Last night hubs took lead dinner preparing duties and made chicken parmesan with cauliflower rice.  I may be the only person in the world to feel this way, but I vastly prefer cauliflower rice to regular rice.  I am a huge, huge fan.  And dinner was delicious.

I, however, failed to take any photos or note any cooking methods.  Perhaps this challenge will catch me up earlier than I anticipated.  But I do love having a meal at the end of the day that’s warm, and home-cooked and filling.  I will make a better effort this evening to document!

This morning I ventured to yoga for the first time in nearly three weeks.  My knee injury has been harder for me to deal with than I anticipated.  To be fair, the last injury that really sidelined me was five years ago when I accidentally broke my foot on John & my honeymoon.  That was a pretty tough one.  But memories of the difficulties of being out of commission faded with time.  And that was also in my first year of MS, so everything felt much more confusing and challenging.  That broken foot took nearly four months to heal.  That’s a long time for a hairline fracture.

Back in April when husby encouraged me to get back to yoga and I trepidatiously ventured out to a new studio, it was pretty hard.  I think I sweat nearly a gallon and I smelled terrible and I was fairly certain that I was going to pass out or collapse after sixty minutes of heat, chaturangas & downward facing dogs.  Today was a different kind of hard.  Poses that were never difficult proved nearly impossible.  My heightened awareness of both my knees made my movements slow and labored.  I saw myself in the mirror and felt clunky and puffy (Can you balloon up after merely three weeks of inactivity?  Yes, yes you can).  But strangely, after my awkward triangle poses and extended side angles and my near inability to do a simple warrior one, I finished class feeling better than I did before I went in.  Yoga just does that, I guess.

Getting injured hasn’t just been physically difficult for me.  It has been mental torture.  I’ve wallowed in the frustrations of lack of movement, fear of the increased MS-ness of my body, and slowness with which every task has had to be completed.  When you favor one leg (either consciously or unconsciously) it throws your whole body out of whack so not only does my left knee hurt in uncomfortable ways, but now so does my right knee and both my hips from my strange, labored, limping walk.  I’ve tried to focus on other things ~ writing, cooking, etc etc.  But I get distracted by the disorder of the house and the need to clean (something I haven’t tried because of my lack of fluid movement).  Yoga helped with all that mental clutter, too.  Therapy has been good in so many ways.  But not the calming, meditative way that yoga is helpful.  The feeling of just being on your mat and everything else fading away.  Being present.  Being fully in that moment.  (Sidenote, that sh*t is hard, sometimes.  I feel like my mind never stops – it’s constantly whirring and buzzing with a million thoughts at once).

I want to make a conscious effort to stay positive and stay upbeat as I move through the recovery of my knee.  I want to make sure I am not dipping into depression and putting to much emphasis on having MS.  I think people who say “I might have MS but MS does not have me” are either the healthiest MS people ever or slightly in denial.  I’m okay saying that sometimes, MS does have me.  Sometimes it wins the power struggle and I have a really bad run of days.  Sometimes, pathetically, I feel super duper sorry for myself.  But the trick is to feel those feelings.  Get mad, be sad, wallow.  And then wake up the next day and move forward.  Give MS its space.  Respect its tantrum-throwing, infuriating ways.  But don’t let it control you all the time.

Going to yoga today – if I’m completely honest – was terrifying.  I was so afraid.  Of how it would feel.  Of what I would or wouldn’t be able to do. Of hurting myself again.  Of everything you might think I would be nervous about and so much more.  I was scared I wouldn’t be able to drive home after class.  I was scared of everything.  

But here’s the thing, here’s the trick. I did it anyway.  And that’s what makes the difference.