After.......Happily Ever After

What happens after Happily Ever After?  It's a good question, a question that has been on my mind since flipping through the pages of The Art of Frozen II.  Yes, Frozen 2 is my new favorite Disney movie, and yes I'm a geek and bought the book "The Art of Frozen II", haha!  I didn't buy it just because I loved the movie, but I am also fascinated by all of the behind the scenes stuff of great movies!  In this book there is a page that says "After.....Happily Ever After".  The creators of the movie posed the question "What happens after Happily Ever After?"  This was their starting point for Frozen 2.  Since studying that page and having that question sitting on the back burner of my mind I have thought about my own life and just this past year.  Many funny thoughts have come to mind like when my husband asks if I want to go out and all I can say is "I want my bed".  When we were dating we would stay up all night long if it meant we could see each other for just an hour that night.  A common phrase of my husband's is "Yup, we're married!"  said in a sarcastic or maybe a disappointing tone, haha!  It has become an inside joke of ours!  When the day comes that you want your bed more than your honey, you are officially past the honeymoon stage of marriage, haha!

As in Frozen 2, life happens after Happily Ever After.  There will probably be many Happily Ever Afters in our lives, but then things can't and don't always stay that way.  Happily Ever After did not erase the death of Elsa and Anna's parents or the insecurities and doubts they had in their lives.  It did not erase their responsibilities and the difficulties of life.  This is probably one reason this movie is so popular, the characters are so realistic and their trials are realistic and relatable.  It shows that even if you have a Happily Ever After that not everything is perfect and happy!

Some of you might think that the year 2019 was great, maybe you had a Happily Ever After during that year.  Some of you probably couldn't wait for 2019 to end, maybe it was a horrible year.  I always see mixed reviews about the new year on social media.  The popular saying is "2020 will be my year!"  Well I can tell you one thing, 2020 has not been my year and February is not quite over yet!  I would not classify my 2019 year as a Happily Ever After, but you know, it wasn't too bad, I can't complain.  I reached some of my financial goals, I was healthy, my family was healthy, it was a pretty good year.  I know I'm not the only one who started 2020 with disaster, disappointment, or difficulty.  Upon going to my routine chiropractic visit, my chiropractor was afraid to ask how the new year was.  He said all morning he had been hearing dreadful stories, basements flooding, houses robbed, cars breaking down, car accidents and then there was my news.  I was honestly afraid to tell him, I wasn't sure how much more bad news the poor guy could take especially in the wake of his good news.  His wife is pregnant!  He said he didn't think he would be ready for it.  I told him to not bother about worrying over that because he would never be ready, haha!

The start of each new year for the past 3 years has presented some new trial for me, always beginning in January or February.  About 3 years ago I had my first UTI and let me tell you, in my opinion, birthing my children without pain meds was less painful.  The infection went into my kidneys and it hurt so bad I could not walk.  Luckily it was only one evening and of course it was my work week.  Two years ago I had terrible ear infections that lasted through the beginning of April and I thought I was losing my hearing.  The infections came back in June and I went to the ear doctor and found that my hearing was fine.  Last year I developed some pretty horrible anxieties.  These anxieties, in part, stemmed from the previous two years of events, I was starting to see a pattern!  I had major anxiety after developing my second migraine with Aura in 2 months.  Over the previous 4 years I averaged 1 per year and they were about a year apart, and now I had experienced 2 in 2 months.  This was very scary for me.  These migraines are paralyzing.  I avoided going to the hospital because these are often misdiagnosed as epilepsy or stroke.  Again, the pain, worse than birthing children unmedicated!  I have had a history of migraines since I was very young and had read that they can develop into migraines with aura.  My childhood doctor always reassured me that I would grow out of it.  It seemed that I did for a time, grow out of them.  As I grew older I had less of them, but as I grew older they started morphing into the aura kind.  The first time I had an aura migraine I thought I was having a stroke, but quickly realized all signs of stroke were not present and then the exploding pain in my head took root!

