2019: The Year of Acceptance

Chantelle
January 8, 2019
Healing / Law Of Attraction / Manifesting / Personal Development

Happy New Year, everyone! Welcome to 2019, a year that I will hopefully learn to just “go with the flow” and accept what is. I have always considered myself a free spirit, but honestly, sometimes I’m such a worry wart. I catch myself in this spiral of horrid thinking about how I’m a such a failure and I’m not where I thought I would be by almost 30. 2019 will be a year of acceptance so that I won’t drown myself with these thoughts anymore. If you are someone I know personally, you know that I have recently gotten over an illness that left me unemployed. If you don’t know me, to sum it up, 2018 was one of those years that was all about setbacks and the lessons that come with them. It wasn’t my favorite year, but at the same time, I’m lucky that I have such an awesome support system to help me through these hard times. I am still unemployed and searching every day, and I…

Why I Actually Hate The Holidays..

Chantelle
December 1, 2018
Minimalism / Personal Development / Vegan / Zero Waste

The older I get, the more I hate the holidays; Especially Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a holiday that essentially celebrates genocide, and we do this by killing 300,000,000 turkeys a year. That’s right... Three hundred million! Then, before the night is over after we get done saying how grateful we are, we go and spend a shit-ton of money on gifts for the people we’re grateful for. Some of us even put ourselves into debt because of this. It’s a huge consumerism trap, and I’m finally breaking free. Some people may think I’m just crazy, but hear me out. Without giving a huge history lecture, basically, a group of white refugees came to a new country fleeing their corrupt government. The natives greeted them with a feast and blessings, welcoming them with open arms. Then the white men went on to almost wipe out their entire race, raping their women and stealing their land. Now, we celebrate these events by buying a turkey. Here’s a little history video about that. After…

At Home and Healing (Pancreatitis Series #4)

Chantelle
November 23, 2018
Healing / Healthy Living / Uncategorized / Weight Loss

Welcome to the fourth and final part of my pancreatitis series. Finally, I’m at home and healing. I know this part took quite a while to be released. It’s almost as if I didn’t know where to end it because the healing process has been anything but quick. Whenever I thought things would get better, some curveball would come at me. Some unforeseen complication would disrupt my healing process. If you’re new to my blog, welcome, but you’re going to want to read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of this series before continuing on with this post. (Also, note that this is not my normal blogging style. These posts are also significantly longer than my norm.) Because a lot of the days at home healing was a lot of doing nothing, nodding out of high doses of pain medication, I am going to only elaborate days of importance. October 23, 2018 (TUESDAY) I woke up this morning at 281 lbs, and the realization of a 16-pound weight loss…

Transferred To The Hospital (Pancreatitis Series #2)

Chantelle
November 3, 2018
Healing / Healthy Living / Journaling / Mental Health

In my last blog, I explained the events that lead up to me being in the ER and being transferred to another hospital to get emergency gallbladder removal surgery. This is a continuation of that, so if you haven't read the first part yet, start HERE. October 6, 2018 (SATURDAY still): Officially At Hotel Riverbend I was getting settled into my new room around 7:30 pm. It was nice, and when I say nice, I mean it was nicer than a lot of hotels I’ve stayed in. I had my own bathroom and on-call room service. It was very nice. Not to mention, I was on the 8th floor of a building that looked over the Willamette River and the flowing hills of Springfield, OR. It was beautiful. Around 9 p.m. I was getting antsy. Why would they tell me I need emergency surgery around 2 p.m. and at 9 p.m. I’m still waiting, sitting around watching HGTV in a motorized bed? When the next CNA comes in to…

My First Trip To the Emergency Room (Pancreatitis Series #1)

Chantelle
October 28, 2018
Healthy Living / Journaling / Mental Health

The last few weeks have been such a blur and I have been trying really hard to piece together the fragments of memories I have of this time frame that I spent in the suite at Riverbend Peace Health. It all started with my trip to the Emergency Room. To clarify my absence, I was in the hospital with pancreatitis the last 2+ weeks. I have never felt pain like that before. In fact, one of my many nurses during my stay told me that the pain I was feeling at the time was comparable to a drug-free childbirth. She came to this conclusion by the amount of Dilaudid they had to give me to get ahead of the pain. Because my memory of what happened was so bad, during the final days there I went through text messages I had sent to family members and coworkers and sat down with nurses that were in my care, in order to get some sort of timeline together. I was on so…