The Annual Month of Gratitude.....

It is, amazingly enough, November again.  I'm not sure how it happens so rapidly.  Eight years of November blogging.

I'm not promising daily posts. Clearly I can't, since I already missed the first two days LOL.  But since I did miss two days, here are the three first, most important things I can think of that I am grateful for so far this month:

1) I am not blogging this from a hospital. In 2012 we descended into headache hell and had it cross paths with sepsis hell and ended up in CHOP for a week. This post does not do justice to the level of desperation I recall from this day: In An Old House In Paris. (Start here if you want to see the whole week; Fever and Toxic Waste) This is what I talk about when Babygirl and I represent Make A Wish at events:  The knowledge that we were going to go and see Paris gave me something to give her to hold onto that long, long night. I can't even type it without tears of gratitude to those wonderful Wish Granters.

2) Although Babygirl still has her headaches, far too frequently for my taste (or hers), there is yet another new class of medication out there for migraine prevention that may help her.  We'll be talking to neurology next month.

3) I had nothing but good news from my own doctor at my visit this week. My sugars were higher than I liked, and my weight had been 'stuck' for quite a while before my last visit, and so I finally asked for a weight loss drug. My doc thought it was a good idea, but my insurance thought I wasn't fat enough to actually need it. THAT was eye-opening, so I kicked the exercise up a notch and added an extra mile to my morning walks. You know, I weigh myself every day, and check my sugar, but was pretty convinced that I was doing poorly on both counts.  Turns out my testing supplies are outdated, but my scale is pretty accurate. My sugars are good, and my weight is down an additional 10 pounds this year, bringing the total weight loss to 90 pounds in the past 12 years. (Well, truth be told, I've probably lost about 184 pounds, because if you lose 5, gain 3, lose 5, gain 10, well.... you get the idea. The struggle is real.) It was heart-lifting in a year of struggle. Right now I have dropped from "morbidly obese" through "obese " to "overweight," but I weigh now about what I did going into high school. The goal is to weigh what I did coming OUT of high school, which, since I am an inch shorter than I was then, will still leave me "overweight" from a medical standpoint, but I think a 115 pound weight loss goal seems reasonable.  But it's not about the pant size. It's about making an effort to be there for Babygirl.

DeeDee