My husband and I had been dating for seven years when he asked my dad for his blessing to marry me.  According to my husband, my dad said something like, “Well, shit!  Of course!!!!”  I imagine my dad patting him on the back, and then giving him some sort of manly hug.  My dad never saw us get married.  He passed away three months after giving Ryan his blessing.

I spent the next year deeply grieving the death of my father.  The world was a different place and did not hold the same enchantment it had held a few months prior.  My heart was not in the right place to celebrate marrying the love of my life when I was heartbroken over losing the first man I ever loved.

A little over a year after losing my dad the dark cloud that had been following me around since he passed away had turned into a lighter shade of gray.  I was just beginning to see where the world held some beauty again when, as God would have it, my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  The trajectory to healing and happiness had changed course again. 

Shortly after my mom's diagnosis, my dad visited me in my dreams.   I was standing on the patio in the backyard of our childhood home when my dad walked through the sliding glass door.  He was wearing the usual attire he wore working around the house, and he looked a lot younger in my dream than when I had last saw him.  He walked up to me and with his whiskers rubbing across my cheek he gave me a big hug.  It was at that moment I realized it was a dream and I began to pull away from his embrace.  Before letting me go, he grabbed my shoulders, looked into my eyes and said. “Jill, it won’t be long now.”

I woke from that dream with tears in my eyes and the conviction he was telling me it wouldn’t be long before he and my mom were to be reunited.

It was over the next few days, my husband and I agreed to plan our wedding within six short weeks.  We had already missed the opportunity to have my dad at our wedding.  We did not want to live with the regret of not having my mom there either.

We married at the Seattle waterfront with just our families on a stunningly, beautiful March day.   Everything about that day was perfect and a testament to God’s blessings. 

My husband has always wanted to travel to New Zealand, so as our wedding gift my mother gave us plane tickets for our honeymoon.  Over the next several months she would continuously ask when I was going to schedule our trip.   She may have felt I was unappreciative since I seemed to be hesitant making any arrangements.  The truth was, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her, I didn’t want to plan anything while she was sick.  

Over the next several months, cancer overtook her body and her health slowly declined.  She lived at home for the majority of the time and it wasn’t until the final two weeks she lived in the hospital and in hospice care. 

On the last day she was here on this earth, I heard the same words my dad spoke to me in my dreams that night.  The hospice worker told us, “It won’t be long now.”  Shortly after hearing these words, I left my mom’s hospice room and booked Ryan and my plane tickets to New Zealand. 

In the final hours of someone’s life you can visibly see the transformation of life leaving their body and death creeping in.  Sedated with morphine, their eyes hold a listless stare off into the distance and are neither open nor closed.  It is difficult to determine if they are present in the room and can still hear what is going on around them.

But when I grabbed my mother’s cold, frail hands and I said, “Momma, I scheduled Ryan and my tickets to New Zealand” her listless gaze moved from the corner of the room to look at me directly in my eyes.  With as much strength as she could muster she nodded her head and tried to smile.

That image has imprinted itself in my memory and evoked an immense amount of pain every time I thought of New Zealand.  As the dates of our scheduled trip approached, I knew I could not avoid the moments of pain any longer and risk losing out on my mother’s final gift. So over the last several weeks my husband and I have spent many hours together listing out all the things we wanted to see on our honeymoon.  And my husband spent many, many more hours over the next several weeks planning all the logistics…. booking hotels, rental cars and more flights.

The feelings towards New Zealand have slowly evolved from the painful memory of my mother on that day to one of excitement and gratitude.  I now envision exploration in Auckland, hikes along the Tongariro, dinners in Wellington, sunbathing in Abel Tasman, kayaking in Milford Sound and bike riding in Queenstown.  More importantly, I envision many wonderful days together with the husband I married on that beautiful day in March. 

We are going to have a trip of a lifetime together.  And with a change of heart, I feel blessed to know it won’t be long now.

Ryan and I have somewhat of an open relationship.  I’ve come to terms with this over the years.  I have competition and I'm okay with this. There are so many other amazing qualities about him.  I don’t want this one little thing to overshadow everything else.   

This is the special Valentine’s Day card Ryan received this morning.   

Dear Ryan,
Words cannot express how much my life has changed since the moment we met.  I didn’t know what true happiness was before you came along.  You have shown me a world I never knew existed.   A world of laughter, love and exploration.

I feel honored you share with me a side you don’t show the rest of the world.  A man who is serious, silly, kind, generous, curious and has an incredible sense of humor.  You take better care of me than I ever thought possible, and I don’t know what I did to deserve someone as incredible as you.   I am and always will be eternally grateful you chose me to share your life with.  

It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been together, your touch still makes me feel as wonderful as it did the moment we met.  The card is true.  You do turn me on.  But what means more to me than anything, and to your wife’s dismay, you rarely turn me off.    

