I found 6 hours…. and then lost it again!

Time...
  Time…

I found my missing 6 hours in a week and then I lost it again.
So I have to say that I’m pretty good at making lemonade when life hands me lemons.
In fact I get a real high from the process of squeezing these darned lemons to get every bit of juice that I can.

Towards the end of December I started to get this rash all over my torso. I ignored it for a while and just hoped it would disappear back to where it came from. It was a busy Christmas especially entertaining the boys and trying to recover from the very busy quarter.

The rash just kept growing and spreading so as soon as the boys went back to school I booked in to see my GP.  At first glance I was told I had folliculitis and was put on a course of penicillin.
A week later after completing the dose I saw more rash and now massive red scaly patches.
Back to the GP and to hear that it is actually *psoriasis.  I had heard the term before but had no idea what it meant.

I was then referred to a dermatologist who prescribed 25-30 UVB Light treatments!
The first question my GP as well as my dermatologist asked me was ‘Are you stressed?’
Aren’t we all to some degree? I said perhaps I over did it last quarter balancing work, home and the boys’ activities but I don’t feel stressed. It’s life, I’m handling it.

While I was relieved to not have to take any medication, I was a bit annoyed that I needed to go 3 times a week for this light treatment to a clinic that was 45 mins away from home.  Which mother of toddlers has the time to get an annoying ‘condition’ to deal with for crying out loud!?!  Was I stressed then??   Yes! I did not have 1.5 hours + treatment time ranging from 2-15 minutes each x 3 times a week!
How could I possibly de-stress myself now??

A good friend heard me whining one day after a couple of weeks of treatment. I was whining about how I now have to spend 6 hours a week on treatment – 6 hours I already didn’t have. And she said, ‘you have just found 6 hours you didn’t have!’
I wasn’t sure what that meant initially.

I chose to take the bus (no driving and parking stress involved) to my treatments – 45 minutes each way. I caught up on work calls, social messages, coordinated my boys’ birthday parties, listened to inspiring podcasts and even began my first audio book on being a ‘conscious parent ‘ . This was ‘MY‘ time! I had found 6 hours I didn’t have and it was for me. Forced as it may have been but I would not have had that opportunity otherwise.

Now for regular commuters this may not seem special but I hope you get my drift on making the best of a situation.

During my treatments I also had a chat with an Ayurvedic doctor who also had to hear me moan about how I was ‘loosing‘ time I already didn’t have when he advised me to ‘de-stress!’
de-stress
He just said to me, ‘embrace it‘.
And I did. And I enjoyed that ‘me‘ time.
7 weeks later, treatments done, psoriasis healed for now and I have just lost my lovely 6 hours that I had found in that time. I’m back to the pressure of making every minute be productive getting caught back up in the rat race of life. The treatments had slowed me down to take a breath.
My take-aways  from this incident: embrace the situation & look at the bright side.
Just with these two learnings I experienced a ‘shift‘ in my perception of the situation and was more in control of it where I made it work for me.
* As for the psoriasis please feel free to ask anything you would like to know. I will also be sharing some experiences with it in due time.