As a young child I went on a little journey with my doctor trying to answer the question, Why?  What was causing these migraines?  I had a CAT Scan, I had many blood tests and the worst case scenario that they worried about was ruled out, a brain tumor.  A few years later it was discovered that my father had a brain tumor.  He first went to doctors when he started losing vision in one of his eyes.  They found a pituitary tumor growing rapidly and starting to invade his optic nerve causing vision loss.  He had to undergo brain surgery to remove all of the tumor.  Luckily it was not malignant.  After learning that this kind of tumor could be hereditary and shows up in women more often than men, it has always been a worry.  Not only that, but this kind of tumor could slowly grow over your entire life without being detected, or it could grow slow and then fast, or just rapid.  After having 2 aura migraines in two months and then learning of the death of one of my older sister's school mates due to an aneurysm, I was freaked out and I went straight into uncontrollable worry mode, I was probably over dramatic!  When something does not feel right I automatically start thinking about the worst, cancer, tumors, life threatening disease and so on.  I started thinking about how hard it would be to die and leave my family, or not be able to work anymore.  I started thinking about all of the what ifs and how I might handle every possible situation.  This kind of thinking was very real for me as a young girl when saying goodbye to my dad as he went to San Francisco to undergo his surgery.  What if he didn't come back?

So, at the counsel of many family and friends I drug myself reluctantly, in my own version of kicking and screaming, to the doctor.  My doctor is a nice man and I like him just fine, but I don't go to the doctor unless I feel I need to.  I have routine personal health profiles done at work as part of a discount program for my insurance so that covers all the basis.  Other than that I don't usually feel a need to go to doctors.  So, I went into the doctor's office after having no sleep the night before and my blood pressure soaring.  My main question to him was "do you think I should have a CAT Scan?"  After having a very calming discussion he determined one of my triggers was stress, I had been stressed. I decided not to have the CAT Scan unless I experienced other symptoms that were not normal.  After all I had a long history of migraines and the doctor reassured me that that was probably all that was going on, but he did not want to dismiss my worried notions.  He said he would get me into a CAT scan whenever I gave the word.

The beginning of 2020 I had hope that nothing bad would happen, I was a new woman!  That notion was dashed to pieces on the day after New Years.  I woke up in the wee hours of the morning to go to work and sure enough I had a swollen gland and a nice fat lip.  What did that fat lip turn into?  A cold sore, and you guessed it, my first cold sore ever!  I thought, "this isn't so bad, I can deal with this, how bad can it be.......Right?" My husband gets them, but he had not had one recently.  I have made it 8 years being married to him without getting one myself, not bad.  Well it was bad, way worse than I could have imagined!  Besides feeling like I had a new friend taking up residence on my face, a toxic one for that matter with the inflamed, gushing puss, and not to mention the PAIN, I was pretty sick too.  Every time I ate I was sick to my stomach, almost nauseous.  Did I mention I was working?  Yes so the second day of a seven day work week, I was incredibly sick.  I was practically living on ibuprofen just so I could sleep at night and get through the work day without too much pain.  Okay so that cleared up in a little over a week, not so bad in hindsight, but not great either.  I definitely never want another one of those again.

After that my kids get sick!  Okay not so great, but not so bad, we've been through this before, we've had a lot of experience playing "who can catch the puke first?", and survived.  It started with my son.  He developed a low grade fever one night and was up all night throwing up.  I had given him medicine a few times to get the fever down, but eventually he could not keep anything down so I stopped trying with the medicine.  After staying up with him all night I had to go to our homeschool co op to teach my daughters class.  My son was doing okay, he was sleeping and his fever was steady at 100 degrees and had been all night.  I left him with my husband and took my daughter to co op. About a half hour after I left his fever spiked and he had a febrile seizure.  Not knowing what it was my husband had honestly thought for a moment that he had died.  He had stopped breathing at one point.  He knew I could not get home fast enough to be of any help so he called our neighbor to help take him to the hospital, but she was out of town and advised him to call 911.  He called 911 and the fire dept. showed up and was able to get my son to come out of the seizure.  That had all of us shook up for the next several days.  Just having the thought that one of your children might have died was emotionally straining.  My husband took work off and we just all tried to deal with the emotional aftermath of that event.

