A Blog Worth Sharing

My daughter Susannah wrote this very caring and poignant blog about her dear friend Wendy.  Wendy is a lovely young caring and fun loving woman, a wife a mother and a fine school teacher. She is suffering from this dreadful PH (pulmonary hypertension) lung disease.  Susannah’s blog is truly worth sharing far and wide and it should make us all thankful for our well being. We so often moan and complain about the weather, the price of gas, the government, our neighbours, when if we stopped for a moment to think!  should really be counting our blessings. We all can and should offer Wendy our most sincere prayers for a return to good health. God Bless Wendy.

---

I am doing it for everyone in a hospital bed… Posted: 19 Feb 2015 08:20 AM PST First of all, let’s be clear.  We chose to live where we are.  We can complain all we want, but we had a choice and continue to have a choice.  All my friends in PEI…remember that.  And also, can’t lie, I am actually jealous.  Jealous of tunnelling to find cars, jealous of skiing to Tim’s, jealous of a single lane back road full of 16 foot snowbanks.  Our roads are really dull here.  Our skiing is marginal at best.  Peter has cuts on his feet and lips from stick hunting in icy snow…what he doesn’t know is I bought him a nerf ball on a rope!!!  No more stick eating and the ensuing diarhea!  Life should improve… So read a friends FB status last nite after she left the gym.  It has since been stolen as the title of this post because it is just so flipping true.  My partner has a joyous nursing job and has said so many times that she has many people to think of and draw strength from while competing and training.  My personal inspiration for the whole idea of doing this sport was someone trying to not be in a bed.  How many people have got up and moved because they knew someone who couldn’t? So brings up my best buddy (who isn’t a dog.  Peter wanted that clarified).  My best friend is the F Bomb herself…a hard as nails grade four teacher who swears with clinical accuracy and loves with nuclear intensity.  She is kind and rough, fiery and sensible, all these neat balances of humanity and ass kicking awesomeness packed into one body.  Problem is, the body is non cooperative.  She has this random, rare bastard of an illness called Pulmonary Hypertension.  PH for short.  PH together makes the same sound as the letter F by the way, making it interchangeable with the word PHuck or PHighter or PHart.  Some of my favourite words start with F.  I use them more often on special occasions, like weekdays and weekends.  I learned many of them from the F Bomb herself. F Bomb has had my back so much there is an imprint of her pointy little hands on there.  I have a room at her house, a key to the house, and generally a collection of beer stashed somewhere.  However, F Bombs superior husband (as in the guy is sweet, cute, thoughtful, funny, swears alot, rides bikes alot, and cherishes and dotes on his little guy…seriously, this guy is at a dad level held by few…he is like a Ben dad.  They are rare) is entitled to any of my beer at any time. The Bomb also has been instrumental in getting kids riding mountain bikes.  Like hundreds of kids.  Like kids that would never had touched a bike in their life without her.  We spent an hour in the gym with a little guy who had never ridden before, then the next year he was on singletrack.  Unreal.  And she never cursed at him once!  She never curses on kids.  Just inanimate objects, adults, and around kids that aren’t in her class.  She is just augmenting their vocabulary. So she is not really able to ride because of this PHucking lung disease.  She has some heart stuff too, which is no PHun either.  And she misses it, because this kid is an athlete.  She wants to do a tri someday (which will happen…fyi and stay tuned).  So somedays when it sucks in the gym, or on the road, trail, on following the black line in the pool/hamster wheel, I am doing it because she can’t.  She once stood on a treadmill next to me (it wasn’t moving) and yelled me through a half marathon.  I can channel those expletives. So yeah, if you are blessed enough that you can move, do it.  If you are blessed enough to see the frost on the trees and the mist off the river in the mornings, soak it in.  If you are fighting a battle, slow down and look for the blessings the battle is giving you.  If you need a reminder on how to do that, she’s giving lessons in a brutally honest way that you will carry with pride.  But do me a favour: stop and look for what in your world is going in the right direction.  We all have a pile of shit to shovel, we just gotta accept that even when shovelling shit there is some good stuff going on around us.  Slow down and have a look and remember that you could always have a worse smelling pile.  It’s not about having the perfect moment, it’s about taking the moment and making it perfect.  So go soak something beautiful up.  And swear at it just for fun! I hope others will do as I have done and share this message. God Bless and keep reading