“Stop licking! NO.” That’s Angel yelling at our dog, P.S. right now. It stands for Peggy Sue, and that’s the name that she came with. We got her as a retired breeder from Indiana a couple years ago. P.S. has some quirks about her, but overall she’s a great dog. Well, having a dog, to my surprise, totally impacts your life. It did for me, at least. See, I never had a dog growing up. Other than some quick-to-die beta fish, the most that we had was a rabbit. Hazel (as we named her) never really did that much except try to run away whenever we let her out. Despite some annoyances (like the compulsive licking), P.S. does a few things that I try to do myself:
1. Dogs listen to you ramble. Around the time of our wedding, Angel was out of town a lot planning, and P.S. moved in with me. I was stressed with my old job and wedding stuff. P.S. was always there (what, it’s not like she’s going to the store or anywhere) and never seems to mind when I talk about life.
2. Dogs forgive you quickly. P.S., being only a bit taller than my ankles, has had a few accidental kicks from both Angel and me when she nips at our heels. Despite the kick, she always seems to forget about it in less than a minute. Angel and our friend Karen can attest to this, but I enjoy wrestling with our dog. P.S.? Doesn’t enjoy it as much as I do. Even after she gives me her dirty look, she always forgets about it and comes back.
3. Dogs aren’t picky. Listen, any animal that eats its own poop (remember how I said P.S. has some quirks?) doesn’t have discriminating tastes. I think if P.S. could talk, she would tell me that she likes any food, just as long as it’s not spicy. Do I think that it’s good to eat poop? I think that’s way too far (sorry to burst your bubble P.S.), but the idea of being flexible in your expectations is something that I think you can really learn from dogs.
4. Dogs are enthusiastic. You’d think that when I work all day and come home to let P.S. out, she would be pretty angry about that. Well, as I pointed out, she forgives pretty quickly. Not only that, but she gets excited about pretty much anything that I do with her.
5. Dogs continually seek to entertain you. P.S. has this quirk (yes, another one) about wrapping herself in her blanket until she’s a little mummy. When she’s ready to come out, it’s pretty hilarious:
So, that’s my list of 5. Do you have a dog? How do you think we should be more like dogs?
First off, I strongly recommend the book I’m reading right now: Surprised by Hope by NT Wright.
I think I read NT Wright in a Bible class at Wheaton, but I’m pretty sure it was the class I took with the worst Bible prof Wheaton has probably had. He was no longer teaching right after the semester I had him for New Testament. The highest grade in our class on our midterm exam was a D. For New Testament. At Wheaton College.
Anyway, because of the other negative parts of the class, I don’t think I paid much attention to Wright.
But now, reading through this book for pleasure and for desire of the knowledge it contains, I am really falling in love with Wright as a writer. He reminds me a whole lot of CS Lewis, and that’s pretty sweet, because he’s still alive. Hence, there is a chance I could interact with him some day. I probably won’t, but the mere prospect makes me happier to read his writing.
But on to the topic of the book…
Ever been confused about what happens when we die? There are a lot of scriptures about this, but I always felt confused. People say you go to heaven when you die. Movies show the saved knocking on St. Peter’s gates, being let in if they were good (or for Bible-fearing Christians, if their names were written in the Lamb’s book of life). Then the saints sit around worshiping God, falling on their faces and calling Him ‘holy’ for the rest of their lives.
I’ve heard that you see everyone you know when you get to heaven, that it’s okay to lose Christian loved ones to death, because they’re waiting for you “on the other side.”
And then there’s “the other side of the other side” aka hell. In youth group, I remember being shown a video about a girl who died in a car accident and went to hell. The video graphically showed a place of horrific terror. Then at the end of the video, the girl came back to life and knew that she had to change her life so she wouldn’t go to that awful place. I can’t count the number of altar calls I’ve heard given with the threat of “Do you know where you would go if you walked out of this building today and got hit by a bus?”
People die, they go to heaven if they’re good (or if they accept Jesus, depending on whether you’re a Christian or you’re following popular belief about life after death in our culture); they go to hell if they’re bad (or if they reject Jesus).
Okay, easy enough.
But then I knew the Bible has all this stuff about “new heavens” and “new earth.” What does that mean anyway? What is a glorified body? Do dead people have consciousness?