Later that night we prepared to take our son to the emergency room because his fever had spiked again right after the tylenol wore off and we could not get him to drink anything.  My husband finally got him to drink some fluids after offering him a $2 bill.  We were able to give him some more medicine and he slept for some of the night.  Luckily I was home that week and I just stayed by my children for the next three days.  I can now say I have seen every episode of Paw Patrol and Peppa Pig about 5 times over, and I'm pretty sure I gained 2 pounds during those 3 days just hanging around the house. My son slept most of the nights and days following.  When you have a seizure it's like doing a full day of hard work or labor in about 2 minutes and it exhausts you.  My daughter got sick the next day and had a fever for 2 days.  She slept through most of those two days. When my son started feeling better all he wanted to do was go to the store and get some ice cream.  After having an experience like that you feel ready and willing to do or give anything to your child because you are so grateful they are still here.  So we went to the store and got ice cream and a gift for Lucy since she was feeling so awful.

I've begun to think that I'm cursed or something.  Why does my immune system decide to take such a horrific nose dive every new year's?  Why does it always seem to happen right on or after new year's?  I don't know.  I start asking "Why me?" or "Why does this have to happen now?"  I know, I know, I've been taught my entire life to not ask the question "Why me"?  Instead of asking that think about how good you have.  Think about how blessed you are and be grateful for what you have.  In the middle of asking the "Why me?" or "Why now?" I find myself thinking of all of the terrible things that could have happened, but didn't and I find peace in the gratitude.  When I talk to people I work with I have often times found myself feeling foolish ranting about my problems when the other person is dealing with something much worse.  One thing I have always thought wise to remember is that if you were in a room with a bunch of random people and you put your problems out there in hopes you could trade trials with someone else, you would usually choose to take your own back.  That is the truth.  There are so many out there that suffer much more than I do.  Many of my trials seem of little significance when compared to the magnitude of other people's trials.

To add a little perspective, each of us have different trials ranging in levels of difficulty, but each of us are also very different.  We all have different strengths and weaknesses.  What is hard for me might not be hard for someone else and what may be difficult for someone else may be easy for me.  I believe our trials are personalized just for us, meaning there may be specific lessons in those trials that only that person can learn or needs to learn.  I can look back on many of my trials and admit that I learned something very valuable from each trial and in turn they were really blessings.  I think we learn important things about ourselves that we never knew before when we are faced with adversities.  We learn how our reactions will play out and it might not be the same as we hoped or thought when previously pondering on a "What if".  We learn about our weaknesses and where we can improve.  We learn about our strength when we reach the end of a trial that we never thought survival a possibility.

One thing that has always helped me in my trials is to ask "what am I supposed to learn?" or "how can this help me grow?" Why do I have so many trials of a physical pain kind?  Sometimes I think maybe it's preparing me to one day die slowly in a lot of pain, I know...... negative and morbid.  On the other hand I think it is supposed to remind me when I need to slow down, that I don't have to do everything, that I'm not invincible.  It is to help me ask for help, which is something I don't do.  It helps me have compassion for others with similar trials.  These physical trials have forced me to look beyond the regular options that doctors provide and has helped me take control of the pain in a different way.  It has helped me to eat better, pay attention to what I put in my body.  It has helped me live the word of wisdom better.  Some of these physical pain trials have lead me to the healthiest years of my life by ingraining a desire in me to find my own answers.  I also think these physical trials have been a spiritual journey.  It has helped me understand more about the Atonement of Jesus Christ.  Physical, emotional, and mental pains fall under it's safe umbrella.  I have felt the healing power of the Atonement through these different trials of pain.

Trials can be really hard, but they can make us better people if we let them!  There is always light at the end of the tunnel and the potential for more "Happily Ever Afters"!  Maybe the trial is the "Happily Ever After".  "Happily Ever After" lies within the trial or is a result of a trial in many cases!