hopeful

(Ironically, this is a bad day for me.....2nd week into "ugly treatment" (as I'm calling this protocol) and almost finished with the week and I'm already wishing I could throw in the towel.....but my spirits are still hopeful that this is doing good to get me to the end of the tunnel.)

Someone asked me the other day how my "hope" was that day.  With my Lyme (as I suspect with other people with the disease), my hope goes up and down daily.  It doesn't even really depend on if I feel bad.  Some days when I feel absolutely terrible, I still have hope; hope that there is an end eventually to all this misery (even though I don't know when that will be).

Hope that I again will look like this (taken 5 1/2 years ago):

Bright, happy, healthy eyes (it's all in the eyes, isn't it?)

Instead of this (taken this year):

Sad, sunken, droopy eyes

Well, I do have another kind of hope.  The hope in the promises of God.  That he won't forsake me (Ps 9:10  Is 41:17  2Cor 4:8-10) or leave me during this trial, that His love is never failing (Ps 13:5  Ps 119:75-76), and that some day I get to enjoy Him forever in heaven (without pain or sadness!) because I believe in the work Jesus did on the cross for my sin (Jn 3:16  Rom 6:22-23 Rev 21:3-5)  .

But the hope I'm talking about today is the stuff that helps you get through a day sometimes when you're really struggling physically, not that the other hope isn't there, but this is the hope about having an end date.  Like when your belly is swollen with a baby and you just wish that darned thing would come out because you KNOW he/she will provide so much joy and you will be out of your physical misery of carrying such a load :).  You KNOW there's an end in sight....you have a due date to hope for.

I used to have despair (and I still do sometimes) because it seemed like I couldn't "see" an end to this illness.  It seemed so far away and foggy and ambiguous because with treatment I wasn't feeling better.  I mean, I had little breakthroughs but nothing to tell my heart "You're getting better!!!!!!"  Because with Lyme, often it is one step forward, two (or three or four) steps back.  It's hard for a new Lymie to understand this.  So when I had a day of feeling "good" it made me get excited that I WAS getting better, only to be slammed down the next day with crushing fatigue and pain once again.  It took a few of those scenarios to realize I should probably just not get excited about those good days at all....despair.

And then the farther I went on with treatment, I was eventually able to see how actually the little breakthroughs actually were significant even if I crashed the next day because if I looked at myself at the same time the year or two before, I hardly EVER had good days.  So while it's hard to really not be able to see an end "date" of when I will feel normal again (no one can predict that except God), I've learned to not get overly excited or think about a "good" day as a huge step toward the end game; or get greedy with them like I think I need to hoard it since they are so few and far between.

Instead I take those "good" days and peacefully and thankfully relish them like sunshine after days of stormy weather; not worrying about what tomorrow holds.  And I say to myself and to my God, "At least I feel good today."