Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Day 72 (Empty Nestering) - FAQs

My visitors basically have the same four questions...
How do you sleep?
How do you eat?
How did it happen?
and...Doesn't your neck hurt?!

Standing...face down
Well, for starters...yes my neck is experiencing the effect of gravitational pull from having a heavy head to hold up in a different direction!!  I can only stand and sit for limited intervals of time before my neck cries out for relief and I must lie down on my massage bed which feels like heaven!!

At the hospital they taught me my sleeping position.
Sleeping...I am allowed to lay on my right side with the side of my nose next to the edge of the mattress.  That way, I am able to breathe and still be pretty close to being full face down.  The only problem is I wake up after only a couple of hours with a pain in my hip and neck.  So sleeping becomes a "trying to get comfortable" experience!











The joy of eating
Yes, I can eat at the table...sort of
Eating...At first eating was a challenge but I'm getting use to it now.  The very first day I was quite nauseated ..it was all I could do to kneel on the floor with my plate of food in front of me.  Now I just hold my plate in my lap.  Of course I drink everything through a straw!  If my neck gets tired from looking down, I have found that I can put a pillow on the edge of the table and rest my forehead on that.  It is quite comfortable.  And I never have to worry about swallowing my food down the wrong pipe!!  It just doesn't happen! :)






And how did this happen?  The doctors have no answer to that question!  As we age, the gel in our eyes starts to pull away from the retina.  I guess in my case the retina just didn't want to let that gel go.  So the gel pulled and the retina resisted until a part of the retina sacrifice her life creating a lovely hole right in the center of my vision!!  Dr. Howard did say I was a little young to be there...usually this condition happens around 60-70 years of age.  Lucky me!!


Personally, I look at it as a blessing!  I'm still quite agile and physically fit.  Despite my hurting neck, I can get around quite well and I have a totally awesome and wonderful husband who is here to take care of me!!  I have a massage bed, a massage table, carpeted floor for when I'm crawling around (or working on my laptop), a fantastic ward family who has provided three meals and goodies for us and awesome children who have sacrificed their technology (aka..Jason's Kindle Fire and Jessica's iPad) so I don't have to be board!!  Things could definitely be worse!!

Face Up Heaven!!
And guess what?!  I get to experience heaven four times a day!!  Four times a day I get to straighten up for my eye drops!!  It probably equals the equivalent of less than a minute but it feels like HEAVEN!!!  (And I usually get an awesome kiss from my good-looking man at the same time!!  Yup!  At that point in time, I'm in heaven!!)




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