Sometimes It's The Little Things

In my professional life as a writer and copy editor, I spend a good part of my day focusing on the little things--a misplaced comma, a split infinitive, a run-on sentence. In my everyday life, however, I'm not so good at focusing on the little things. In fact, more often than not, things tend to seem overwhelming and insurmountable--too much laundry, too many commitments, too much worry about too many things, most of which will never happen.

So that's the context in which I headed to the neurologist last week for my six-months-since-I-started-the-shots checkup. I was not looking forward to it. And since I wasn't entirely sure what the purpose of this appointment was, I had allowed my mind to run wild. In fact, when I walked into the office, I fully expected to be escorted straight into the MRI chamber.

A little negative? Well, yeah. That's kind of how I roll normally, and the last six months haven't done much to remedy that. Everything about this damn disease seems big and scary. I've struggled with adjusting to a whole new normal, all the while running alongside life. If one thing has become very clear to me, it's that life really does go on--no break, no slowing down, no take a minute to wrap your head around this.

So sometimes it's a challenge just to remember the little victories. But at last week's appointment three things happened that reminded me to do just that. Those three things were:

* Kudos from my doctor for giving myself the shots.
* Permission to stop injecting in my thighs--my most painful and biggest problem area.
* Hope that within the next few years there will be an oral medication that will take the place of my injections. Fingers crossed.

And in that one-hour appointment, I was once again reminded of the great line from Ferris Bueller's Day Off: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."