Putting insomnia to good use!

Fibromyalgia, angina, spinal problems, muscle pain and neuropathy often vie for first place in keeping me awake at night.

It often starts with a trip to the bathroom and ends with insomnia raising its ugly head. You know the noises of bird calls in the night, a train tooting in the distance or the barking of a dog, you hear them all and they are the loneliest sounds...

I have found a way of replacing that lonely feeling with making my mind bring to remembrance prayer requests and anxieties of the past and coming new day. 

Laying in bed, I meditate on the LORD and force my body to lay in a restful position as I often eventually fall asleep mid prayer.

Where once I would stress out because I thought it rude to zone out on God, but I now have come to see that He blesses us with sleep and is therefore pleased when I succumb to my tiredness.

What can be a lonely time can be redeemed by praying blanket prayers. It's comforting to know that we can put insomnia to good use! 

Is a little compassion too much to ask for?

 It is so difficult to adjust to a new normal after a diagnosis. After many years of wondering why I had all over pain and tiredness, I finally got a diagnosis of fibromyalgia.

I was relieved that I had a name to put to the painful syndrome that sucked the life out of me and added to my woes as a sufferer of angina, arthritis and back pain. And polymyalgia rheumatica thrown into the mix.

It made sense that with all these ailments, I would be finding it more difficult, or even impossible to do the chores that after a lifetime of being a wife and mother, were familiar and regular as the rising and setting of the sun.

With the newest diagnosis, came a depression because not only was I totally frustrated with having to constantly adjust to my new normal, but I was not afforded much compassion or understanding from others.

It was intimated, but not said, that I was lazy and using ill health as an excuse to be lazy. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was laid low emotionally as well as physically.

These days, it is rare to find someone who is compassionate for the chronically ill and/or aged. And it compounds the frustration and anger one can feel as one goes through the cycles of grief with a new diagnosis that limits one further.

I know a little understanding from others would go a long way to help me adjust and accept it every time I am faced with a new normal. 

Sadly, not only do most people now not want to listen about chronic illness, but they don't want to know. 

It's not a hard thing to commiserate with the trampled flower bowing under the weight of pain and illness and later, stigma. 

We don't necessarily ask for help from others, but is a little compassion too much to ask for?