Dancing with My Disabilities!: Congratulations To....ME! I Received The Versatile Bloggers Award, My Very First Blog Award!

Blog Title: Dancing with My Disabilities! This blog was I Already Gave My Right Arm to Be Ambidextrous prior to Read My HIPS, which is now Dancing with My Disabilities. I am doing some renovating and will begin blogging for the New Year 2024. Please be patient, and please continue to support this blog as well as my other blog Chronically Mommy, which is also being renovated to be more up to date. Pass this information on to anyone that you know may be interested in knowing...To be continued...

Dancing with My Disabilities!

Title: Dancing with My Disabilities! I had my shoulder and both hips replaced, and I am changing things up a bit on this blog! I began belly dancing in 2010! Yes, you read that correctly!! I am going to be blogging about my experience as a woman with several joint diseases and conditions who had her shoulder and both hips replaced who now belly dances, dances hip hop, performs, teaches dance to children of all ages and abilities, teaches belly dance fitness classes to adult women, teaches chair belly dance movement classes to people with mobility issues and disabilities, and takes a Pure Barre class as well! I still have pain, but I want to blog about how I have fun too! Please read Chronically Mommy (chronicallymommy.blogspot.com) for info on health/pain and being a mom to a 13-year-old son. I have avascular necrosis in my shoulders, hips, and knees, psoriatic arthritis, axial spondylitis, Sjogren's, fibromyalgia, hEDS, POTS, MCAS, vascular/ocular/hemiplegic migraines, pseudotumor cerebri, trigeminal neuralgia, occipital neuralgia, endometriosis, and chronic shingles. I found out that I have autoimmune arthritis in my cervical spine and a bulging disk in my lumbar spine. Fourteen years ago, my spine orthopedic surgeon told me I had a small amount of inflammatory arthritis in my SI joint. The question was if the spinal involvement was due to Psoriatic Spondylitis, which is a more severe form of Psoriatic Arthritis or is it a new diagnosis of Ankylosing Spondylitis? Now, they have an updated term, Axial Spondylitis, which fits my symptoms and diagnostic proof. Whatever the diagnosis, the treatment will remain the same. I had my left hip replaced in 2003; my right shoulder replaced in March of 2010. I gave my right arm to be ambidextrous! LOL! Lastly, I had my right hip replaced on May 10th, 2012, and I began belly dancing two years prior to my right hip replacement surgery. Yes that's correct! I began belly dancing in 2010, just after my shoulder replacement, before my son was born. I performed for the first time in 2012, five days prior to my right hip replacement surgery. Pain is still another part of my life. It is just a question of when, where, and how much, but I would like to use this blog to write about my experience as a woman with several joint diseases and conditions who had both hips and a shoulder replaced and now spends her free time dancing, teaching, and performing! I began dancing with a troupe in February of 2014, Seshambeh Dance Company. I now take a Pure Barre class on Monday mornings, teach ballet, tap, and creative movement on Monday evenings to children of all ages and abilities, take a hip hop class with all adult women on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, teach a belly dance fitness class on Thursdays to all adult women, and teach a chair belly dance movement class to people with mobility issues and disabilities as often as I possibly can. Join me in my journey! At times, I take 16 to 20 pills a day. I give myself an injection each week on Fridays for my autoimmune/autoinflammatory arthritis diseases. Just when one thing is doing better, something else goes downhill! My attitude, however, is always going uphill! I am 49 years old, have been married for 24 years, and my husband and I adopted Mick in Dec. of 2010! I have a lot on my plate right now, but I take it one moment at a time. I believe that God will never give me more than I can handle. However, I do need to learn to ask for help sometimes instead of always doing it by myself!

Help, I need somebody,
Help, not just anybody,
Help, you know I need someone, help.

When I was younger, so much younger than today,
I never needed anybody's help in any way.
But now these days are gone, I'm not so self assured,
Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors.

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being round.
Help me, get my feet back on the ground,
Won't you please, please help me.

And now my life has changed in oh so many ways,
My independence seems to vanish in the haze.
But every now and then I feel so insecure,
I know that I just need you like I've never done before.

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being round.
Help me, get my feet back on the ground,
Won't you please, please help me.

When I was younger, so much younger than today,
I never needed anybody's help in any way.
But now these daya are gone, I'm not so self assured,
Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors.

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being round.
Help me, get my feet back on the ground,
Won't you please, please help me, help me, help me, oh.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Congratulations To....ME! I Received The Versatile Bloggers Award, My Very First Blog Award!

VERSATILE BLOGGER AWARD!!!!!!!!!

I would like to first start out by thanking Shalunya from Gypsy Shalunya Graceful living under trying circumstances for giving me this awesome award. I am extremely excited to accept it because it is my very first blogger award. I'd like to thank Shalunya, for this truly remarkable award, Susan for inspiring me to use the deep desire to write to start out as a blogger, Mo for being the first person to follow my work as an inexperienced but anxious and eager blogger, Selena for always encouraging me to express more, and Migrainista for being my most devoted follower. Shalunya wrote...

