Abree had a fantastic week last week. She stayed mainly at 0-1 on the pain scale. She also was able to go exploring a new little area on Saturday with Zac and it didn't flare her up at all. We are beyond thrilled at how well she is responding to the therapy!
Her favorite therapy is NMR (can't tell you what it stands for because I have no clue). All I know is the machine works on activating the muscles in the body and teaching the nerves to fire correctly to those muscles, while teaching your to control the response of that muscle. Hopefully I explained that okay. It's a pretty intense therapy and she's sore after it, but she said that is where she finds the most relief from her pain and then stays down the remainder of the day.
She also started PIEZO a couple of weeks ago. It's the therapy focused on breaking down the scar tissue in the body. After her first day she called me telling me how dirty she felt. When I asked why did she feel dirty she said it was because of the amount of swear words that were going off in her head during that specific therapy. I laughed hysterically!! I'm just grateful it is her and not me because mine probably wouldn't have stayed in my head.
On Monday we got all her food sensitivity testing back. It wasn't as bad as we thought it would be but we do have to cut out dairy (which we already follow), eggs, gluten, chicken, beef, pork, black beans, and gluten. I'm really worried about how we are going to get all her protein and iron in for her. We did find out she is pretty iron deficient and if we can't get the numbers up they will do an iron infusion to help. So today we started the fun search of recipes and new foods. If anyone has any fun recipes along that follow these diet restrictions please send them our way. We need all the help we can get.
I was able to come back out this past Sunday to do the switch with Zac. I was excited to come back and be here with Abree and see all our new friends we've made at the clinic, but it was hard for me to leave my other children again and even harder not to spend time with Zac. The weight of being away has fallen back on my shoulders and it made for an extremely hard day yesterday. My anxiety was high, my exhaustion uncontrollable and my emotions everywhere. Let's just say I wasn't pleasant to be around. But I'm trying to stay focused on the fact that we are a month into this and we only have 8 more weeks to go (hopefully nothing changes).
As I sat in the clinic with Abree yesterday, meeting a lot of new friends (you wouldn't think so much could change in 3 weeks but it does); the common response I got when I told people I was Abree's mom was that "Oh she's the one with the beautiful smile!" or "Ah yes, the one who brings light into the room." After being gone for 3 weeks and always worried about how she was doing, I couldn't have asked for a better response. Not only were my worries about her lifted, but the feeling of knowing how much she is helping people with her smile once again helped me in my hard moment.
As we all go through our "hard moments" or moments that aren't going the way we want, remember to smile. There is so much power in a smile! When we truly smile we forgot about our own worries and life actually seems good for the moment. But a smile can also uplift, strengthen and bring hope to someone else.
Abree has no clue the amount of lives she is blessing by going into the clinic and smiling each day, but those patients who need that smile or clinging to it. Everyone knows who she is because she has learned to smile during something hard in her life. She is learning to smile even when she has a flare up (which she is in one today). But she doesn't complain. She smiles genuinely at those around her and accomplishes what she knows she has to do that day.
I'm feeling so blessed at her example! She is teaching me to stop having the pity parties and pull my crap together (haha!). I need to remember to smile, and genuinely smile, on the hard days; accomplish what I need to accomplish and keep moving forward!
A few pictures from the week:
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