The Face of Heart Failure

Losing our mother was to me, the last link to my Grandparents on my mother's side. Fortunately I was able to locate my extended family and it was like all of them who had gone on before us was giving back to us.

What do you do when it seems like there are bits and pieces of you breaking off of your life and floating away? I came to my sisters house to have my computer worked on and I spend time with family,but my spirit is so restless right now.

Between 1988 and 1990 I was truly a lost young woman with no clear direction I had for my life. That was until I put on my first nursing uniform. I remember how proud I felt to be wearing that white dress, the silk pantyhose and that badge with my name on it and my white leather nursing shoes. I wore my uniform with pride and a sense of accomplishment. It was mine, all mine and no one could take those skills away from me once I had learned them. I loved every aspect of being a nursing assistant. I wanted to be a pediatric nurse practitioner. That was MY PLAN, but that's not what happened. In 1991 I had a back injury that derailed my nursing career. Let's face it, in nursing your livelihood depends on you being able to use your knees, feet, back and hands and my back injury sat me down for over a year. I would never be the same again. I made several attempts to go back to nursing on a full time basis, but my back was shot and my body was well on its way to morphing into somet

Fear is real because it lives in the mind and it can also be a crippling thing.

This has been an uphill battle, but I am trying my best to hold this together. I have stumbled quite a bit in the past weeks and things that normally wouldn't bother me seem like mountains now. I had to retreat and take an emotional health day. To regroup and to get my focus back. In my haste of having to deal with the upheaval of disability. I had to get an attorney because I feel that it's now time for me to bring in someone who is truly on my side of this equation. I am also grappling with my fear of my doctors. I have gotten nothing but upsetting news since my nightmare began and I am just overloaded with everything. As a Virgo I tend to carry all of my worry in my gut and it makes for stress-filled episodes that cannot be planned on. My anxiety is through the roof and I have begun to break out in stress hives again over the thought of being homeless. I lived for a few weeks in my car because I was too ashamed to ask my mother could I come home. Even though she told us th

This can be a great healing or revealing time for a person. So much growth can happen if you allow it to. With my mother's passing. I am so overwhelmed by the thought that she is gone. Having gotten used to her fighting her way through major adversity. I didn't stop to think of how tired she was. I understand her in that way simply because the body is not designed to last forever. It is fragile and resilient all at the same time. It is amazing that the human body can heal itself if given the passage of time to do so. I worry on a daily basis that I am running out of time to do the things that I am really passionate about, but my body isn't cooperating. I can't walk very far without the assistance of a walker and standing is hard as well. I get very winded doing simple tasks, but to have to fight to prove that to the powers that be that I am still disabled escapes me. I feel like I was penalized for not being able to attend the hearing and now I have to go before a ju

My Momma went home to be with her husband and her grandbabies last night. She closed her eyes for the last time on August 15, 2014. It's poetic because as my sister was celebrating her new life with her new husband, my mother went to heaven. She no longer has to endure any more hospital stays, no more surgeries, no more pain. She fought the good fight, and now she is at peace. We love you momma Mary Ann Watson-Washington Sunrise: 4/22/1941 Sunset: 8/15/2014

There's a lot of pain behind that soft smile of mine. Today was a very difficult day. My anxiety got the better of me and I was caught up in a whirlwind of emotions. Dr. Ellis is my new primary care physician. I think I will be able to build a good rapport with her if I could just get my nerves out of the equation. She has done nothing to me, but my fear of her is very real to me. I have to see a hematologist, and doctor for my rheumatoid arthritis my thyroid needs to be checked. She also is going to make sure that I get my C-pap machine for my sleep apnea. She says this may help with my heart failure as well. None of the other doctors I saw have even remotely mentioned that if my sleep apnea was treated that it may help my heart function better. I think today I was just on information overload and having my cycle today definitely did not help matters any. I hope having to see all of these specialist that it won't derail my plans, but then again people make plans and God jus

There are times when you have to take your own personal inventory. Not once but several times over the course of your life. For starters as we age and progress through this life our priorities change. The things that mattered to me when I was a child are not the same things that mattered to me as a teenager nor when I became an adult. Having a new set of experiences during those times most definitely reshaped the things that I cared about. Of course there will always be those core things that will always be the mainstays in my way of thinking, those are just hardwired into my DNA. My true nature has always been to worry excessively about things. Most born under my zodiac sign will attest to that fact. Most Virgos are headstrong and willful. If someone cannot give us a valid reason for why we should not do something, that is as good as saying, " go ahead and do it". When I first began this experiment in breaking my own heart with Tony it was the culmination of a girlhood c