I won’t say any more for now because I have to go to bed, but I will say that NT Wright’s book answers these questions with great sensibility and understanding of Scripture. My thoughts on heaven, hell, salvation, resurrection, Kingdom of God, stewardship of the earth, and so much more have been radically transformed by this book. Check back soon for part two…
I have a doctor’s appointment scheduled this Friday, my first since last October. Not October as in three months ago, but the October before that, right after we got engaged. I knew that engaged women need to go to the doctor and figure out “family planning.” All the Christian relationship/engagement/sex books talk about that. So within three weeks of our engagement, Matt and I were sitting in the doctor’s office talking about contraception methods. I was nervous, as I always am when going to the doctor, but overall it wasn’t too awful. I didn’t feel like she gave us too many revelations, but she did support our decision to go with birth control pills as the cheapest, most foolproof method.
She scheduled me for a pap smear the next week and said she would write me a birth control prescription when I was ready to start taking it.
The next week I went back for the pap smear and promptly regretted our decision to get married. It was SO painful. I had heard that it would be uncomfortable, but that it shouldn’t be painful. So when it hurt, I told my doctor, and she tried a smaller instrument. It still hurt, just as badly, so she stopped and said that since it was hurting, I shouldn’t have a pap smear done until after I was sexually active.
Wait. So sex is going to hurt this badly??
I tried asking her some clarifying questions to see why it was better to have my husband hurt me this much rather than a doctor.
“It won’t hurt the same when you break your hymen having sex,” she said. “It will be quicker and you’ll want to do it. It’s better than having your hymen stretched during a pap smear.”
I walked out of the exam room with a newfound awe for every married woman I saw. I stared at the receptionist’s wedding ring as I turned in my paperwork after the appointment. How did she endure such pain? How is she so happy, calm, and normal?
I walked bowlegged for two days after that attempted pap smear, and it wasn’t even a FULL procedure! She never even got near the cervix!
So here we are, over a year later.
Our insurance has changed, so I’m going to a new doctor. Sex doesn’t hurt anymore (that is a story for another self-disclosing post), and I’m pretty sure my hymen is stretched enough to handle the pap smear this time.
But my general fear of doctors and my memory of the last pap smear are not making it easy to approach this next appointment with peace. What if she isn’t gentle enough? Honestly, the idea of anything touching my cervix still weirds the heck out of me, the same kind of feeling I get when someone tries to stick a finger in my belly button. It’s not painful, exactly, but it’s intolerable.
So that’s where I’m at this week…dreading Friday’s cold, sterile table, barely-there paper gown, and awkward stirrups. I guess it seems a little silly to pray about a pap smear in light of global tragedies like Haiti’s earthquake, but thankfully God is big enough to handle both. I will be praying during that appointment and asking for supernatural peace. I’ll let you know how it goes. Fortunately, I have Avatar to look forward to on Saturday as a reward for my suffering on Friday.
P.S. Something funny: When I showed this post to Matt, he said, “Wow. That’s really self-disclosing. But I like it. It’s from the heart…or from the cervix.”
I’ve determined that blog writing is difficult in the early stages. It’s the awkward time when you don’t really know who your audience is yet. And if you don’t have an audience in mind when you’re writing, writer’s block is pretty much guaranteed. At least for me. Maybe I’m too much of a people pleaser, but I’d like to think it’s because I’m a decent writer. I write in completely different styles, about completely different topics, and with varying levels of self-disclosure depending on who I imagine I’m writing to.
So I’m still playing around with who I think I’m writing to on this blog.
Ideally, we want to grow our readership and speak to people we don’t even know about super intimate topics (like how I’m terrified of my first married pap smear coming up soon). But for now, our readers mostly consist of close friends who click on our Facebook links and may not want to know about my pap smear fears. Hence, we continue writing glib, simplistic posts. You see the conundrum, right?
To remedy this problem, I will begin categorizing posts based on level of self-disclosure versus topics. That way, those of you who are totally weirded out by TMI about our marriage, our bodily functions, or emotions in general can skip to the more light-hearted posts (like about food and martial arts) or the strictly theological posts.
Matt’s not home right now and I haven’t talked to him about this (communication is very key in a healthy marriage, you know), so we may change this system up. But for now, look for the categories. I’m going to try out the new system by posting two more posts. One highly self-disclosing, one minimally self-disclosing with lots of theological pondering. Read accordingly.
For this post, we’re going to answer the questions Angel posed in a recent blog for her work blog, Inspired Faith.
