Have you ever seen Demotivators?  They help me to smile a bit when things just get too ridiculous.

I’m trying to see our current situation like the picture above, but this Demotivator seems more appropriate at the moment:

I woke up a couple weeks ago, and my vision was a little blurry.  What with travel and holidays, it took a little bit to get in to see our doctor – he sent me on to the optometrist, who send me on to the ophthalmologist.  It turns out, I had a bleed (stroke!)  in my eye.

Apparently it is quite an anomaly, and they are testing for all sorts of possible underlying causes.  In the meantime,  he is optimistic that I will be able to recover full vision.  But… I have to return to the ophthalmologist once a month to get a needle in my eye until it is resolved (something like 2-6 months).

You may already be able to see the blip in this.  When I told the doctor that we were planning to leave the country at the end of the month, he said, “Absolutely not.”  He then proceeded to explain that he didn’t think it wise for us to leave the country for quite a while.

I’m totally floored.  I felt really good – a couple months closing up in Rwanda, and then moving on to our next project with YWAM Nanaimo (which is what this next blog was supposed to be about, but I’ll have to postpone that to another time).  It felt like we were able to close this season and begin a new one.

I am very thankful for the way everything has been streamlined – various professionals communicating effectively with each other and explaining well along the way.  AND!!  I don’t feel like I have to use Google to figure out what is really going on, because I am being cared for by a doctor who knows more than I do.  (Don’t get me wrong, I am thankful for all the help the internet has given me over the years, but…  I feel much more confident being in the hands of a competent professional.)  I am thankful to have a doctor who is trying to find out the underlying cause instead of just treating symptoms.  I am also thankful that this didn’t happen several months ago in the US, or while we were in Rwanda.

I have had a few days to pick myself up, remind myself of all the things in the previous paragraph, but I’m still having a trouble figuring out how to do some of the things we need to do.  It feels like, just as we were ready to move towards stability, we have been derailed.