Iron Ore

Update:

I saw the neurologist Monday and things are going well. Despite the ever present weakness, fatigue and pain, no CIDP symptoms. I am going to continue reducing my prednisone until it is 5 mg a day. I am going to start tapering off my IVIg-once every two weeks, then once a month and finally, as needed.

They are popping open champagne at my insurance headquarters over that! Last time I checked, my IVIg was over $16,000 a treatment.  I have had around fifty since last March.  

In other news, I am now married to a doctor. Adrienne received her PhD on Saturday. Next week, we will travel to Vermont to visit friends and pick up Mercedes. I can think of little else than seeing her again. There are also the preparations for moving to Statesboro, which will happen early in July. Of course, the house is still unsold.

(I have been working on the following for over a month and have decided that it is time to be rid of it!)

One of the hazards of living in a small, college town is life next to students can be uncomfortable. Probably having breakfast together on Sunday morning and reviewing the previous evenings exploits has been happening since there was college students. Being forced to hear overhear it because we are sitting at the next table leads to interesting thoughts on maturity and experience. Yesterday, I was forced to listen to a student narrate, in heroic style, her conflict with some particularly thick headed folk who happened to be “over thirty.” I remembered that when I was her age, thirty was a good place to draw the line between the "us" and "them" factions in life.

Well on the older side of thirty, it is still a good place to draw that line because the folk on the other side are seriously lacking in life experience. When I was that age, I thought I knew everything.   Now, I know that my store of knowledge is quite limited. It is the difference between being ignorant or being stupid.

Prayer should come with warning labels. When I decided to stop coming to God with a Christmas list of what I wanted, as if He were Santa, and instead only ask for knowledge of His will and the strength to carry it out, I expected to be sprinkled with magic dust while I slept and to awaken, like Peter Parker, with new, Spider-Man powers. Unfortunately, years into this experiment, I am still the same person I wanted to be rid of.

I though that, after a year with CIDP, things would get better for me.  Meaning I  would become a better person. Unfortunately, as I get better physically, I find myself more easily distressed and temperamental: I spend my morning shower re-experiencing my imperfections, reliving a life time of slights (real or imagined) and social blunders, feeling them as acute pains. I often vocalize or throw my hands up to ward off the memories.

When I confessed this to a friend, she wrote “ Why does it seem like my fingers need to be pried off of the stuff of this earth to get that this is NOT my home? this is only a place through which I must travel to get to my final destination...Bumps, weigh-stations, off-ramps, detours, full-out stops are just temporary distractions from the purpose of the journey.”

I am short sighted, I assume the little I see represents the whole.

This is where experience comes in; We are iron ore, and life is the smelting furnace that will remove our impurities. Instead of using magic, God is using experience to help me answer my prayer. The process can be painful or difficult, or not; but, basing my responses on impressions made when I was younger or inexperienced will make the process more difficult.