1. How did God reveal His hand and presence in 2009?
A: For me, it was in many small ways throughout the year. It was a fairly tough year spiritually for me, mostly because of my stress from my job at the beginning of the year. I had a lot of pent up anger and frustration that kind of carried over into the entire year. Even now, I find my temper much more easily roused than ever before, and that makes it difficult to be sensitive to the Spirit in daily life. But continuing to stay plugged in at church and with other believers, including my wonderful husband, has helped provide reminders of God’s presence. Just the other night, when I lost my temper, instead of ignoring it and relishing my feelings of anger and frustration as I’ve done so much this year, I felt convicted and asked Jesus to renew my mind again. Not huge revelations or anything, but it’s what I need right now.
M: There have been a lot of job transitioning for me this year. At the beginning of the year, I started selling gym memberships. I knew it was going to be a demanding schedule and hard work, but I looked at it more of a stepping stone into a higher role in the gym. In fact, that’s what the GM told me: if you want to be a department head, then you have to start selling memberships. Fine, I thought, but I didn’t know what I would have to give up to fit their requirements. Even though I was told that I wouldn’t have to work Sunday mornings, I found myself scheduled in. I was at the club six days a week, all evenings. I was told to essentially lie to customers by saying, “This offer ends at the 15th of the month,” when I knew full and well that it didn’t. I wasn’t happy, and I began to see the company and people for who they are, not on the pedestal that I put them on. I’m not saying that I don’t like the company or my former coworkers, in fact the opposite. The company, in my opinion, has a good mission and vision, and the people who work there work hard and care about what they do. It’s just that our priorities clashed, and it really wasn’t working out.
So, I had been interviewing in March/April. I was meeting with some great folks in some great companies. Towards the end of April, I had an interview scheduled with a telemarketing company for a customer service role. The sticking point was that the only open time slot was during my shift at the gym. The day before my interview, I went to talk to my boss and we talked about how the job was going for me. I told him how our priorities were crossed, and he understood. He asked me, “Do you want to stick with us?” and, on the spot, I told him no (this was big for me, I’m pretty indecisive). That worked for the best, because the next day I found out that it was a working interview (interview, then try out the job,hiring decision made at the end of the day), and if I went to work at the gym that day instead of the working interview, I wouldn’t have gotten the job.
Unfortunately, the job was in sales at this telemarketing job. Fortunately, though, I got a call a week later from Simple Truths. Dan hired me to head up the Social Media campaigns, and that is where I have been ever since. To sum up, God has been faithful in a recession job market. He provided me with the right opportunity at the right time, even if it didn’t make sense to me.
2. What was your happiest moment?
A: Maybe TMI, but figuring out sex for the first time. In a non-TMI way, every time Matt and I have deeply connected emotionally.
M: I think my happiest moment of the year was watching Angel walk down the aisle… at Wal-Mart. Just kidding, at our wedding. Times like that let me know that I am really blessed.
3. What was your most defeated moment?
A: Lame, but the other night, I couldn’t get my windshield wiper on my car. When Matt and I were cleaning it off before I left for church choir practice and he was going to leave to talk to a tae kwon do school, I accidentally knocked the passenger side blade off. It was snowing that night and so cold, so trying to put it back on wasn’t easy for either of us. I also have a history of frustrating windshield wiper moments. Two years ago, when my blade came off, I accidentally snapped the metal attachment down and cracked my windshield, which later had to be replaced. Last year, I was replacing my wiper blades because the old ones were getting so bad, I almost crashed one day coming home from work in a snowstorm. (I was praying, “Jesus, just help me make it to Target and I’ll buy new wiper blades – I’ll even get the expensive ones.”) So anyway, I was putting the new expensive ones on last winter, and it took forever to get one of them on. I just have a hard time figuring out the mechanics while also freezing my rear off. So the same thing happened again this time. We were both having trouble putting it on. It was dark outside, and our fingers were getting numb from the cold. Finally, I told Matt to go ahead and leave, and I would go inside and watch the youtube tutorial on how to put them on that I watched last year. I watched the video, then went outside and tried again. Nope. Didn’t work. When my fingers were numb again, I came back in and watched another video tutorial. Went out again. Still didn’t work. I was so frustrated (precisely because I know it shouldn’t be hard to put on a windshield wiper blade!) I sat on top of the car, even though there was ice and snow on it and got my pants soaking wet because I was determined to do this simple thing. IT STILL DIDN’T GO ON. I finally came inside sobbing because my entire body was numb, my butt was wet, my fingers hurt, I was going to miss choir practice, Matt wasn’t even home anymore to take over on the installation, and I still hadn’t managed to get the blade on. Stupid reason, but definitely my most emotionally frustrating experience of 2009. The next day, Matt went out and put on the blade in the daylight and got it done in about 30 seconds. I love my husband.