I always love reading your blog and I wanted to make sure I told you so!!! I am passing the Versatile Bloggers Award onto you.

Rule #1: Thank the person who gave you the award. Shalunya from Gypsy Shalunya. Rule #2: Share seven things about yourself.

I am passionate about writing, and would love to write for a magazine about health or something like that. I have been secretly writing a fiction novel and auto-biography for several years now. Blogging fills that need to write in me. However, I really enjoy a pen to paper. The books that I'm working on are currently all being done by hand in notebooks.
I was a dancer when I was younger, starting at age 2. I ended up sticking w/ strictly ballet and started dancing for the company St. Louis Performing Arts Centre in MO. It is no longer in business. It was the only Cechetti style ballet in the state at the time. I was in the Nutcracker Suite w/ ballet companies Kansas City Ballet and Dance St. Louis (Missouri State Ballet). I would love to dance again, and although my many joint and connective tissue diseases keep me from physically dancing again, I will always "be" a dancer. No one can take that away from me. In my mind, I am always dancing...
I am living 2 completely separate lives. And in one of my lives that I have kept secret for many, many years, I am beginning to share w/ others my abilities as a clairaudient, a clairsentient, an intuitive (mostly medical), and an energy healer. I'm still in the early stages of understanding it, but I believe my purpose is to help others to better deal w/ pain, lose, illness, and injury as God works through me.
My husband and I are in the process of adopting a baby/a child/siblings. We have been trying to adopt for 6 years and have worked w/ several agencies including the state to adopt a foster child/siblings. The state even lost our paperwork. Now we feel very content w/ our adoption facilitator out of California, Lifetime Adoption. We are at the end, just awaiting a match for a birth mother to pick us. If anyone is interested in finding more about us because you know of someone who is pregnant and thinking about adoption, visit Dana and Jim's Adoption Website.
I love the paranormal and supernatural! It fascinates me! I read and learn all about it from past lives, to ghosts and spirits, to haunted houses, to psychics and mediums, to astral travel, to magic, to animal totems, to angels and spirit guides....and I could go on and on. I even went to a paranormal and metaphysical convention last month in Atlanta, Through the Veil. I met some wonderful people, like Chip Coffey, Chris Fleming, and Christopher Moon--all of which can be seen on paranormal TV programs!
My husband and I have lived together in MO, KY, RI and now GA in our 10 years of marriage and our 16 years of being together (11 of those years were together-together under the same room). Of course, we did stay together a lot when we lived in the same dorm in St. Louis, and I would stay w/ him and his mom in their apartment as well.
Not surprising at all that I have several joint and connective tissue diseases, both auto-immune and not because I have always been so empathic to those around me, feeling what they feel. I have taken on entirely too much pain from those around me in my life, and now have so many chronic pain conditions--I can't even call it irony! I call it a burden that my body cannot carry anymore. My body's foundation literally cannot carry anyone elses problems, pain or issues anymore. I realized in my late 20's and early 30's that a person must take care of themselves before ever helping anyone else. You cannot help anyone if you are not strong enough to stand on your own. If someone needed a walker to use to help them to walk, they would not use one that had a wobbly leg. So why would you lean on someone for help all the time, that can't even help herself? I am helping myself now. My meds are working, I'm exercisng, I had a hip replacement in '03 at age 29 and a shoulder replacement this past March at age 35. So, basically, I'm becoming stronger physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually!

Rule #3: Pass the award onto 15 bloggers who you have recently discovered and you think are are fantastic!!

I love these blogs so much (and Shalunya's and Migrainista's) as well. Of course, Shalunya just received her award in order to pass it on to myself and Migrainista so I'm giving the other well-deserved versatile bloggers their turn for this award! So Rock on Bloggers!!!! Thank you all for giving me so much to read, learn, stop to dwell on for a moment, and some of you who have given me great ideas to expand upon with my blog....

SO HERE'S TO YOU ALL..........................................

VERSATILE BLOGGER AWARD!!!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...: Congrats to all! You ARE ALL VERY DESERVING!!!
XOXOXOXO; July 16, 2010 at 1:31 AM
Selena said...: Thanks for the award Dana! I really appreciate it. Now I just need a bit of time to put my post together so I can thank you and pass it along!; July 16, 2010 at 5:42 PM
Nessie said...: Thank you so much! Now I, like Selena, need to have more than five seconds to myself to find 15 more awesome bloggers to pass on some props! :D; July 20, 2010 at 11:44 PM

It's Time You Understood.

I want you to understand that your arthritis is not the same as mine if you tell me "I have arthritis too in my knee sometimes." That is not what I have. I have autoimmune arthritis. I have fatigue, pain, and stiffness in every joint in my body, take very serious medications like biologics which is in IV form every 4 weeks at the hospital's infusion center and chemotherapy pills. The type of autoimmune arthritis diseases that I have affects my eyes, my lungs, my heart, my skin, my ligaments, my tendons, my salivary glands, as well as my joints. Please visit www.causes.com/WorldAutoimmuneArthritisDay to donate $5 for the cause.