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Love,
Your Laptop"

In the process of understanding adrenal fatigue and establishing my plan for recovery I’ve been researching and reading a lot.  In the initial stages of discovery I made a list.  On the left hand side of the paper I listed all the things that are good for me.  I didn’t just list things I intrinsically know are good for my body and mental health, but I made a list based on the positive physiological feeling I received when I closed my eyes and thought.   Spending time with my family. Exercise.  Sleep.  Yoga.  Eating well.  The dog park.  Writing. Having a clean home…….  The list was 25-30 items long.  After I finished writing all the things good for me I drew a line down the middle of the paper and made a list of the bad things.   Some of them were  obvious and were the counterpart to what is good for me.  No sleep.  Eating crappy food.  Having a messy home. 

Some didn’t have a counterpart....  Saying yes to things I didn’t want to do.  Going, going, going and never having time for myself.  And some of what is bad for me..... is too private to mention on a public forum. 

After I brain dumped all the good and all the bad, I circled the top five on each side of the paper.  The idea is to create a plan to spend more time on the good and minimize and/or eliminate the bad. 

Fortunately, the list of bad things was far smaller than what was good.  But one word seemed to be more powerful than the rest.  When I looked at it I immediately felt the emotional drain.

PHONE.

At some point in time my phone evolved from being a technological tool used for phone calls, to a device that has stolen my time and energy pulling me away from living my life in the here and now.

I could feel the negative emotional and physical response from the hours and hours I spent clicking and refreshing.

It never used to hold so much power over me.  In fact, five or six years ago I had the wherewithal to remove my work email from phone.  I hated the anxious feeling I had every time I saw a work email come through first thing in the morning, right before bed or when I was supposed to be enjoying personal time with my kids.  

I think my relationship with my phone began it's negative downfall when my dad was sick and in the hospital.  I used my phone as a distraction, a way to escape the emotional devastation I felt living in the real world.  I also used my phone as a way to receive support and encouragement from Facebook and texts.  Those words of love and encouragement were my lifeline.  They are still invaluable to me to this day. 

Over the next couple years the more time I spent in the oncology department and the less control I felt in the real world, the pull into a world that was safe and controllable became stronger.  The more sadness and pain I felt due to life’s unfortunate circumstances, I looked for distractions in other people’s stories.  My phone in the last couple years has become one of my appendages.  Watch TV with phone in hand.  Refresh.  Do the dishes, come back to phone.  Refresh.   Lights out, head on pillow.  Refresh.  Wake up in the morning, grab off of nightstand.  Refresh.

The sick feeling I had towards my phone grew and grew.  So when I wrote those five letters on the right hand side of the page I knew I needed to develop a plan to change our relationship with one another.

If it weren't for the handful of applications on my phone I felt add to my life in positive ways, I would have dumped the whole hunk of metal all together.

1.       First and foremost, I need my kids to have immediate access to me day or night. 

2.       The calendar 

3.       My Fitness Pal

4.       Mapping/GPS

5.       Safari when I’m out and about and need to research something

In order to use the phone for the good and not the bad I created a plan to change its role in my life. 

Alarm clock.  I purchased an independent alarm clock.  This involved research and running to four different stores to find one that offered soothing wake up sounds and was not dependent upon my phone.  I purchased this one and I love it!!  http://www.amazon.com/Sony-ICFC1PJ-Alarm-Clock-Radio/dp/B00IEYHMPK

Facebook.   I deleted the app from my phone.  I only check Facebook once a night from my laptop.  I love Facebook for keeping me updated on friends and family.  I still thrive on the emotional support I receive from friends and family through Facebook. The change from constantly looking at my phone to only using Facebook in the evenings from my laptop has felt awesome!

Its home.  I no longer bring my phone with me to the bedroom.  It lives in our family room.  I can’t stress enough how liberating it has been to not check my phone right before bed and first thing in the morning when I wake up.  In fact, I almost forgot to grab it the other day before work.   

Driving.  I know you all will cringe.  I didn’t check it while I was driving, but I would grab it at stop lights and sometimes be one of those annoying people who didn’t notice the light turned green.  It's now locked in the glove box or safely tucked away in my purse.

I cannot adequately describe the positive impact it has had on my physical and emotional state to change  my relationship with this one little device.  I feel like I’m living life in the present and not living it through a cold, rectangle, metal box.

For two weeks I couldn’t wear any makeup. Every. Single. Time. I looked in the mirror I would look at my face and think.....

• Man! I look tired.  I need to get more sleep.  
• The shadows around my eyes look terrible.  Maybe I should drink more water.  
• I have a lot of sunspots. I need to wear more sunscreen.

 (Never mind the negative self-talk. That’s another story for another day.)  

