I'll give you a hint: It involves where we currently live and one of my eyeballs.
This time last year, we announced to our church and the world that Clay was accepted to the University of St. Andrews, we would be moving to Scotland in the fall, and then my eye decided to start eating itself from the inside.
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| Kate Ryan, the frisbee champ. |
It doesn't feel like a year ago. I remember like it was yesterday. Got up, dropped Clay off at NOMA for work, went to CFA for my ever-hectic Saturday shift, and all my cute kitchen ladies insisted on calling me "ojo rojo" and telling me I had pinkeye. We spent the evening enjoying a lovely picnic in City Park, playing frisbee and croquet with the Solomons and the Ryan/Scott Conglomerate. All the while, my eye was getting redder and redder. Sunday, we told our church we were leaving, and I cried and hugged everyone. Monday, we went to see Jurassic Park in 3D, and that's when I could tell something was horribly wrong. I remember looking around the theater in the dark, telling Clay something was wrong with my eye.
I'm pretty sure he said something along the lines of, "Shut up, there are 3D dinosaurs on a giant movie screen."
So began the worst week. Tried to go to work and my boss kicked me out. How I even drove home in literal blinding pain was beyond me. Misdiagnosed by a walk-in clinic, spent $100 on useless medication, and tried to go back to work. All the while, my eye got redder and more painful, to the point where I couldn't sleep and my eye clamped shut. Went BACK to the doctor, who referred me to an ophthalmologist, and that's where it all began.
Uveitis week. You've all seen my progress. So how have we progressed in Scotland?
One year later, and it's been 3 months since my last flare up. My eye still has scar tissue in it, but you can really only notice a difference in really bright or really dark spaces. One eye expands and contracts based on the lighting. The other just... stays. My vision has greatly improved. If I look at things through my bad eye, eventually it focuses and becomes clear. Just takes time. I have worn contacts regularly for over a month with no issues, and I've been off all medication and eye drops for almost 2.
Looking back on the past year, it's easy to try to blame someone for my eye. Blame the walk-in clinic for misdiagnosing me, making me suffer through painful uveitis with no medication for 4 days, possibly creating irreversible damage to my eye. Blame the ophthalmologist for never taking the extra 5 minutes to listen to me talk about what my eye was doing and rushing me out without thoroughly thinking about the consequences of weaning me off eye drops so soon. Blame the rheumatologist for putting me on useless medication and giving me hope that my eye would go back to normal. Blame myself for stressing out, causing me to become sick and my antibodies to become low, making me susceptible to illness. Blame God for giving me a crazy HLA-B27 gene and not healing me like I asked all those times.
Honestly, it's just one of those things. I don't know why it happened, but I'm thankful that I'm not where I was a year ago. Thankful that, even despite all the hospital visits and prescriptions and medication and pain, we still made it to Scotland and God has taken care of us in every single step. There's no way, through all of the medical and financial obstacles that we faced in those last 4 months in the States, that we would have made it here. I've done the math, I've looked at our bank accounts like a mental patient, and there's NO WAY.
So I'm thankful. We could have said we made it to Scotland all on our own, but uveitis just made it that much more difficult to do it on our own. It's a fantastic miracle and a complete testament on how, despite illness or stress or impending doom, God takes care of his own.
But anywho. Scotland is nice and pretty today. Right now, it's near 60 degrees, mostly sunny, and it feels heavenly. I have the windows open and everything. Ummm, and the sun goes down at 8:00! For those of you who have been in our flat, you know our living room/kitchen has these ginormous windows, and lucky for us, the sun shines into one of them the entire time it's up. I'm pretty sure while I've been writing this, I've gotten a sweet face sunburn from all the sun. Completely different from the weather 4 months ago. There are daffodils blooming everywhere and bunnies are hopping around in our front yard. The birds and seagulls are almost deafening during the day, and the lower humidity just makes it perfect.
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| I picked these from the front yard! |
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| Bunnies! and more daffodils! |
But I've found over the last few weeks that there are very specific things that I miss from America. I miss hole-in-the-wall barbecue restaurants with my grandparents and cookouts with friends. I miss Braves games and the sound of crickets and cicadas. I miss going to the beach with my sister and being sunkissed and warm. I miss people-watching in the French Quarter. I miss Target. I miss Community Coffee and Chick-fil-A. I miss driving and I miss shopping and being able to go wherever and get whatever I needed within an hour because I could just drive there, shop around, and drive whatever back to my house. Such is life, huh?
But Scotland is nice. I'm happy here. I'll leave you with some pictures to prove it.
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| double rainbow on south street! |
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| got these from my mom today! Foxy sweater and matching socks :) |
Carm
