How I got here. Part 3.

After I went back on the Betaseron and we officially quit trying to add another baby to our family, I tried to get on with my life.

I started blogging, I took the kids to the park and to play dates, I made lunches and did laundry.  Life went on as scheduled.

The kids eventually finished preschool and started elementary school.  Panicked at the thought of being home all day alone for 7 hours with nothing to do, I got a job as a preschool assistant teacher.

And I hated every minute of that.  Hated it. The kids were unruly.  The teacher I worked with was a free spirit (which is exactly the opposite of me) and the class was just a madhouse. I wanted to quit, but I'm not a quitter so I stuck it out and made it through the school year before I happily resigned.

7 hours at home alone all day didn't sound so bad at this point.  I started running, continued my blogging and in general just tried to calm the voices in my head.

I loved my little family of four but honestly, it felt like we were missing someone. I felt like we were supposed to have another baby but that just seemed out of the question with my medical problems.

I read a lot of blogs on adoption and wondered if perhaps God was calling us to adopt. I prayed a lot about adooption but I never felt a real peace about it.  And then I wondered if perhaps I was supposed to adopt without the feeling of peace and just trust God.  I went back and forth on this, praying about it all the time.

And the feelings of peace never came. The feeling that our family was incomplete was still there. The more blogs I read about adoption, the more I realized that the people who adopt have strong feelings about taking care of these helpless kids.  It's more than just filling a hole in their family, it was a strong desire to spend any amount of money, do whatever it takes, fill out mounds of paperwork, make multiple trips to another country and jump through all sorts of beauracratic hoops to rescue a child.

And (as selfish as it sounds) I did not feel like we were called to do that.  It just didn't feel right.

So I continued on my medication, I continued struggling with these feelings of having an incomplete family and we kept on living our lives.

And all this time, I continued to have the spells of pain and dizziness.  There would be times when I would go a week or two with no pain and I would think that the healing I had been praying so fervently for had finally come.  And then they would start back up again.

I likened myself to the apostle Paul (...Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 2 Corinthians 12:7)  It was during these times that I claimed my life verse: 


Heal me, Lord, and I will be healed;
    save me and I will be saved,
    for you are the one I praise. - Jeremiah 17:14

I prayed this scripture thousands of times while searing pain was shooting through my shoulder. And they pain would always eventually subside.  But it also always came back.

Through the years came to realize that this pain brought me closer to God.  I learned that I could not make it through one day without him by my side and I'm convinced I would still be trying to do things on my own if it wasn't for this pain.

This summer, right as Sarah turned nine and I realized that I had been suffering with this pain for 9 years, the pain seemed to go away.  I spent almost the entire summer pain free.  I was still taking the Carbatrol and Lyrica but I felt like  this relapse had finally run it's course.

I also stopped taking the Betaseron shots and switched to a new oral medication called Tecfidera.  This was such a blessing to me.  No more shots! I could take a pill twice a day with the same effectiveness of the shots.  That alone was an answered prayer! But to have the pain gone too?  I didn't want to get too excited (because one of the major characteristics of MS is it's unpredictability) but I felt better than I had in years!

Life was good.