Feeling Better

It has been a long time since I felt well; years now, since I retired early because my body simply stopped functioning as it should. I look back at the days when I woke at 5:30 a.m. and tumbled into bed at 11:30 p.m. or so and I marvel at how I just … kept going… for such a long time. Those were the days of eighty-hour workweeks when I somehow also found the time to run errands, gas up the car, vacuum the house and clean up the supper dishes each day: perhaps even watch a bit of television and read a paragraph from a book. I have always been a reader but I never managed to read too much, back in those days before my eyes drooped and I succumbed to sleep.

I recently started a new alternative therapy that I will write about when I better understand how it works. I am cautious of fads and even more cautious of talking about things I do not fully understand. But I do believe that there is knowledge out there of effective alternate therapies that predate western medicine by thousands of years.

And all I know is that I feel better: much, much better.

I recently went on an amazing and wonderful road trip with my daughter that I will also write about in the weeks to come. The day my daughter and I set out, I had just started putting into practice the very concrete suggestions that my highly-qualified therapist suggested, including megadoses of vitamin D3 which, according to her testing, was chronically low.

My daughter rolled her eyes at that one: “Gee, Mom,” she told me in characteristic cynicism, “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that you need to get out in the sun more.”

And yet, I feel. So. Much. Better.

We hiked a ton while we were away. And every evening, when we video-conferenced my husband, I could see the worry in his eyes as he carefully cautioned me to ‘take it easy’; to ‘pace myself’. He is a high-energy man who has done his level best to patiently sit by my side all these years as I have had to make gargantuan efforts simply to leave the house to get into the car where I could sit down again. He has seen me relapse so many times that his worry is painfully real. Each evening while my daughter and I were travelling, I cheerfully told him I would be careful and then each day, I carelessly pushed myself way past any efforts I have been capable of in the past four years.

The day my daughter and I arrived back home, I looked around the yard and the house at all the little things I have been neglecting. And I couldn’t wait to get started. When it comes to housework, my husband and I are a team. But when it comes to the details (trimming the grass around the trees and the house, washing the grime off the door frames where our dog walks back and forth each day, dusting the door frames and the tops of the pictures on the walls), if I don’t do them, they won’t get done. My husband simply doesn’t see the little things.

My husband saw me, though. “Your eyes!” he exclaimed over and over the first night we got back. “I haven’t seen that light or that energy in such a long time!” He was elated at the difference.

The first thing to catch my newly-energised eyes was my tiny little garden. By the time my daughter had continued on her way back home two days later, she and I had planted two types of lettuce, and spinach and peas. And my husband had tilled an additional little garden plot in which we will plant a little row of corn, potatoes, carrots and squash.

Such mundane things. And yet, it has been four years since I have had the energy for mundane things.

There might be another chapter in this body of mine after all.

It’s a brand-new day. Oh, I am so hopeful…

Patti Moore Wilson © wednesdayschildca.wordpress.com

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