Tea

Well, I am trying to think of something interesting to blog about.  I always look forward to reading my friend, Sandra's blog.  She always has the cutest things on there and her life always sounds like such fun.  I can't wait till I have a home of my own that I can be creative with.  I keep seeing ideas all over the place that I would like to do, but have no home to decorate them with.  Hopefully soon!

In the meantime, I will spend the day enjoying some Green Tea Goji Berry with Agave nectar sweetener and reading a mystery novel on my Nook.  Hope you enjoy your day too!

Blood Work

Well, I got my blood work back finally.  My liver enzymes have come down, but they are not back to normal yet.  The doctor believes that it is a result of Celiacs.  This is actually good, because we don't have to look for anything else.  While I am definitely getting better, we still do not know when we will get to leave.

Busy Days

This week has been quite a busy one.  Wednesday morning, bright and early, I went to have my blood work done at the hospital.  That afternoon I went to lunch with my favorite friend, Sandra, at the Swanson. The food was delicious, but the fellowship was even better.  Thursday, yesterday, Andrew and I went to Jeff Davis Co., GA for him to take some pictures of their new Middle School that my Dad designed.  They have been in school for just a week now and are loving their facility.  The principal walked around the school with us the entire time Andrew was taking pictures and it was written all over his face how much he loved the new building.  Andrew of course took some amazing pictures which I am sure they will love.

The best part about this trip was lunch!  We went to a famous local steakhouse in south Georgia around that area called Benton Lee's.  It was way back down some country roads and right on the river.  Their menu consisted of a plethora of steak options as well as gator nuggets and frog legs.  According to my Dad, when you order your steak, they go in the back to the freezer, take out the meat and cut off your steak and cook it.  But since my Dad has been, the place burned down and they have rebuilt it so he does not know if that is still the way they do things or not.  But regardless, their steak was amazing!  They had by far the biggest steaks I have ever seen:

I got the "kid's meal"

Andrew got the Medium T-Bone

Their plates were not even really plates, but rather metal trays!  It was ridiculous, but delicious!  We enjoyed the leftovers from this meal today for lunch.  Tonight is my nephew, Zeke's, 2nd Birthday party.  My sister, Carrie, came over early this morning and has been here all day setting things up for the swim/BBQ party tonight.  I am so excited, Andrew and I got Zeke a little red tricycle! I'm sure he will have no clue how to use it, but I always loved our tricycle growing up.

In the meantime today I have been anxiously awaiting a call from the Doctor's office about the results from my blood work.  I went in first thing Wednesday morning and figured that for sure by Friday they would have gotten the results and contacted me.  Every time the phone rings my heart skips a beat, and then when I see it's not them it drops.  I kinda feel like that stalker girl that a guy went on a date with...he didn't have that good of a time but she keeps calling him and waiting for him to call.  I mean, I've only called three times, about to be four.  The least they can do is call me back before the weekend, even if it is to tell me that they don't know anything yet.  Ahh!!  I want to know :)

One Week

One week from yesterday I go back in to the "blood bank" as I am now calling it, to have some more blood work tested.  I call it the blood bank because I think they have taken as much of my blood as the blood donations take.  The second time I went in, they took eleven vials of blood!  I believe this will be my fourth time going in to "donate" blood.  Thankfully I did not have to give eleven vials each time!  Wednesday I will only have to give one, maybe two.  They will be checking my liver enzymes.  The first time they tested my liver enzymes, my levels were elevated.  The next time they checked my liver, the levels were elevated even more.  Doctors say that in about 40% of Celiacs, the liver is affected.  Hopefully I am one of those 40% and now that I have been very strictly adhering to my gluten-free diet, my liver levels will be coming back down.  We are praying that my liver levels will be down, and then hopefully we can resume our plans to travel overseas.

In the meantime, Andrew and I have been having lots of fun trying to think of things to do each day.  We have watched the first season of White Collar, which my Mom got quite into.  We also make almost daily runs to Barnes&Noble and/or Starbucks.  Today we visited a Scuba store in town and also Yvonne's Natural Market which had lots of gluten-free products.  There is a language program we downloaded to help us start learning some language while we are in this waiting process.  Unfortunately practicing language makes me sad that we are not there yet.  I never knew you could be home-sick for someplace that you've never even been before.  I am hoping and praying that at the end of next week we will get this next blood work back and my liver will be looking normal and then we will be able to quickly pick back up where we left off and move oversees soon.  Until then:  B&N, Starbucks and Sense and Sensibility.

Changes

I know, I keep on changing the background and layout of my blog.  I like all the old ones, but they are just not feeling right.  I think I really like this new look.  Not quite perfect for me yet, but hopefully there will be no major changes again in the future. :)

As far as what we've been up to lately....not much.  We have to wait three weeks, then I have to go back for more blood work.  We have just kinda been hanging around.  This past weekend we went white water rafting with our small group.  It was so much fun!  We all fell out of the raft and had to fight for our lives at one point, but other than that we did amazing :)

Hope all is going well with my readers.  I'll try to keep you up to date with what is going on with us, but unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) not a whole lot is going on these days.

Diagnosis, but no time frame

We finally have reached a diagnosis.  And by "we," I mean the doctor has finally found something that will appease him.  Apparently I have a genetic disease (thanks mom and dad ;-)) called Celiac Disease.  This is actually quite ironic because I am a Wheat, but I can no longer eat wheat.  As best as I understand, I am not allergic to wheat, but rather my stomach does not have whatever it takes to properly digest the gluten in wheat.  As a result, the gluten kills the hair like villi in my stomach though which all the nutrition in the foods I eat is absorbed.  I don't think I have a bad case of this disease, since I do not have many symptoms (probably just the stress of moving made it flair up), but left untreated it could get worse.  The treatment is not really that much of a treatment either, I just have to cut out gluten from my diet.  I think this will actually be easier to do overseas than here in the U.S., because the foods are so much less processed overseas.  In all the processing that goes on in our foods here, you never know where they are hiding the gluten, but overseas it's much simpler.  Bread, don't eat.  Apple, okay.  With all that being said, they have a diagnosis, but they still want to watch me for a while once I get completely on this gluten free diet.  And I honestly have no clue what that means.  How long are they going to want to monitor me?  I can't just sit around here forever as they watch me eat :)

In the meantime I have gone through quite a few books.  Jane Eyre was the book I read this week.  Loved it!  I really like reading that time period.  It was a more difficult read because it was in old English, so it took me a little longer than usual, but I did love the style of writing.  Even the words she used, words that we would not use today, but I felt they painted a better picture of what was going on and used fewer words to do it.  I can't wait to start another book soon.  Maybe Pride and Prejudice?

Still Delayed

Well, everything went good with my tests yesterday.  The doctor didn't see anything that worried him.  One would think that if I feel perfectly fine and the doctor didn't see anything that bothered him that we would be good to go.  Not quite so though.  We have to wait to get more tests back, get more tests done, wait for those to get back.....and so goes the cycle of "there is not actually anything wrong with you we're just going to try to keep looking till we find something."  I'm trying hard not to get discouraged, but it's difficult with no end in sight.

I've waited for this moment to travel since I was such a little girl.  We've been though constant delays for one reason and another over the past year.  We held strong through all of those delays, trusting that He had a plan for everything.  We finally thought we were in the clear; made it though training, had our plane tickets in hand...only to be delayed once again by this and I see no end in sight.  Everything is going in such slow motion.  I feel like the answers are so easy, we just have to wait to get this test back and that test back.  If I had a goal or a light at the end of the tunnel to look forward to I think it would be easier.  But nothing, who knows when they'll decide it was all just a fluke and we can go....