Struggle Street

I wanted to write another entry and update everyone whose been so nice with showing their concern for my health the last couple of weeks, and have offered many prayers, and kind words. I really appreciate all of you. As of today my boil is about a quarter of the depth and width that it was last week this time, which is amazing. It's slowly and surely filling (that sounds so gross I know) and soon it will close up and be but a memory. I'll kind of miss the boil, not gonna lie. It's become a close part of me ;) Honestly I've had some good laughs having this boil, not to mention the celebrity status its given me. This island is small, and news about people apparently travels very fast. People I've never even met have come up and asked me how I'm feeling and wished me well. Even weirder than that though are the two people that literally stopped me on the street and asked if I was the "chick with the boil" and then one of the people actually asked if they could see it. Caught slightly off guard, I showed him, and he gagged. It was way too funny. I came home and knew I HAD to tell someone what had just happened. I logged onto my skype to see who was online to IM (skype is like my main way of communication with everyone within the island--if you don't have skype, you're out of the loop) and my friend Matt was on. I told him I was interrupting his studying for a funny story, after telling him what happened we decided if this were to ever happen again that I should start making up bogus stories about the boil just to gross people out even more. Like how the boil tastes awesome and ask them if they want to try, or tell them its weird a parasite didn't crawl out of the boil when I showed them, because that usually happens when I open the bandage, gross mean things like that. After a long hypothetical conversation we decided I should probably get a memorial statue put up at the med school here of me holding up my shirt slightly to expose the famous boil. It was funny. You HAVE to have fun with things like this. Other than my boil my only problem is my skin. I'm basically a reptile.

Apparently with a staph infection the skin needs to exfoliate, and it does this just by shedding off. So the top layer of skin on my hands is completely gone, and since so much moisture leaves the body through your hands, the rest of my skin is INCREDIBLY dry. If I scratch myself, skin peels off. I also learned that my tongue shed a layer as well which explained A LOT because my tongue feels WEIRD. It had all these weird spots on it and then the next day the texture of it felt completely different, and now stuff tastes all funky to me. It's an adjustment, and I'm hoping it goes away soon, same thing with my skin issues. The doctor just said to avoid soap which dries skin so badly (aka I have an excuse to not shower often-score) and to use LOTS of lotion. I'm officially putting lotion on every twenty minutes, its intense. Another beneficial treatment for my skin AND my boil is to swim in the ocean. I had a conversation with my doctor that went something like this: Doctor: Go swimming in the ocean, the salt water is excellent for your hands and for your boil Me: Won't that sting? Doctor: Oh yes, it will sting VERY badly. Now gladly into the sea you go. So that day I did just that, swam in the ocean. My friend Katie watched me from the stairs and oh my gosh it stung far worse than I could have imagined. It was like pouring hydrogen peroxide on an infected wound but adding that to getting hit by an army tank or something. I felt like I could feel all of my skin sizzling and I was just waiting for it to fall off. Honestly the hardest thing about this all has been my mental state. I feel like I'm always on the verge of tears. My peeling hands are so ugly and embarrassing that I don't like to even leave the apartment. I have had a lot of breakdowns where I literally just stare at my hands and start crying. This morning was a bad meltdown because my new layer of skin on my hands that just started coming in is now peeling off as well, and I was feeling so discouraged. My sister Cari just cried with me because neither of us know what to do. My perspective gets so skewed, and too frequently. Today my nephew said "some people don't have hands, just be grateful you do." and it was like a slap in the face. Definitely not what you want to hear minutes after bawling because your hands are freaking you out, but I had to just be quiet and not say anything because I knew it was true. Every time that I'm feeling bad about myself because my hands are peeling, and food tastes weird I go online and read a medical study where someone who had a staph infection didn't survive, and I have to consciously remind myself of how lucky I am that not only am I alive after being septic and having that infection in my blood for so long, but that its healing, and my antibiotics worked, and that this whole situation could have been so much worse. I set out this weekend to try and have a better general attitude towards it all. After this mornings freak out crying hysteria I knew I needed to change my attitude and be grateful for what I have, and where I am, and for my family here that's taking care of me. Every six months my church has a conference where all of our leaders meet in Utah and they give talks, and its broadcasted via satellite and the internet all over the world. I went to my sisters school this afternoon to watch both sessions. Normally conference weekend has been an excuse to sleep at home while it streamed on the tv and it was a break from a normal sunday at church, but this week I was depressed, and I needed something uplifting. This weekend is also the birthday of my late sister Amy and that was also getting to me, and I realized how incredibly much I missed my mom, and my family during this weekend, and during my being so sad lately. Conference was AMAZING. There were so many talks about trials and how the biggest part of them are how we endure them, and that they're tests from our Heavenly Father, and he uses trials to shape and refine us. They spoke of people whose misfortunes make mine look tiny and pathetic. This weekend I couldn't help but think of my sister, Amy, and how much she was struggling her last couple weeks before she died from brain cancer. How she couldn't turn over because it was too painful, and she was too weak, how she had to have ziploc bags put over her eyes to seal in moisture because she couldn't blink, how she lost motor function in her face and it was paralyzed and she was no longer able to talk, and the most amazing thing was how she bore it all. Without complaint. Thinking of this today made me feel awful for ever complaining, and I couldn't control my emotions and I just started to cry. I'm so grateful to be alive and well, and I'm grateful to be living in the Caribbean islands with my family, and to have met so many awesome people and had so many amazing experiences, and even though I've been afflicted with this sickness, I know that its for my experience and for my good. Thank you to everyone who's praying for me, and thinking of me. I appreciate every single thought and prayer. I've been so blessed to have the friends and the family that I do.