Yeah, I’m going to have to make it a habit of touring the Coors Brewery as often as possible. Free tour *and* free Blue Moon? Yes, please!

More truth, and not just for Tuesday

All women are beautiful.

I can say that without reservation, whether others may believe the statement or not. I have been alive longer than most of you (damn, I’m in my 7th decade!!), and I have been blessed through those decades with some very close friendships. The vast majority of those friendships have been with women. Most of the people I have worked with in my life have been women. Hell, I even helped raise up three of them! So I think I know what I’m talking about on the subject.

All women are beautiful.

There isn’t one thing that defines their beauty. Rather, it is (cliché as it sounds) the whole package. And I’m not talking about some kind of inner beauty here, where it is defined by personality or skill or comport. No, I’m talking about what we all first see in a woman… the outer appearance that gives us that initial impression of who they are.

All women are beautiful.

Yet it seems to be a rarity that a woman sees herself this way. Again, having been around women all of my life, I have been privy to many of their beliefs about themselves, and where I see beauty, they will focus on what they perceive as flaws. Of course, we are all that way to a certain extent, and It doesn’t matter if others see those attributes as flaws or not. If she believes it is a flaw, it becomes a barrier to her seeing herself as others may see her… as beautiful.

I wish all women could see themselves as I see them.

Truthful Tuesday

There is something I do for Mindy every week that, while I do it willingly and without reservation, I don’t do it gladly.

As she has mentioned here before, she has Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA). RA is an auto-immune disease where the body ends up attacking the healthy tissue in the joints. It causes pain, stiffness, and swelling, and can lead to loss of function in those joints. My mother had RA, and I saw the joints of her hands twist to the point where they were almost completely unusable, and other joints caused her such severe agony that she was confined to a wheelchair. It is a nasty disease.

My mother’s RA was treated with experimental drugs, given through an IV drip. While these drugs helped to a certain extent, her RA was too advanced to stop the destruction of her joints. These days, there are several drugs on the market that are helping RA patients, and they work by blocking, or at least controlling, the way the immune system handles inflammation. Mindy is on one of these drugs.

Sadly, these drugs are administered by self-injection. No nice pills, no nose spray, no swallowed liquid… nope, jab a needle into your body and push the plunger! And from what Mindy has said (and what I have heard from so many others using the same drug), the drug itself is extremely painful while being injected. I have heard it is so bad that some people would rather deal with the disease than the injection. That’s where I come in.

I am no stranger to self-injection. When I was dealing with my twice-weekly migraines many years ago, the only real treatment for it was Imitrex, and it was only available by injection at the time. So for a couple of years, I would jam a needle in my leg every time I felt my migraine coming on. It wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t bad either.

So I became Mindy’s injector.

Every Sunday, just before bed, I grab the syringe with the medicine from the refrigerator, and an alcohol wipe, pick an area of her body where we haven’t injected recently, disinfect that area, then shove the needle into her skin as rapidly as possible. Then I start the task of depressing the plunger and injecting the medicine. Of course, Mindy is calmly and sedately allowing me to do this… like hell! This stuff hurts like a bastard going in, so she is doing her very best to hold still and not curse *too* much as I am injecting. She’s really pretty good at it. I, on the other hand, am a nervous wreck, as I am causing the woman I love an extreme amount of pain. And I can’t just inject quickly… this stuff has to go in slow and steady. So by the time I have finished (up to a minute after the initial injection), we are both shaky and having a reaction… her from the medicine and me from the injecting.

But it has to be done, and it is just another way that I can show her how much I love her, which I know sounds strange, but it’s true. I love her so much that I will endure the effect it has on me to make sure she gets her injection. She knows how much I hate to do it, but she also knows it is to make sure she stays healthy, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s embarrassing to be “shit-my-pants” terrified of the skyride, yet there it was. It didn’t help that I almost knocked myself out getting off the ride…

It’s going to be a long day. :-/