for what it's worth

June 29, 2018: I officially became a resident of Southern California. It's been a dream, a bucket list item, a goal, a desire...all the above...to live in a place where the weather doesn't beat you up and leave you dead in a ditch. This all happened so fast that I'm still spinning, still waking up shocked that my location arrow has changed. I am almost a full month into my Oceanside, California life and I have to say, I'm pretty sure this is one of my better decisions. However, I have never felt like more of a misfit in my entire life. I was born and raised in Texas, right in the middle of the panhandle. Amarillo is where I became who I am. I went to elementary through high school and enrolled in college there, even went to a few classes in college but it just didn't take. I guess I'm more of a hands on, life lessons, trial and error, seat of my pants educated kind of girl. Anywho-- I love Texas and the people of the panhandle especially. I miss my frie...

I want to tell you about a very special person. She is young, like early 20's young, and she has a dream--no-- a vision. It's a vision she has turned into reality. This girl has persevered through so many trials on a daily basis I honestly can't believe she hasn't packed her bags and flown the coup! This is Rannah. She has a calling on her heart to serve the deaf children of Uganda, Africa. This passion began as a high school teen in a small town located in the panhandle of Texas. She dreamt of providing a boarding school for the many children who are deaf due to the malaria medicine in Uganda. Because of the lack of education and the poverty levels, deaf children are often considered cursed, worthless and unable to learn or earn wages for their family. Most are never taught how to communicate. They have very little value if any if they aren't able to help provide. Many are mistreated, ignored, abandoned and even discarded. Rannah's heart was truly broken wh...

This month has been filled with lots not so OK days. I've struggled with chronic pain, achy joints, abdominal cramping, nausea and extreme fatigue. Here's an example of my not so OK day today: Struggled with insomnia last night so I got about 5 hours of sleep total but not all at once. Tummy cramps and nausea awoke me this morning. I lay in bed for about 30 minutes willing myself to get up but afraid the nausea might win. Took the handful of prescribed meds, vitamins and minerals needed to make my body function. Also added anti-cramping and nausea meds to the cocktail (not pictured). Ate a small gut friendly breakfast (not because I'm hungry--trust me, I'm not--but because the meds need it) and my 1 cup of coffee (more than 1 cup = more cramping + nausea). Sat in my comfy chair and caught up on social media and reviewed today's TO DO list to figure out what MUST be done today and what can be postponed. This may seem a bit lazy to most however, it is ...

I'm back in my fighting stance! I think anyway... I'm learning how to stand on my own after 24 years of marriage. When a long term relationship ends it really messes with your head. You wonder: What's wrong with me?  Why is this happening?  What happened to happily ever after?  You feel: Brokenhearted Hopeless Confused Angry You want to: Crawl up in a ball under the covers in the safety of your bed. Lash out. Sit and watch mind numbing TV. But because you are an adult you have to function in the real world and find a new path. So here I am, adulting on my own. While married, my future seemed secure and mapped out. Finances, retirement, daily routine... As a single person, things are different. My divorce left me financially stable thankfully and this post is not bashing him in any way, I'm just trying to figure out what my new future will look like. I want to be able to add to my finances but with a chronic illness and it's unpredictabili...

I'm breaking my blog silence finally. It's been an incredibly rough couple of years to say the least. My life has been turned upside down, right side up then upside down again. I think I just might be on my way up once more... I hope anyway. My heart is broken and in the process of healing, something I fear may take a lifetime. My husband and I decided to end our 24 year marriage this year. It was not an easy decision. I will not air the details here as it is no one's business but ours. From this point forward, we are concentrating on our friendship, our boys and making the best of this situation. Have you heard of the Japanese pottery art of filling broken pieces with gold to put a vessel back together? It's a practice called kintsukuroi meaning "to repair with gold." This particular art has touched me deeply.  As I said, my heart is broken and it will never be the same again. The scars that life leaves behind can be devastating and ugly. I don...

It might take me a year to get through this whole alphabet post challenge... J is for Joy. A lot has happened since my last posting in June. A whole lot. To start with, my sweet Grammy (dad's mom) went to heaven and my grandfather (mom's dad) followed a few hours later which made for a very sad day. It also meant 2 funerals in 1 day, if you can believe that. Although we may be sad, it's also such a blessing as both were suffering terribly from failing bodies. I managed to navigate through those few days on massive amounts of meds as I was actually very sick with this stupid Crohn's mess. The pictures from then portray my struggle vividly. Shannon and boys happened to be in Alaska on a fishing trip with his dad when all this went down but thankfully my sister and her 3 kiddos were here so I wasn't alone in my grief. The one nice thing about death in our family is that we all come together from all over to celebrate our loved one's life. There are tears but ...

The seconds on the clock seem to be in slow-motion, each one forcing the hands of time to inch slowly along as if they weigh a thousand pounds. We are waiting. Waiting for the minutes to stop their drive to move time forward. Waiting for her soul to be released into the arms of Jesus. It's why she lived with such grace and abundant love. Memories of life and love flood my mind like the old black and white silent movies. I stand paralyzed in my grief as the images dance past the backs of my eyelids. A smile on my face even though my heart is breaking. I see the young woman as she meets her future husband and the sparks that ignite bringing color to this moment in time. The promise of a bright future and many blessings. Flashes of babies, camping trips and flavorful food that caresses my mind's nose. Christmas trees and gifts that flow into the middle of the Hinkle house living room surrounded by their children and their children's children. Memories of...

