[blessedbreasts]

I've been very stressed out lately. I have a pretty stressful life in general (which I'm sure is hampering my progress; it's certainly hampering any chance I have at attaining nice skin), but this past week was extra stressful. I've barely had time to relax properly. I tried to take a nap one day, and I wound up having to take a phone call. Also, yesterday was a hard, very bad day. It started terribly and I wound up feeling really drained and depressed.

I hope my life will change for the better in the near future.

Couldn't find a hot water bottle locally, so I'll order one from Amazon after all.

I'm really looking forward to taking spearmint. I'm getting more and more excited at the prospect of dabbling with herbs. Maybe if I like spearmint, I'll consider adding other herbs.

Why the stress bb? No worries if its personal but we are happy for you to vent!!!

Yes In an ideal world id like to try cecis pm and spearmint plan. She has my goal boobies.

Oh Ella, it's not so much personal as it is a long story.

I'll try to shorten it. Basically my mom has been sickly as long as I've known her. Not "gets colds often" sickly, but "regularly winds up in the hospital for days because it's that critical" sickly (my mom's had it all, heart failure, questions of cancer, surgery). She's given us all kinds of scares. At the end of 2012, she gave us the worst yet and nearly died because her brain stem bled because of a super rare stroke. The doctors and nurses gave us no hope, and it's honestly only the hand of God that kept her alive because the professionals couldn't do anything for her (one neurologist even told me how to basically mercy kill her! I can't tell you how damaged that left me). When she miraculously survived, she still couldn't do a thing, and I'm not exaggerating. She was hooked up to so many machines that a family friend said that her hospital room looked like a cockpit, and at one point all she did was lie there, unblinking, and drool. It was so terrifying and disturbing to see her like that. It really did look hopeless and like the doctors and therapists were right.

She eventually started bleeding internally, and I think a lot of people thought that would be the end. For some reason, though, that seemed to reset everything, and after the bleeding stopped on its own and they found the source and put a metal clip on it so it wouldn't happen again, all of a sudden she started getting better. Over the course of a few weeks, she started blinking and looking directly at people and following them with her eyes, started moving her mouth and fighting to communicate, started getting finger movement, then full hand movement, then arm movement, started being able to swallow, and on and on... she is now completely in her right mind, talking, eating, walking with a walker, and recovering more and more everyday! We're all so grateful to God, because the few people who have a stroke like hers and survive just don't recover the things she's recovered and continues to recover.

The problem is, she's in a lot of pain because of her nerves and feeling all coming back to life, and she's stuck in the house, unable to do hardly anything for herself. My father and I take care of her. I've had to take over the cooking and keeping of the house on top of caring for her like a child and trying to carry on with the responsibilities my own life.

What's worse is she occasionally has meltdowns where she sobs and needs to vent about how miserable she actually is because of the discomfort and how hopeless it all seems. And she says all these terrible things about herself, which is absolutely heartbreaking because she's so so so precious and lovely. One of those meltdowns happened yesterday morning and it basically set the tone for my day, which was already stressful enough because my schedule has been more jam-packed than usual and I've had to do some out-of-the-ordinary things. I can usually deal with it better, but on top of how stressed out and busy I've been, it was too much.

It's just tough.

Sorry for how long this is!