Season's Greetings: Illness, Power Outage, And Adversity Can't Stop Christmas And Hanukkah From Coming!

I am home sick today and cannot be with my family. I don't need to share this with others. (I know this is the time of year for sharing but not the germ kind of sharing if you know what I mean).

While I miss my family very much and am sad that I can't celebrate with them in person today, I want to focus instead on gratitude. There is much for me to be grateful for. Rather than focus on negative feelings, I'd like to focus on things I am thankful for...

Today's top 10 reasons I am grateful:

1) I have a family that loves me who I love very much. We have lots of love in our lives.

2) We have a roof over our heads and enough food to eat. We appreciate what we have and recognize that there are people who are less fortunate than we are. Our thoughts are with them today.

3) We have health insurance and access to great doctors. We know that there are millions of people with no health coverage at all.

4) We have transportation, electricity (something we really appreciated last night when we lost ours do to a power outage), and water. We are safe.

5) We have the ability to find the resources we need to manage the adversity we encounter. We recognize that adversity and challenges can provide opportunity for growth and enlightenment.

6) We do our best to learn from our mistakes and grow from them. We help others. We share information and resources. We pass along coping tips for those going through similar experiences.

7) We volunteer our time and talents to causes we believe in. We are grateful for the opportunity to help others through difficult times.

8) We are thankful that we keep learning, growing, adapting, and connecting with others. We are happy to know some outstanding, wonderful, thoughtful, insightful people who make the world a better place each day.

9) We are open-minded. We enjoy learning about circumstances different than ours. We appreciate diversity.

10) We are free. We have freedom of speech. We have freedom of religion. We are free to make our own choices in our pursuit of happiness.

Let me say that one reason I am really grateful for electricity today (see #4 above) is that we had a power outage last night. It set the smoke alarms off (no fire but all of them going off at once was very loud & startling). We manually turned off all of the alarms we could reach. (They still have batteries in them & still work. They are electrically wired - normally - as well. So they still worked after we "turned them off" noise-wise. We just undid the electric portion but if there were a fire right now, they would still go off). We have yet to hook them back up because we were asleep when the power got restored.

So we survived the power outage last night. Opening our presents in the dark (after dealing with the smoke alarms) was interesting. (There was no fire. The problem with the smoke alarms was related to the power outage and absence of power to the ceiling fan above the woodstove... a fan which is always on when the woodstove is so as not to confuse the smoke detector which is a little too sensitive).

I am thankful that our woodstove was already working prior to the power going off. I'm thankful that we had the light of the fire to help us to find our Hanukkah candles. I'm grateful that lighting a Hanukkah candle gave us enough light to locate a small flashlight (and a cell phone to use as a spare flashlight... which we needed to manage the smoke detectors)! When things settled down, we were fortunate to be able to open our Christmas and Hanukkah gifts by firelight and the Hanukkah candle (with a little help from the flashlight).

Our power was out on Christmas Eve from about 8:30 pm to 1:00 am. The power company fixed the downed wires.

IT WAS VERY WINDY!!!

Despite all of the commotion at our house, Santa still managed to find us.

I am scheduled to have my abscessed tooth extracted tomorrow. The oral surgeon squeezed me in for an emergency appointment for tomorrow (scheduled shortly before I got sick yesterday). I hope to still be able to make it tomorrow to have an abscessed tooth extracted. I'm thinking maybe getting the infected tooth out might help me feel better with my sinuses (and stop the post-nasal drip which is irritating my throat and making it very hard to tell if I have a virus or not). I'm on an antibiotic for the abscessed tooth.

So in the morning, I need to call them to ask them if they think my tooth infection has caused a chain reaction/spread to sinus problems with a VERY runny nose and a froggy throat.

I honestly don't know for sure if I'm contagious or not. I have never had an abscessed tooth and I just don't know if it could spread and cause infection elsewhere (?) but I do know my face hurts. So I may still be able to get my tooth extracted tomorrow. If so, I will be grateful for that because the pain feels like electric shocks to where my tooth is. (I didn't know teeth could hurt this much until now).

In any event, I wasn't going to chance it today. I don't need to infect a houseful of people on Christmas. Also, my niece is just getting over pneumonia. I just didn't think it would be wise for me to go. So my husband and daughter went and I stayed here.

I'll call the oral surgeon when they open in the morning and see if they want me to come in or not. I can't eat for 8 hours beforehand because they are going to put me out for it (due to my complicated medical history they thought it best not to do it while I'm awake and I tend to agree with them on that).

If they think my symptoms are tooth infection-related, then obviously the sooner I get in the better. If not, I don't want to get them sick and may need to get re-scheduled and get stuck with the dental deductible for 2009.

Thank you to my family, my blog's readers, my friends, my local endo support group members and all of my wonderful blogger friends who have such positive spirits and who make the world a better place!

So enough talking about last night's power outage or tomorrow's tooth extraction. As you can see, I have a lot to be thankful for. After I post this, I plan to meditate for a little while before my family returns home from holiday visits with extended family. They are en route as we speak! :)

Quote of the Day from The Foundation for a Better Life:

"And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? [Christmas] came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”

—Dr. Seuss (1904-1991); writer, cartoonist

My thoughts are with those who are cold, hungry, in pain or unhappy today.

Today I wish for world peace.

"We shall find peace. We shall hear angels. We shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds".
--Anton Chekov

This article was posted by Jeanne via "Jeanne's Endo Blog" at www.endendoat.blogspot.com.