I is for Inflammatory. More specifically, I is for Inflammatory Bowel Disease or IBD for short. IBD: Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) involves chronic inflammation of all or part of your digestive tract. IBD primarily includes ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. Both usually involve severe diarrhea, pain, fatigue and weight loss. IBD can be debilitating and sometimes leads to life-threatening complications. I have had the  privilege (yes, you detect a bit of sarcasm there) of experiencing both Ulcerative Colitis (UC) AND Crohn's. July 2004 marks the anniversary of UC diagnosis. I have an ileostomy because of UC. My colon was so diseased and beyond the help of modern medicine that it had to go in 2011. January 2015 marks the diagnosis of Crohn's. We thought having my colon removed in 2011 would bring an end to the UC and it did. What we did not count on is that IBD has two spectrums to it, UC on one end and Crohn's on the other. Some have asked if mayb...

H is for Hope. It's been a terribly long road for us. All this mess started back in early November with no clear answer as to what was happening to me, my body until late January when Crohn's was finally diagnosed. To say that news was devastating would be a gross understatement. I had worked so hard over the last 3 years to become healthy post ostomy surgery, post Ulcerative Colitis, post near death. I was enjoying an active lifestyle until one day I wasn't. Pain slowly crept in to my daily life threatening to rob me of all joy. Crohn's has managed to single handedly mangle my hope. I am fighting everyday for some sort of normalcy. I long to eat, drink and be merry with everyone. I am trying. I am fighting. I am hoping that each day brings me closer to health and happiness. I am hoping that life with Crohn's will eventually just become life again, that Crohn's will no longer try to upstage me. My hope is to turn this negative into a posit...

I've been trying for weeks with out success to write this post on the letter G. I've tried G is for Grace, Gratitude, Guts, Giving, Goodness... The list of constructive G-words is endless and yet none would take shape enough to qualify as a post. I am frustrated with my current situation.  I wake up every morning with intense pain which worsens when I let my bladder go for the first time after several hours of sleep. Doc says it's probably scarring from disease and surgery. Awesome. I so want to be positive, to do the whole mind over matter thing but the matter is overriding the mind. It's hard to focus on the good when the bad threatens to squash it, kill and sweep it away like a pile of dust. This weekend was the perfect example of how this damn disease (Crohn's) rules my life. We had  three couples join us at our ranch for some good old fashioned outdoor fun. We had ATVs everywhere you looked and one of the weekend's best adventures was riding them all ...

 F is for food. I have a love-hate relationship with food right now. I enjoy good food, doesn't everyone? But it does not treat me with the respect I feel I am warranted. Well my body, specifically my small intestine (all I have left), sees food as the enemy. Meals are a ticking time bomb for me. It doesn't seem to matter what I eat either. If I put food in my mouth and swallow it, my stupid intestine is standing ready with full artillery to do battle. It starts to cramp about three-fourths of the way through a meal. F also stands for a bad word that I try not use... key word: TRY. It's pretty difficult when the pain and cramping are at their worst. The F-bomb is just so cleansing when used correctly. It should be treated with respect and only used when absolutely necessary. This reserves it's power for when it is most needed. Over the past few days, I've eaten rice (white) with almost every meal. Breakfast...Lunch...Dinner. It seems to be one of the...

E is for Empathy Empathy: The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.  Empathy is NOT the same thing as hypochondria. Hypochondria is the OBSESSION with the IDEA of having a serious but undiagnosed medical condition. Empathetic people actually have the ability to share in the emotional and physical pain of another person where as a hypochondriac believes he has a condition all his own. The two are easy to confuse if you don't know a person well enough. My hubby's name should be listed along with the synonyms of empathy. He will take on my pain as his own more often than not. If I'm having a bad pain day and share this with him, he will go from happy-go-lucky to down in the dumps with physical and mental pain of his own in a matter of minutes. If you know him, you know this too. It's for reals man! I see this as an incredible gift and at the same time I think it can be a curse too. When I was in the hospital, he was absolutely misera...

D is for Determined Determined: Having made a firm decision and being resolved not to change it; processing or displaying resolve. *Resolute * PURPOSEFUL * Purposive * Single-minded * Unswerving * Unwavering*  *Undaunted * Intent * Insistent * Steadfast * Staunch * Stalwart * PERSEVERING * Persistent* *Indefatigable * Tenacious * Strong-willed * UNSHAKABLE * Strong-minded * Steely* *Dedicated * Committed*  Determination is a quality I've had to develop over years of living with chronic illness. It's possibly one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. Well maybe it's in 2nd place to parenting... Determination doesn't come naturally to me. There have been so many days where giving up looked really good and so much easier. I mean REALLY good and SO MUCH easier. So good that I made an exit strategy on a particularly bad pain day. So easy that it's options are quite limitless. I wrote it down with great detail in my journal an...

 C is for Chronic  Chronic: 1) constant, habitual               2) continuing a long time or recurring frequently Crohn's falls in the category of autoimmune chronic illness. It has chronic pain, chronic inflammation, chronic diarrhea, chronic ulceration, chronic depression, etc... Every morning when I get out of bed I spend the first 30 minutes (at least) trying to get my abdominal pain under control. The rest of the day is spent trying to maintain that control while also trying to function as close to normal as possible. I don't tell you this so you will feel sorry for me, I want to share why I am not always on top of my game.  It takes a great deal of mental strength to deal with the level of pain Crohn's brings. Here are some of the characteristics you might see in me when I am dealing with pain above a 4 or 5 on the pain scale the medical community likes to use (0= no pain to 10=worst pain ever). I live somewher...