Dumpling Days book

 A nice way to ease back into #homeschool routine, reading out loud.

Also a fun way to learn about kids who feel a sense of #belonging in both America AND Taiwan...

and who feel they don't belong in either place.

I asked my son to find Taiwan on the map and realised the map was given to me by a lady from Taiwan. Who now lives in America and has a Cambodian child.

A German friend lent me the book, her family is also Cambodian.

Reading about Chinese food while not eating it is painful though.

#dumplingdays

My grab and go anxiety management tools

Disabling- Enabling- Communicating - this month's word prompts. 

Disabling-Anxiety

A bit of stress occasionally might not need too much thought to live with. But what if the stress bursts in suddenly and looks like it won’t leave anytime soon?  How can you keep getting through each day when every day is overwhelming?

Recently we entered a time that seems like it will be one of prolonged stress. 

Cue anxiety. It is hard to focus and breathe. 

It's pretty intense and looks like it might go on for a while. It's been 2 months already. What tools do I have that I can just grab straight away and start using? What has been helping?

Enabling- On Anxiety Management

Exercise

In normal times I wait until I have a good amount of time to go for a bike ride. I need half an hour or more to make it worth it, enough time to ride to the other side of the park.

But with anxiety threatening to overwhelm I've been taking any bits of time I can. Even if it means only 5km, and even if it’s in a hot part of the day. Even a little bit of movement makes a difference.

On intense days it means I can feel it right away. On not-so-intense days I know it’s still important. If I’m exercising regularly anxiety spikes are less fierce.

And I'm riding through trees and past lakes/moats of water so the scenery is beautiful which helps too.

Breathing

What if you could calm your nervous system for free, (almost) anytime and anywhere?

At first, breathing exercises made me dizzy, but now that I know how to do them, it feels like a superpower.

Deep breathing exercises centre your nervous system. In counselling, I learnt triangle breathing and another similar one. Box breathing is another well-known method.

I felt how much I had come to rely on breathing when I found myself in the hospital earlier this year.

After rushing our child to the hospital I started to feel anxiety building up in my body. Time to breathe! But, it didn’t work with a mask on and it wasn't an option to take it off. (It was the pandemic, and we were in the ICU of a children’s hospital in Cambodia. There were at least 10 very sick, very small children in the room.)

In that situation, all I could do was notice how I felt and deal with it later.

However, in our current season, I'm able to use breathing exercises to manage anxiety. 

Other tools that have been helping include:

Sleep, nutrition, guided imagery, and books.

More on how books have helped:

Reading Narnia out loud has given me a chance to focus on a magical fictional world. While reading I’m holding the physical book in my hands and having to articulate each word. My children and I really enjoyed it. We read all 7 Narnia books over the last few months. Coincidently we just started before this anxiety began. I wrote more about our experience in these 2 posts:
We are deep in Narnia
From the Dawn of Time until the Last Battle.

I was a bit sceptical when I heard about a Christian book on anxiety, was it going to quote "Do not be anxious" at me?

I was proved wrong when I heard the author interviewed on The Pastor's Heart. In fact, the blurb did quote Philippines 4 but in a way that attracted rather than repelled me.

‘Do not be anxious about anything' says the Apostle Paul. But Paul Grimmond says saying that to an anxious person is a bit like telling an ice-cream not to melt in summer.

NB- I haven't actually read this book yet, hoping to one day. It's helping me just by its very existence.  

When the Noise won't stop

A Christian guide to dealing with anxiety 

by Paul Grimmond

Communicating

There is so much hype around the issue that is triggering my anxiety. I don't want to expose myself to unnecessary triggering. I’ve been trying to take in all the relevant information and bypass the rest. Not possible to do it perfectly but a balance to strive for.

I also have to be careful about the time of day I take in information. I know it will stress me out more if it’s later in the day. If there is some big news I need to hear, my husband knows to share it with me at lunchtime rather than in the evening.

 

Thanks for reading. What's on your grab-and-go list? 

Head over here to read what other chronic illness bloggers wrote for these prompts: A Chronic Voice October Linkup

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

What A Sudden Diagnosis Feels Like

 

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay 

BOOM!

A new diagnosis blew our normal week apart.

