The Wake Ode To My Misery Rar
Madelyn Grindel
I also shower before bed because being in a warm shower actually cools your body as it compensates for the environmental change, such as through vasodilation to allow the environment to extract more heat. The water evaporating off your body as you exit the shower also cools you.
The opposite is also true. Do not take a cold shower or ice bath before bed, as your body will undergo compensatory warming mechanisms, like vasoconstriction, making it difficult to fall asleep when you get into your comparatively warmer bed.
Whether or not you get quality sleep and feel refreshed in the morning and focused throughout the day depends on this routine. What your routines look like will vary according to what works best for you, but there are some basic, science-backed principles to follow.
When you wake up, build going outside and getting natural light exposure into your morning routine. You may be far from bedtime, but exposing yourself to sunlight within the first hour of waking will have a direct impact on your sleep quality later that night.
One final note on napping. If you have trouble falling asleep at night, avoid naps during the day, as they can reduce your sleep pressure, our need or desire for sleep, making it more difficult to fall asleep later that night.
Try going to bed and waking up early for a few weeks and see how it makes you feel. You may find you really are a night owl, or you may find, like me, that you vastly prefer waking up early in the morning. Find the fun in the experimentation.
In either case, develop a consistent routine you can stick to. Waking up rested and recharged will revolutionize your focus and energy throughout the day, helping you to study more effectively, push yourself harder in the gym, be someone others want to be around, and, most importantly, not be miserable.
On the 25th anniversary of the devastating storm, here's a look back at a few of the stories UPI reporters gathered in the days after Andrew hit:Related
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-- Among the hardest hit cities by Hurricane Andrew was Homestead. There, City Manager Alex Muxo said about 90 percent of city employees lost their homes, and though massive amounts of food, water and other supplies were donated, there was little mechanism in place for distribution.Advertisement
-- One Florida fisherman said he'd never forget the moment he watched his two friends die while trying to save a fishing boat. The then-28-year-old Stephen Suszek survived but was shipwrecked on Elliott Key in Biscayne Bay for a day.Advertisement
-- For some children, the destruction of Hurricane Andrew was particularly terrifying. For Rachel Fabelo, then 29, a stay at a Miami shelter meant more than just worrying about how to restart. She also had to worry about how the storm impacted her daughter's emotional well-being.Advertisement
"When are we gonna have a new start? Who's gonna help us? How long is it gonna take? How much longer do we have to put up living like this?" Fabelo asked a UPI reporter after losing her Cutler Ridge home south of Miami.
Carolyn Kendrick said at the time she was considering moving to the tent city after rats became a problem at her devastated house in Homestead where she lived with her husband, four children and four grandchildren.Advertisement
-- Andrew made landfall on the southern coast of Louisiana on Aug. 26, 1992, near Morgan City. Four feet of water flooded the streets of Lisa Park subdivision in northern Houma. The storm also knocked out power and a tornado damaged one home in Terrebonne Parish.
During Advent and shortly before Christmas, a friend confided in me that she had a miscarriage. It was in the early stages, and she was waiting to pass her baby naturally, without a D&C. As Christmas fast approached, I thought of her and her agony. I wondered what it must be like to face Jesus as an infant when she had just lost her own baby. How did she experience any of the wonder and joy in the wake of such tragedy?
I think of the liturgical season of Lent and how it affords us the time to enter into the desert with Jesus, to encounter the temptations He once did as He faced the devil with alacrity. Jesus purposefully set aside the luxuries and necessities of life so that He could live out this type of spiritual emptiness, a misery that leaves us with nothing to offer God but the chasm inside. That space must exist before God can fill us with Himself, and Jesus knew that as he contemplated His mission and ministry during those 40 days in the desert.
This is not misery in a despairing sense. No, this is a misery that is truth. It is the reality of the human condition that we are weak and fragile and broken in body and soul. And, because of this truth, we need God. Nothing can replace the ache we have for the eternal, certainly not maintaining our brokenness that reveals itself in ugly ways. Why hold on to our anger? Why justify our fears and failures? Instead of keeping them as possessions, it would behoove us to give them to the Lord, to hand them over as He handed Himself over in the Garden of Gethsemane.
