me, that has helped me feel good about life once again and that has built my strength to cope with the unpleasant aspects of my illnesses.

I've learned that all pain and fatigue and no fun makes me a very unhappy person. Since I've accepted the reality that my chronic illness is continuing on indefinitely, unhappy is NOT how I want to live the rest of my life. So this Chronic Babe will continue to build a list of fibro-friendly activities to do for fun, 'cause Chronic Babes just want to have fun, too!

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