M: I can point to two times, relatively similar. I’m still processing through them, so forgive me if they’re “duh!” moments for you. Anyway, both my Mom and Dad have been in the hospital in the last four-week period. They’re getting older, so it makes sense that they’re running into more health issues than before. What gets me, though is that the conditions they experience recently have been more lifestyle related than genetics related. This strikes a chord in me, because I bought them gym memberships, work out with them, and give them nutrition advice ( Am I a doctor? No, but I’ve picked up enough from working at the gym to know the basics). So, despite my efforts, they are still experiencing health issues that most likely could have been prevented.
I know that I need to respect their boundaries, and my parents will do what they will do. I can’t force them to work out every day, reduce stress, and eat right. Deep down, though, it still makes me feel like I’ve failed them. Like I couldn’t motivate them enough to change their habits and avoid illness. So, that’s where I’m left. Looking on the bright side, this has been a sobering month, and they’re realizing the need to make some changes. They are finding their own motivation, and that works out just fine for me.
4. What do you wish you had done more of?
A: Praying.
M: Staying on task.
5. What do you wish you had done less of?
A: Losing my temper.
M: Worrying.
6. What was the greatest book you read?
A: My memory isn’t really good enough to remember which books I’ve read in which year, but I do know one I read this year that was good was The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam
M: Trust Agents by Chris Brogan
7. What was the most meaningful film you watched?
A:Blindness
M:Food, Inc
8. What song reminds you of 2009?
A: “When I Fall in Love”
M: “Jai Ho”
9. Who was the most influential person you met?
A: Pastor Ross, Pastor Rich, and Bob (some of our leaders at Calvary)
M: Randall Ross
10. What did you do in 2009 that you had never done before?
A: Planned a wedding, got married, lived with Matthew, owned nice pots and pans (thanks to Matthew’s cousins and Leslie
M: Sex!
11. What were you most afraid of?
A: Getting pregnant and the implications that might have for our future plans.
I get this question a lot. ”So… how’s married life?” I often find it hard to explain, since I don’t go through my day thinking about how things are different now that I am no longer single. I usually respond with, “Umm… it’s good.”
Sitting down and thinking about it, there’s a lot that’s different about married life. To let you know, I have: lived in my parents’ home (20 years, baby!), in a dorm at school, and with four other guys in a house. Marriage is very different from all three of them, especially the last one. In fact, it’s kind of funny to think of how different living with four guys is from one woman. Here’s the breakdown:
Laundry: It was a glorious day the first day after the wedding that I rushed off to my Wushu class. I had thought that my workout shirt would be sweaty and smelly from the last class, but magically it was clean and hung in the closet. It was as if the laundry fairies had visited our apartment!
Cooking: Before getting married, I lived with Dan Matundan, a graduate of the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Chicago. The other guys liked cooking too, not to mention myself. I seriously gained fat and weight when I lived there (more on that later). We had food all the time. There were always leftovers, and when there weren’t there was someone cooking. We had meat pretty much every meal, and always extra.
Cooking for two is a bit different than for five. We eat well, but I notice that food goes bad in the fridge a lot more often than in the other house. On the other hand, I am eating less meat, more vegetables, and less overall.
Date Night Every Night: Well, maybe not every night. Not too much staying up late and talking, either. But, it is nice not to have to “go home” at the end of the night. Movie nights, eating in… I’m a fan.
Sex: Well, let’s just say it didn’t happen before and it does now, end of story.
When we went to China, our professor told us to take pictures, journal, and remember what it was to first see things. He told us this because we would soon take the differences for granted, and forget the differences. I think the same thing about marriage, remember the nice little things before they settle into regular life.
You’re probably all dying to hear about Matt’s other passions (I’ll give you a hint about one of his major passions–it was the very last thing he wrote about in the previous post) or at the least some controversial theology…
But, unfortunately, once again, life finds us ridiculously busy.
