Today has been an okay day.  I have been keeping myself very busy.  I have pushed myself to keep busy, even though I have physically felt awful.  The physical symptoms I can deal with.  I can sit and rest.  I can take pain meds.  I can distract myself with stupid mindless games on facebook.  The emotional stuff can be tough, though.  I have a hard time turning off my brain.  There aren't meds to make that stuff go away.  Well, there are, but they are either illegal or I don't have a prescription for them.

To my true friends, the people who have been there for me and supported me from day one of this whole crappy ordeal...  I appreciate each and every one of you.  Most of all, I just want to say thank you for still being there.  Thank you for realizing that I am going through a rough patch right now and I might not be myself.  I might not be the same kind, happy person I was before all of this started.  But I will return to that.  I am returning to that, slowly but surely.  My true friends know that I have been having a hard time dealing with the changes in my life so I may say things out of anger, frustration, sadness, or just because I am crying out for support.

I am so thankful that I have friends who may not truly understand what I'm going through, but they try.  They are there for me.  I just want to say thank you to Jenn, Donna, Dawn, Kerri, Michelle, Jane, my mom and my best friend of all, Chris.  You have all dealt with me being crabby for the last year and understood why I have been that way.  You have all been an excellent support system.  I don't know what I would do without you all.

On another note...  I was trolling the forums on dinet.org (the dysautonomia website) today and I found a thread that was just started yesterday by someone asking everyone if they are able to work and if people had to change careers.  It was so interesting what the responses were.  Six out of the fifteen who responded are nurses!  Like I said, interesting.  Someone had brought up that maybe so many of us are nurses because it's so hard to get a diagnosis of dysautonomia, so it takes someone who's in the medical field to push through all of the bullshit. 

After I posted my response, I received a very nice message from one of the nurses on the forum (let's call her Susie, until she wants to make herself known).  She really helped because she made me feel like I'm not alone.  She was a PACU nurse when she started getting sick.  Susie went through the same thing with her coworkers in that she didn't get support from people who she thought were her friends. 

I would like to share something that Susie said to me, because through my emotions and my brain fog, I couldn't say it as well.  "Nursing is a career that really defines the person who is good at it. It wasn't just something that I did, it was who I was." - anonymous (unless she wants to claim it :-)

I felt like I was good at nursing.  It wasn't something that I did, it was who I was.

I was also a mother, a wife, and a runner.  At this time, I am not a nurse.  I am not a runner.  I am still a mother, but not the kind I would like to be.

I wanted to use Susie's quote to help you all understand a little more why I was so bothered by the interaction I had yesterday.

I will leave you with a picture of me at work...