Not wearing any makeup forced me to look at my face with brutal honesty and accept the truths my body was trying to tell me.  One of my favorite quotes from Pheobe on Friends “It’s just like pulling off a Band-Aid.  Just do it really fast and then the wound is exposed.” 

Every day we are programmed to pop a pill to dull our headache.  Chew a tablet to fix the heartburn creeping up in our esophagus.  Apply some ointment to cover up a rash.  Slap on some concealer over the dark circles under our eyes.  Drink a cup of caffeine to get through the day.   We hardly ever pull off the band aid and find out what are causing these things.  We never ask the why!!

I feel like in the last 10 years every time my doctor asked me about my energy level I was at a complete loss how to answer.  For one, I don’t know what’s normal.  I know I wake up tired every morning and once I have my cup of coffee (or two) I feel fine.  I make it until about 2:00 in the afternoon and when I feel my energy sink I grab a snack or take down an energy drink. Never mind the sugar and other little stimulants I have throughout the day that keep me roller coasting all over the energy scale.  I'm tired, but nothing a cup of coffee or two can’t fix.

In the past several weeks, in addition to not wearing any makeup, I have eliminated all the foods that have been an irritant or allergen to my system.  I’ve removed sugar entirely from my diet.  I’ve cut back coffee to 3 times a week (instead of a couple times a day).  By taking my nutrition down to the very basics it has forced me to fairly evaluate my energy level, my bloating, my weight loss/weight gain, my headaches, etc…etc.  It reminds me of the family who shove issue after issue under the carpet, then someone comes along and lifts up the rug.  All the dirty little secrets are exposed.

Without caffeine, without any stimulants, I am flat out exhausted.  I’m sleeping plenty of hours during the right hours of the night.   I’m not eating any processed foods, dairy, wheat, yeast, gluten, eggs, or SUGAR.  I track all my calories and exercise 4-5x per week.  You can imagine my utter disappointment when I stepped on the scale this week and it showed I had gained weight.  I felt like telling her she was a lying bitch.  

Shortly thereafter, I found myself tempted to give up.  When the scale refuses to reflect my efforts I mull and mull over all the possible things I could have done differently.   However, THIS TIME I can say with 99.9% confidence there is nothing I could have done differently to move that number closer to what I had anticipated.

Luckily I have a fantastic doctor and nutritionist who are devoted to helping me feel better. They have been very thorough running bloodwork panels, reviewing my nutrition and to listening to my concerns.  We are now at a point we are considering that my issues could be contributed to Adrenal Fatigue.

Your adrenal glands are the size of walnuts and they sit right above your kidneys.  They are responsible for managing your cortisol levels and other hormones in your body.  Cortisol is released from the adrenal glands every time you are in a stressful situation.   If you are walking in the woods, round a corner and standing in front of you is a big angry bear your adrenal glands will pump cortisol into your system issuing the fight or flight reaction.  The cortisol will give you enough adrenaline to (hopefully) handle the situation appropriately.  If you are continuously under stress from a job, family issues, physical ailments or any other chronically stressful situation your adrenal glands will pump and pump cortisol into your system over and over again until they become fatigued and stop operating the way they are supposed to. 

This will result in a number of symptoms including exhaustion, weight gain, sleeplessness, depression, loss of hair, high or low blood pressure, mental fogginess, poor memory, loss of libido, poor immune system, increase in allergens and food cravings.    With each and every one of these symptoms we have been programmed to pop a pill, drink a shot of caffeine or shove it under the rug and assume this is as good as life gets. 

I’ve been reading and researching Adrenal Fatigue.  In the process of discovery I needed to fill out a questionnaire of my symptoms and then list some past events which could be considered stressful.  

• Stressful job for several years.
• Working full time and attending college in the evenings.
• Taking my finals for graduation in the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital.
• Father passes away.
• Graduate.
• Start new consulting company.
• Mother diagnosed with terminal cancer.  
• Leave consulting gig.
• Plan wedding. 
• Hours upon hours in the oncology wing at the hospital.
• Weeks in the hospice unit.
• Daughter moves out.
  
• Mother passes away.

Just for kicks…throw in a couple medical surgeries here and there over the past few years.

I’m pretty sure if there was a candidate for Adrenal Fatigue I would be the poster child. 

From what I understand there is a whole process to getting your adrenal glands back into a healthy state.  Most of which involves honoring your body with the right nutrition and exercise.  Sleeping.  Laying your head on the pillow by 10:00 pm.  Recognizing and honoring if your body if it is telling you are tired.  Meditation.  Yoga.  Understanding your stressors and your energy robbers. No caffeine and stimulants to trick you.  Taking natural supplements to kick start your adrenal glands back into gear.

I’m still fighting.  I’m not shoving anything under the rug or giving up quite yet.  I’m working on finding answers.... besides the scale being a lying wench who needs to let go of her grudge.