I thought of what an incredible and paradoxical consolation it is to ponder how beautiful and pleasing to God our misery is when we give it to Him in prayer. Sometimes we erroneously believe we must give something extravagant or come up with creative ways to sacrifice more to God when all He wants is our sorrow, pain, and strife. It may be so valuable to do this, because we finally come to a place of total dependence on Him for everything, not just the ephemeral wants and needs we tend to take to prayer. It may also be so that we, at last, understand firsthand that to fully and totally love requires nothing less than a state of helplessness, of our fate being handed over to Him.
JEANNIE EWING is a Catholic spirituality writer and national inspirational speaker. Among her eight books, From Grief to Grace: The Journey from Tragedy to Triumph, is her most popular. She is a frequent guest on podcasts, radio shows, and has appeared on EWTN, CatholicTV, and ShalomWorld. Her deepest desire is to accompany those who suffer and are lonely. Visit her website at jeannieewing.com for more information.
The misery began around 4:30 a.m. with the sound of my 7-year-old thumping into the hallway. He had already been up once, complaining of a stomachache. This time, I scrambled out of bed and shushed him so he wouldn't wake up his 2-year-old brother. He looked at me and moaned. Then he puked all over the floor.
"Poor Zach," I thought as he catnapped, simultaneously considering the other downsides. We were bound to be cranky after starting the day so early. Also, he clearly wasn't going to school. Would I be able to meet a deadline while tending to him?
Then came the beginning of my own personal hell. Around 6:30, I rushed to the bathroom for the beginning of what would become hours of violent upheaval. I hadn't thrown up since I was around Zach's age, during a flu so horrific that I thought I'd since suppressed the ability to vomit. But no.
By about 9 a.m., Zach had relocated to the living room, where he watched Lego Star Wars cartoons, occasionally sitting up to puke in a pot. He was very casual about the whole thing. I stayed upstairs, curled up in bed, too weak to move, too worried to stray far from the bathroom, too zonked even to read.
His list included protozoa such as giardia, as well as toxins produced by bacteria that regularly get into rice. He rattled off common varieties of foodborne bacteria that sicken one in six Americans every year. Among them: Salmonella, Campylobacter and E. coli, which is implicated in an outbreak linked to Chipotle restaurants. (A more recent outbreak from a Chipotle in Boston appears to have been caused by norovirus, according to NPR's Dan Charles.)
We hadn't eaten at Chipotle, but contaminated food was one of my first theories, a hypothesis I developed not long after the "just shoot me" phase of my illness had ended around noon. Only Zach and I had eaten the enchilada pie I'd made for dinner the night before. And we had fallen ill at the same time. I was pretty sure I had discovered the smoking gun of our gruesome mystery.
As soon as I had enough energy the next morning, I opened the fridge and took action. Out went all leftovers (enchilada pie first), everything in the vegetable drawer and any sauce that had been open for more than three days. I even eyed the bunny graham crackers and wondered if bad germs could survive there, too. I suspected my behavior might be irrational, but it felt good to take control over an invisible threat that could be lurking anywhere.
Soon, though, came a new clue that cast doubt on my smoking enchilada. The next night, my husband, Gabe, fell ill. "I'm dying," he texted me from the bathroom floor, where I found him lying around midnight. His skin was gray. He couldn't sit up. He could barely move. Two days later, we learned of two more cases: Zach's teacher and Gabe's colleague.
Without stool samples to cultivate for bacteria or analyze for pathogenic DNA or RNA, it's impossible to know for sure what the culprit was, Schwab cautioned. But, he said, many aspects of our experience are consistent with the dreaded and remarkably common norovirus. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, norovirus strikes about 20 million Americans every year. By comparison, Campylobacter affects 1.3 million people and Salmonella infects another million. Those are the two most common bacterial causes of gastroenteritis.
Not everyone is as lucky as we were. Norovirus sends tens of thousands of people to the hospital each year and kills as many as 800. Overall, estimates the CDC, foodborne illnesses kill about 3,000 Americans annually.
Notoriously affiliated with cruise-ship outbreaks, noroviruses (and there are 150 strains) cause half of all food-related outbreaks, according to the CDC. But they can also move among victims within about eight to 48 hours of contact with surfaces, food or objects contaminated by a sick person's vomit or stool. Symptoms strike quickly, often with projectile vomiting that doesn't always wait for one's arrival in the bathroom.
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