Home Sweet (Vegan?) Home

Well, almost vegan. Dennis is trying to figure out his food sensitivities on an elimination diet. He's just eating mangoes, bananas, and plain carved turkey.

I'm HOME!!! After six hours of driving back home with pups in tow (I couldn't believe I could deal with them on my own, especially since I've been in a flare-up. They can be very pushy, stubborn, and overly protective. i.e., lots of barking at strangers because they have trust issues, but they're the sweetest dogs ever. End random sidebar.) I'm back home with my sweetie pants after being apart for 2 weeks. Felt like an eternity. I sometimes can't believe we went 3 years being that far apart and seeing each other once a month, if we were lucky.

Today was Day One of trying to treat my body well. Our fridge is empty, the sink is full of dirty dishes, and the blender has some weird science experiment in it thanks to the fiancé, but he promised to clean that all up tonight. Fingers crossed he can do it without me becoming a nagging wife! Anyway, so today I went to get some dairy-free smoothies from the local juice bar, 3 total. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, yum! I also just had some plain brown rice, quite good. My stomach feels a little bit rumbly. It's probably confused with the sudden switch from eating whatever looked good to a rather strict diet of non-processed, whole foods. On my way to healthy living! Woohoo!!

***UPDATE since last post****

Nope, definitely not vegan! Too hard. Instead, we're just trying to be healthy, which is hard enough. We've integrated green smoothies though and they're here to stay. Our favorite is to blend mango, banana, kale, ice, and water. So good, but the mangoes have to be ripe! I'm not even really veg anymore. I still don't really eat meat that often, but when I do it's organic, free-range. I've never really been a big meat eater anyway. So, that's that!

Burlesque is more!

I really, really want to try burlesque one of these days. It's just so sexy, sensuous, empowering. Emphasizing the "tease" in "striptease." Hot! Maybe I can be as good as Coco Lectric. She is ah-mazing!

Just thinking of the confidence boost tickles me! Teehee! *shimmies away behind feathered fan*

Onward and Upward

Today has not been good. Couldn't sleep last night at all due to pain. It was 6:30am when I finally dozed off for a few hours. I was supposed to meet my mom for lunch before I have to make the 7 hour drive back down to my home with 2 dogs, by myself. She's surprisingly supportive and not making me feel guilty! Yay! I'm just taking this day to rest, stay in bed, and move if I really have to. Having my cattle dogs around me really helps take the edge off; not sure what I'd do without my furry companions' support and love.

As I mentioned in my first post, I went back to school to pursue teaching thinking that I could fix my broken feet before entering the field as an elementary school teacher. However, I was derailed and my feet/legs are more broken than they've ever been. Thanks, Universe! I spent a year trying to find a teaching job, in denial that I wouldn't be able to walk/stand throughout the day and I still could not even find a substitute teaching job. The teaching field is a dead end right now in California, a heavily impacted field with no job openings due to budget cuts and layoffs. The districts use their laid off teachers as substitutes and rehire them the next year.

The last year or so, while looking for other desk jobs in education and sending out a million apps with no response, I was also trying to come to terms with what else I could do. I was working part-time, telecommuting as a transcriptionist for an IT marketing agency. I wasn't very enthusiastic taking up the job, but I needed the money and could work from home. I soon found out that with my fast typing skills and my voyeuristic tendencies, I loved being the fly on the wall in people's conversations, learning new things about the hi-tech world. I met with a fellow colleague for help with my equipment (foot pedal issues) and she was raving about how she just finished school for court reporting, passed the state exam, and was on her way to being a professional court reporter. She told me the pay was fantastic, you work your own hours/schedule if self-employed, and it's a highly in-demand job (probably because it's nearly impossible to pass the state exam!). She's now working part-time while being a new mommy and making the same money as a full-time professional. It piqued my interest and I started researching the idea, shopping around at private trade schools -- way too expensive at $12k per semester, for 4 semesters.

Finally after a year of mulling it over, thinking about the what-if's of court reporting (what if I'm not good at it, what if I can't pass the exam, what if my pain gets in the way of jobs, what if I hate it?...) and mourning the loss of a would-be teaching career, I've taken the step of pushing all of my fears aside and going for it, via community college of course. The transcription colleague, who now offered to be my mentor, said you can get the same education from a JC that you could get from a private school because it all depends on how often you practice your speed-building skills, which is mostly done at home. Practice, practice, practice!! I'll be registering for classes on August 5th.