I don't think any man starts out as "that guy". You know the one I am talking about, the one who actually delights in dogging out a woman to see what he can get. At first the person I blamed for his bad behavior was Vivian. She made the mistake of telling him, " I Got You, Babe" Taking care of his every need and every whim and before you know it you're off to the races. At the heart of the matter it was him who decided to keep up with the debauchery and low life tactics. He is an Alpha Male and in being such he will not allow you to be with more than just him. His ego is very fragile and he cannot fathom the things you do with him being done with another man. He would often times tell me what he disliked about each woman he was dealing with and always in the back of my mind I would think, wow, if he is talking about these women to, what must he be saying about me to them? It's sad to know that you as a man don't think yourself capable of being w

Death and Dying of The Relationship The 5 Stages of Grief apply to relationships as well. It is a loss and sometimes it is a loss of EPIC proportions. Especially when you deal with a man like Tony who for whatever reason he has doesn't a woman the closure that she needs. He just picks up and starts something new and he didn't have the decency to be a man and end things  properly. As I have stated before he is a consummate liar and as such he doesn't want to be seen as the bad guy, but ripping through each of us the way he does is tragic. He lies and conducts he life with no remorse for the things he does. I use my words as catharsis to deal with those emotions so I do not act out in a way to bring harm to myself or another person. I am sure he thought I would just be quiet about all his misdeeds, but I couldn't in good conscious let him do it to another woman, and she be blind to the fact that he is a user. I could blame Vivian for turning him loose on the rest of

When you have spent the majority of your adult life trying to make a relationship work and when you find that you have to take a step back and look at it for what it was it can truly be heartbreaking. This man has done nothing, but string multiple women along and he won't close the door on one before he begins another. I have watch numerous woman come and go. He will keep them as long as they serve a purpose. Whether it be sexual, monetary or transportation. Each of us thinking we were the only one. He always leaves devastation in his wake and he is never remorseful about the damage he causes. I had the pleasure of finding out that he has begun yet another relationship while dealing with me. It's not that I went looking for this information, but I have been dealing with him for over 19 years and I know when he starts to change. Case in point he will spend all kinds of crazy time with me and then it will shift. He has always done things this way. He also will not be the one

The doctors have often counted her out, but God has always proven them wrong about my momma

When the body experiences a trauma the mind will sometimes bury those memories to help you cope with those things. A schitoma is the mind reliving that trauma as if it just occurred it does not know the time frame it just processes the information it is given. Sometimes you can be so heartbroken about situations that you simply cannot change and it creates this void in your life. I have always tried to fix the errors in my life, and when I can't, it becomes a compulsion with me to right those wrongs. I have great difficulty with truly surrendering to the fact sometimes there can be no resolution.

Dating has always been sort of an enigma to me. I like being in a relationship, but I also like being alone and these two things are often in conflict with one another. As you well know the man that I have been in love with for a very long time, we just can't seem to make it work without past hurts cropping up. We each are holding on to it because to let go of it would mean to call a truce on a near twenty year bitterness. We both harbor resentment with each other. I am willing to talk about it in great detail, but he is a very unforgiving man. I think part of the reason is that he has never apologized for anything he has ever done to a woman in his life. There is always a justification for the bad deed, and he always has a way of making a woman apologize for making him be bad. Yes it is a form of manipulation, and he is a master at that. But when does holding on to a past bad act become so toxic that once it's spread to everything you do there is simply no recovery? I have

I feel like I am on a merry-go-round when I have to keep explaining why I have to lose weight. Instead of just listening to me some men that I have encountered have gone on to say they don't believe I have a heart condition and I shouldn't be losing weight because I don't need to. They have no idea what this life has been like and I really am so over talking about why.

After my diagnosis with Congestive Heart Failure I wanted to find a way to spend time with my sisters and make some lasting memories. Sistabond was born from this idea. It started with just me and one of my sisters Sandra and my cousin Desiree in 2011 and it has truly blossomed into what you see today and it has grown steadily. We get together maybe two or three times a year to catch up with one another. Great food is our commonality and encouraging each other. We always close with prayer and what each of us is grateful for. I love my my sisters and I look forward to us always being close, even when distance my separate us. There is always love