There had been a bomb ticking but we didn’t know about it until it went off.

The threat of death suddenly joined us.

This new chronic condition in our family began with a swift diagnosis and treatment. Our other conditions have taken a year or more to work out, but this happened within 24 hours. There was no time for unsolicited medical advice this time around! We are so thankful for the local doctors here in Cambodia who saw the problem and took action.

I can’t quite write about it properly yet even though the situation isn't as acute as a month ago. I’m still tired and adjusting but on the path to long-term management.

This month’s A Chronic Voice linkup seemed like a good way to note down a few things from this season. It is still fresh but I can't yet zoom out and describe the whole picture. Having these 5 words lets me narrow it down: Processing, Relying, Retreating, Cancelling and Reframing.

Processing

Being in hospital with a family member was easier this time around. After being a counseling client for a few years I was more equipped this time. I didn’t know it would be like that so it was a nice surprise. I was noticing feelings as they were happening.

Relying

My husband is my favourite person to go through a traumatic medical transition with. We all rely on him at the moment to get through each day.

A few medical and pastoral friends have generously made themselves available to us. It's not an exaggeration to say they are saving our lives with their specific skill set and relationship to us and others.

Retreating and Cancelling

Since day one we had to cancel pretty much everything.

We haven’t done homeschool since then.

We didn’t say goodbye to a family who moved back to their country, we never got to have that last playdate.

We were getting ready to welcome a family moving back to Cambodia after two years but we also had to pull out of helping them. Hope we can catch up with them later on.

Just to survive I haven’t been really checking email or trying to keep up with friends overseas. I’ve been only messaging friends in Cambodia and family.

The first week we could only think hour by hour and were not aware of anything else other than our health. It was hard even to know what day it was or what we would eat. Our extended family shopped, cooked, looked after children. A few ex-pat friends dropped off food and books. I wore the same clothes for days. I only noticed when a friend dropping off food asked if she could wash our clothes.

I had been going to join a homeschool summit online. And I was in the midst of reading some books and on a roll with blog writing (link to my guest posts). All on pause, hope to return one day. (I guess writing this count as a return to writing?!)

We probably won’t do school or meet up with people too much for another couple of months. Although my husband has started back with some Bible and sports activities but not the other classes. I have taken our children out once to a friend’s house, they had so much fun. But I was so tired to the point of forgetting some medical things for about a day or so after that. It freaked me out.

The shock plus the learning curve and the physical tiredness are all-consuming for now. We’re told it will get easier with time and that this is just how things are for now.

Reframing

Finding others with the same diagnosis often helps, but in our case made me feel more isolated for a time.

Others were either dead or managing it with high-tech stuff we don’t have. So it felt like we were doing something dangerous. It doesn’t feel like that anymore, but when it did reframing helped me. I remembered that what is often good for us as a Cambodian/Aus family is different to what is good for anyone else. We don’t fit neatly into either Cambodian or Australian or ex-pats. So of course we are doing this differently. Our current situation suits us; we are in the best possible place to go through this.

One month down, a few more to go?

Now that the bomb blast has settled, the noise is only a ringing in our ears. The shock is present with us but not overpowering. Much of our old normal is gone, maybe only for a time. Some things we will have to work out a new normal.

Head over to the link-up to see how others used this month’s word prompts.

Dear Re-entry

 

Dear Reverse Culture Shock,

I have not enjoyed spending time with you. You are a sneaky thief. Beyond that, your identity is ambiguous. You have made moving back to my passport country horrible.

I’m never sure whether I should call you Reverse Culture Shock or Re-entry. And if Re-entry, how do I spell it? People can’t agree if it’s Re-entry or Reentry.

Even though I have had many dealings with you, I still don’t know what to call you. That says something about your nature. You’re elusive, invisible. 

I wish you were more like your brother Culture Shock. Although also unpleasant, I appreciate that he is obnoxious. Like you, he steals, but in a more obvious way.

Or why can’t you be like your namesake Spacecraft Re-entry? He is loud. Everyone knows he is the most dangerous part of a space journey. Getting back into Earth’s atmosphere is a vulnerable time, and it can be disastrous if is not done carefully.

You are not obvious or loud; you hide away like an afterthought, silently stealing from me.