I'm very excited, motivated, and feel like I have a new lease on life. Purpose! I've come to realize that I can still have a career rather than resign myself to a life of collecting disability (for which I wouldn't even qualify because I wasn't granted the opportunity of working an actual career, therefore, I don't have any salary history). I'm motivated again and eager to learn a whole new world of stenograph machines, shorthand, and other shop-talk terms. I have always been interested in investigative stories and watching court cases play out, so I'm also excited to learn more about law. Also, with court reporting, you're not just limited to the court room; you can also do behind-the-scenes work in the entertainment industry in closed captioning or work in universities, captioning for the hearing impaired. I think I want to tale a similar route of my mentor and be self-employed, working in depositions.

My fear is that I'm thinking too optimistically rather than realistically, just as I did about teaching, and I'll be derailed once again. Although I love learning, I don't love referring to myself as a "professional student." It's a little embarrassing for me already to be 27 and when people ask what I do, having to say, "I'm in school...again." But, alas, I need to build a bridge and get over it, and move on with my life. Onward and upward!

Ah...where to begin...

I guess from the beginning of the pain and the end of what I thought would be a straightforward, clichéd life as a young teacher.

As the end of my collegiate years approached in the Long Beach State journalism program, I quickly awoke to the realization that I would be embarking on the road to becoming a reporter with a grueling schedule and little compensation. With that bitter taste of reality, I felt it necessary to finally be honest with myself about what profession I'd be able to happily pursue in the realm of "real life." As I've always had a knack for working with kids, I played off childhood fantasies of becoming a primary school teacher and decided to just go for it. My parents, staunch advocates of any and all types of higher education, made me an offer I couldn't refuse; come back home to San Jose and they'd pay my way through grad school. My mom, in the stereotypical fashion of a Chinese "Tiger mom", was especially excited over the idea of having a daughter with a master's degree.

Upon moving back home, the pain increased in my severely flat feet (so severely flat they would be considered "deformed" -- yikes!-- in the medical community) and started to affect my knees and hips. Once a month, my left knee cap would randomly become dislocated causing me to fall flat on my face, screaming and twisting with black-out pain. Not fun. I met with a doctor who seemed enthusiastic about my undergoing surgery so that I could be back on my feet, so to speak (pun intended, I couldn't help myself). Ideally, I could go through two major surgeries one foot at a time and recover while getting my master's in education and teaching degree.

Four surgeries and three years later (one additional surgery to take out a screw, another to correct a prior foot surgery gone wrong), I've now been diagnosed (FINALLY!) with CRPS (Complex Regional Pain Syndrome) --formerly known as RSD, Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy --and Fibromyalgia due to the the trauma inflicted on my feet by the surgeries. It took a whole year and a half of doctors -- some looking confused, others talking out of their arses -- mostly because there is very little, if any, research or information on this condition. They would send me around and around in circles -- from the PCP to the neurologist, to the rheumotologist, back to the PCP, then to the pain doctor -- before they knuckled down to try to help me. Unfortunately, because so much time had passed, my RSD has advanced to a point where my foot is now discolored and the skin had thinned out, exposing all sorts of purplish-green veins. Thanks, docs. Everything I've dug up on this disease says that your only hope to prevent the progression of the disease is to start treatment immediately after diagnosis. Mine hasn't been immediate enough, and so far nothing that Kaiser has offered me has worked: physical therapy, sympathetic lumbar nerve blocks, opiate therapy, scar neuromas, cryotherapy, etc.

Inspired by some awesome people in the blogging community (namely, this amazing and strong woman http://prefontaine44.blogspot.com/) and by my perseverant, insistent, and downright annoyingly optimistic yet loving fiancé, Dennis, I'm once again motivated to take charge of my health, especially since the doctors can't work any miracles yet. Starting next week, I'll be, once-again, adopting an anti-inflammatory, dairy-free, meat-free diet (I hesitate to call it vegan since, for one thing, I haven't decided whether to give up organic wild Alaskan salmon and, for another, not sure whether I'm ready to take on such a politically charged stance although I'm all for being cruelty free -- more on this later). The humble part of me wants to say that I will be "attempting" to adopt this diet, but "trying" implies failure and presents opportunity to create excuses.

So cheers! Here's to the beginning of a cleansing, from the inside-out! :)