You put the Lyme in the Coconut...

Well, this is the inaugural post to what I pray is a smooth blogging experience... Lord only knows what's in store.

Where to begin?

My struggle with Lyme Disease has been a long time in the making, while its existence in my life has only been known as such for maybe 5 months. So I guess I will start at, what I thought was, the "beginning."

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My husband and I moved to Wisconsin in December of 2007, after the stick showed two lines and not just one. Two lines after we had said we were done. Two lines promising a bulging belly, late-night feedings, and diapers... more diapers... We thought we were through with that aspect of life. Our two chestnut-haired beauties with the dazzling eyes were in our lives, and all was "right" with our world. And then there were two... lines, that is... making three.
Until this point, we had always lived in our home state of Michigan. Him from the southern, and I from the northern lower peninsula. We never dreamed of moving to "America's Dairyland," afterall, what was there in Wisconsin, but cheese and beer? So we thought. Not only were there amazing people to add to our "family," and natural beauty rivaled only by few... We soon found out just one *small* thing that hatched into our lives here in our own back yard.

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It was a peaceful Sunday morning as I awoke to the sounds of traffic in the street below our second-story guest bedroom window. It was September the 5th, 2010 and I couldn't have been happier. My parents, who still live with most all of the rest of my extended family in Traverse City, Michigan, were here for a much-anticipated visit, and we were making the most of every moment with them.
The night's rest was much-deserved and needed as we had just spent most of Saturday at an old engine show somewhere in Wisconsin that I had never heard of. My dad had found their website online and decided that they needed to make a trip to visit us, so that we could all go and enjoy the old engines, watch the milling of cornmeal and buckwheat flour, enjoy the various flea market offerings, and of course, the vast array of fair food, complete with homemade ice cream, churned by an old engine.
The day was long, with lots of walking and more walking, a coal-powered train ride, a view of the tobacco farming on the fairgrounds, and food. We all had a blast. Even bought a really long-handled bristle brush to clean out the lint trap area of a dryer from a flea market vendor! What a successful trip.
Little did I know it would be the last day I would walk normally...
Early Sunday morning, when I awoke to the inner-city sounds of Racine, WI, (spanish polka, loud mufflers, engines purring at the stop light, and dogs barking to be let back in to our neighbors' houses) I never could have imagined what was in store for me just seconds away.
As I inhaled that first conscious, refreshing breath... the kind that clears out all of the sleepiness from the lungs... and I stretched that first morning stretch... the kind that invigorates each muscle fiber and invites the body into the land of the upwardly mobile...  Ohh, it felt so good to know what it was to be alive and rested after a full day like Saturday. And then, those precious few seconds between stretching and relaxing were finished... And nothing in my life was ever the same again.