You stole my house, my job, my friends — lots of tangible things like that but also my skills and identity. You turned me into an incompetent invisible immigrant. On the outside, I look like a normal Australian, but I don’t know how to do anything. At least in Asia, my white skin announces that I will need help talking or eating.

You stole my ability to do things people expect me to be capable of doing. I look like everyone else, so drivers assume I will know how to cross the road. People in the supermarket expect me to be able to buy a box of breakfast cereal.

Read the rest over here: A Life Overseas

When getting sick feels like you’ve landed in a foreign culture (1 of 2)

How I Make Sense of Chronic Dizziness

Part 1- How it started

 “Sorry I can’t come, my husband is dizzy.”

It sounds ridiculous.

Why would I need to cancel something because my husband is a bit dizzy?

And people’s natural responses sounded ridiculous to me.

“Ok, make sure he drinks enough water.”

Photo by Francesco Ungaro from Pexels

When we arrived in Australia we expected reentry/culture shock. We knew we were going to be in a different world and that that would mean stress and disorientation.

It’s an inherent part of your life when you’re an Aussie married to a Cambodian. I’d read books and blogs, talked to people, made my own lists of my own experiences so far. I was expecting the first few months back in Australia to be extra hard.

Being uprooted from the familiar and landing in a new place is exhausting. It helped that we expected it and we could understand where the stress was coming from.

Even though we anticipated this, it was still stressful and painful. Some things might not have been obvious at the time. But later we could look back on it and notice the role culture shock played.

So we entered a new country, Australia. At the same time we also entered the world of undiagnosed debilitating sickness.

We didn’t know we were going into it, and so there was no preparation or expectation of what it would be like. I don’t think I even knew such a world existed.

Unlike culture shock, we had no way to prepare and often no way to even know where the stress was coming from.

Why is a world of undiagnosed debilitating sickness stressful?

Stress #1

Seeing my spouse in pain was bad enough. But not knowing what it was, not having a name for it, not being able to do anything about it — made it worse. There were a few times of acute pain when I actually thought Soeun was going to die. And many months of feeling like he had disappeared under a heavy pile of symptoms. It was hard to imagine that he would come back, as despite all the things we tried he was not improving.

I could see how The Dizzy Monster had transformed him. Since it began its attack the 24/7 fight with it exhausted him. But doctors could only see negative test results, and to others, he looked normal. On one hand, it was a relief when we got the brain CT scan results back and it was all clear. But also frustrating as it meant the enemy was still invisible.

Stress #2

Unsolicited medical advice is a normal part of life for a chronically ill person. The internet is full of articles on how to handle it, and mocking memes. When I learnt this 4 years after the fact it was a big relief!

It’s usually with good intentions. Your friend (or a random guy on the street) tells you that his neighbour tried cutting a certain thing out of his diet. It worked for them so you should try it too and you’ll be better in no time.

When advice is coming at you from many people, and you’ve already tried lots of things it is a source of stress. But because you can see the giver is trying to help you feel you should be polite and say thank you.

Stress #3

Social isolation is another part of chronic illness life. Before entering dizzy world receiving a dinner invitation would have been fun. But it became frustrating and disappointing. We would say “yes” to an invitation but on the day Soeun would be sick so I would end up going by myself, or not going at all.

As a few one-offs, that’s kind of ok. But when it becomes a general pattern it makes life hard. Not being able to keep commitments. Not being able to show people they are important to us by spending time with them. So it’s easier not to make plans, then we don’t have the disappointment of breaking them.

We had a community of people around us who were trying to care for us. We found that even when friends asked how they could help we didn’t know how to reply. The double whamming of entering the two new worlds at once was overwhelming.

Fast forward to now

Almost a decade, two kids, and many house moves later, we are still struggling to live with The Dizzy Monster. But here in Cambodia Soeun’s symptoms aren’t debilitating. Sadly our old normal is gone but the real Soeun is back and we have a new normal.

The stresses didn’t go away when a doctor described his symptoms as Vestibular Migraine. It’s a little-known, little-understood condition so in some ways receiving a diagnosis didn’t make it easier.

Telling people he has Vestibular Migraines seems to make them think he has a headache or a sore ear. These commonplace illnesses don’t describe our experience at all. A huge transformation took place when The Dizzy Monster joined the family.

