High Five

I am going to go backwards a bit, because I feel like I am leaving out things that are all relevant to my journey, and how I got to the place I am now.  I'm sorry if that makes reading these hard, but a girls' gotta do what a girls' gotta do. 

When I was 8 my grandma was diagnosed with stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma.  If you'd like to get the nitty gritty on that, you can read about it here.  As I said before in my earliest post I was extremely close to my grandparents and this was a beginning of an end for me.  My grandma researched all things cancer and treatment. She decided that eliminating and and all environmental things  she would be giving herself a natural cancer treatment. She went Vegan, cutting out everything that didn't grow from Mother Earth, and did other things like Wheat Grass colonic's and special all natural detox treatment centers, the whole shebang!  When she was diagnosed she was told that she had at most, and at best 6 months left before the cancer would take her life.  She lived three great years after that! 


During this time I ate as she ate, and led a relatively healthy lifestyle since I was with her most of the time.  When she died I was  devastated, the pain you feel in your whole body never really goes away when you loose a loved one, it just becomes a dull ache. 

Everything that I knew in my daily life was gone, and would never be back.  Grandma put me in dance class, had me take piano lessons and once we even took a Clogging class! We had so much fun in that class, and when it was over we would come back to her house, put on some Bluegrass music and dance around the house.  When she was gone....I didn't have those things anymore, and it really wasn't the dance or piano or classes....it was her, I didn't have her anymore. One of our most favorite things to do together was to lay in her bed and she would ask me "Jenny Jo, what would you like to talk about today?" and I would always say...Disneyland.   After she died I remember laying in her bed by myself wanting so badly to have that conversation just one last time.


As an adult, I often think about all of the things I never said to her as a kid, or the things I would do differently.... but don't we all do that?  Once she went to a treatment center in San Diego, and while there she found a street vendor who hand painted leather shoes with amazing scenery and brilliant colors. She bought two pairs of those shoes...one pair for her and one for me.  When she came home and gave me the shoes I thought they were the ugliest shoes I had ever seen and just knew I would be made fun of if I wore them to school. I tried so hard to look pleased and I know she saw the disappointment on my face.  I wore them once when I went out with her and then they sat in the back of my closet until they eventually disappeared. 


I wish I still had those shoes. 


She had gone to a different treatment center, and bought me an outfit  and mailed it to her house so that when we went down to visit her I could wear it for her.  My favorite color is purple and always has been, the outfit was purple with yellow and green flowers printed all over it, it was a small flower print so it made the outfit look really busy. It was a long sleeve button up shirt, with long pants.....did I mention it also had suspenders and a bow tie????? Again I was mortified, I hated that outfit, but I wore it for her once and never touched it again. 


I wish I still had that outfit. 


When I was in junior high, my weight skyrocketed and I was at the heaviest I had ever been at around 190lbs.  I was also about 4'10 so you can imagine I looked like an Oompa Loompa......but I had many friends and was always hanging out with someone. I was happy then, even with my grandma gone.  Guilt set in that I was happy even though grandma was gone and I ate everything in sight.  


Over the summer before I was to enter  high school I went to Arkansas and spent the summer with family.  I had a great time...unfortunately over the summer I developed a nasty rash that would NOT go away and it itched something fierce. It felt like no matter how much, or how hard I scratched the itching NEVER stopped. The rash was on the inside of my arms at the crook of my elbow and went down my forearms until it was almost at my wrists.  It was a living hell.  All day..itching...all night itching....we tried everything to help it, some things like cortisone cream would help for a few days, but then it would come back with a vengeance.





As if it isn't bad enough that I was now a Freshman in high school...the newbie...I had this ugly rash on my arms and face. I can only describe the rash on my face looking like clown make up, that huge red oblong smile thing they paint on....mine was worse.....it was flaky and scabbed and bight red...and itched incessantly.  So what did I do? I ate.....


Thankfully not long after I started school my mom had switched insurance carriers and we promptly got an appointment with a Dermatologist.  I was so excited that day! I wanted this stuff to be gone and forever! When the doctor finally came into the room, he looked at my face, and then down at my arms and with a tone in his voice that said... you idiot, I know exactly what it is he said..."Dear you have Eczema."  One word.... that was it....Eczema.....after living in my hell on earth for months, this guy just walked in and diagnosed me with a 10 second glance!!!! 

I picked up my prescriptions and didn't waste any time using them, and I swear it worked overnight. I woke up the next morning and it was almost all gone, and by the second day I was normal again!  Once my face was back to normal I met some new friends and was on my way to a wonderful high school experience.  My freshman year was a year of firsts for me, my first real crush, subsequently my first real boyfriend ( if that's what you want to call it hahaha) my first and certainly not last heartbreak, first fat insult hurled my way, and the first time I took a walk on the wild side.   I felt like I was having the time of my life. Looking at it from an adult perspective, while some of it was fun....most of it was self medicating, and stupid.  I was on a bullet train headed to Looserville.