I could never have guessed what a big impact this would have on us. I thought it was like any other stress we’d had before, that the memory would fade with time. But all these years later making sure he drank enough water feels like putting a band-aid on an amputated leg.

Is it a holiday? Is it a conference? No, it's a...

It’s not like any other travel I’d organised before. 

It’s not a mission trip to a host country. 

It’s not a visit to a passport country. 

It’s not a holiday. 

It’s not a conference. 

It’s not going away for study.

It's a tailor-made international health trip.

Emails flying between 3 countries. Collecting the correct documents for medical matters and crossing international borders. Trying to write a budget with 3 or 4 different currencies. Scheduling doctor's appointments not knowing how long it would take to get there from my accommodation, or how I would do that with no local language or knowledge or sense of direction. Trying to choose the cheaper flights that also matched up with when counsellors and guesthouse beds would be available...   

It felt like such a hassle to have to organise it, and it was annoying that we would all need to put our lives on hold for the duration. Going away cost so much money and I needed many people’s help to make it happen. If only I didn’t live somewhere without these services, there would be no need for a trip like this. I could just slot it into our normal everyday activities.

These were my thoughts as I prepared to have our babies overseas, and more recently as I got ready for two weeks of counselling and medical appointments in a country we have no connections to.  I resented having to travel for fairly run-of-the-mill health events. 

So what was this trip like?

It was a little like a holiday, in that I was in a relaxing environment away from normal life. 

And a little like a conference in that I learnt a lot of exciting things that I’m eager to take back to my real life. 

I was in a country that was neither my passport country nor host country. Daily activities included catching taxis from my accommodation to meetings. They weren’t big group meeting though, rather individual counselling sessions or doctor’s appointments. It was great to finally be able to investigate the mental and physical health issues I had been trying to work on over the last six months.

And the accommodation wasn’t just a place to sleep. It’s a little like a guesthouse, but specifically for cross-cultural workers. People often stay and rest when they visit the town for a holiday, health care, between conferences and while in transition between countries. 

This means I was instantly part of a community of others who have similar (but very different) life experiences and who are also there for counselling, or having babies and a variety of other reasons. Joining feels so easy and enjoyable; it makes the whole experience of a health trip even more valuable. I don’t know how to describe just how amazing it is to be briefly immersed in relationships that start and end quickly but with a connection that feels so unique and deep.

And it means it felt slightly reminiscent of living on Bible college campus, each family or individual has their own place to sleep but we all eat together. Perfect balance of personal space and community life. The big difference being that instead of classes to attend there is a pool, gardens and playgrounds. Other differences are that people often arrive and depart via the international airport, and stays are usually measured in weeks rather than years. 

It also means that I could really focus on my health as food and laundry is all taken care of onsite. Counselling and getting blood tests results back is exhausting, so I didn’t have energy for much else.  The only “housework” I needed to do while there was collect drinking water from the dining room, and drop my clothes off at the laundry.

Being away from both my passport and host country meant that I was free from any distractions and obligations. I could use all my brain space and energy on the specific things I needed help with.  Instead of resenting that I had to travel for health care, I’m actually really glad now. It worked really well. I feel like it was more helpful doing it like this than doing things from home, slotted in around normal life.

I remember the same feeling when we were away to have our first baby. It had been so hard to get there, and I was annoyed I couldn’t just do things from home like pregnant friends in my passport country. But when we were there, it felt so beneficial to have that family time away while going through such a big transition.

Yes, it was expensive, time consuming, and I needed a lot of help to make it happen; especially from my poor husband who basically had to put things on hold for a couple of weeks. But it turned out to be really effective in the ways we were hoping, as well as enjoyable. In fact so enjoyable I almost didn't want to come home!  It's a strange thing to have such meaningful memories in a country we aren't connected to in any other way. 

My clean laundry waiting for me! Boring photo but exciting moment.

I was excited to see Velvet Ashes this week is all about TRAVEL. I wanted some way to remember this whole experience of a two week counselling intensive while staying in a missionary retreat, so this blog post is what I came up with. 

I enjoyed being driven around by drivers who know where to go, on smooth roads, in closed vehicles with suspension. 

Photo by Owen Beard on Unsplash