I work 34 hours a week at Matt’s company, Simple Truths and baby-sit for 8 hours on Friday nights, so my schedule is getting pretty packed. We have enjoyed a few more get-togethers with some of our neighbors and hope to have more in the future. We’ve been keeping up with some friends, but there are many more who remain on our list of friends we need to hang out with soon, but haven’t been able to yet. (Parties are a great way to reconnect with many people at once. Keep having them, everyone!)
Our weekends have been pretty busy lately with family coming in from Indiana to visit us. This weekend we are going to the gospel choir concert at Wheaton. For Thanksgiving, we are going to Michigan and then Toronto to visit Matt’s family. Then after that, Christmas craziness starts. Every weekend is already full of parties, get-togethers, concerts, etc. Lots of stuff going on, but it will all be fun. Just no time for blogging
But we WILL try to make time for some meaningful posts. I was just encouraged this morning by our Axiom meeting to begin working on my book for real. I have a little dream to write a book designed for engaged Christians a.k.a. sex newbs. I looked everywhere for a book designed for that purpose before we got married and found nothing fully devoted to that subject. I like writing and opining, so I figured I would make an attempt to put something out there. If nothing else, you may be seeing a lot of posts related to the book as I work on it over the next several months.
Well, time to hit the sack. We played volleyball tonight at church. It was saweet, but we’re both pretty pooped now. Till next time!
I figured it’s time that I post something, too. I’m never to sure what to say when someone asks me, “So, tell me a little bit about yourself.” I have a couple “elevator speech” answers, but I have some room to blog out my thoughts. So, let me tell you about some things that I am passionate about and why.
Wushu: When I first told my dad that I wanted to take martial arts when I was eight years old, my reasoning was 1) I liked the Power Rangers, and 2) I am Chinese, so it wouldn’t make sense for me not to take classes (STEREOTYPE WIN). Needless to say, I have stuck with it better than most things in life, and I feel that I’m the better because of it. Most recently, I have been taking Chinese Wushu. Here’s a little video demo of the style:
When I studied abroad in Xiamen, China in 2005 for a semester, I took some private lessons from a master who turned out to be the best all of the south east provinces. He stretched me so well I thought I was going to tear my hamstring nearly every time, seriously. About two years ago I joined up with a club that meets at the Wheaton Park District.
I sometimes wonder why I do love martial arts so much, especially wushu, which is not the most practical style to learn. I mean, if I were to be attacked in a dark alley, I probably wouldn’t spin twice in the air and kick the guy in the head. This has been discussed many times over with my best man from my wedding, Dhiraj Masih. To paraphrase my genius (at the very least in this realm of philosophy, that is) friend, there is something very cathartic about the movements. When you get to the point where you are aware of your body and you feel the punches, kicks, and blocks effortlessly glide out from your body like water, you feel a sort of self-expression that is unique to wushu. It’s like dancing or running, you feel the flow when you do it well. So, I’m not opposed to learning more self-defense, but I’ve really taken to the forms.
Well, I’ll write a little more about stuff that I’m passionate about… but right now it’s dinner time.
Looks like our goal of posting every week hasn’t been met. How does life get away from you like that? We do intend to keep up with our “deep” posts, but for the sake of writing SOMETHING, ANYTHING to keep our readers coming back for more, here are some not so deep updates.
I (Angel) started working part-time for the customer service department at Matt’s company. It’s been great getting to know the people I work with and having something intelligent to fill my time with after these past two years of work that mainly consisted of trying to convince kids to eat and changing diapers. I also have a newfound appreciation for the people on the other end of those automated “contact us” portions of websites. Though I have to say, our company does a much better job of responding to our inquiries than most of the companies I’ve had to contact. Unashamed plug.
Things have been busy at work for Matt, and he’s also been focusing a lot on wushu (Chinese kung fu) for a competition he competed in last weekend and so he can test for his next rank soon. He got three sweet plaques from doing so well in the competition. And he looked pretty hot too (in my non-martial-arts-oriented opinion).
We have been trying to get our budgeting on track post-wedding and figure out joint finances. Not the most fun way to spend evenings, but a necessity. Especially since I realized that when I hadn’t checked my old checking account in awhile, I had been racking up daily fees for having overdrawn my checkbook from a check I had written but forgot to record in my bank book. Yikes. We’re going to talk to the bank about that and see if there’s any way to get those fees, even some of them, revoked since I had a bunch of money in my savings account that they could have transferred over for me. They did end up transferring the money about a week ago, finally, but not until the account had incurred $200 in fines. Yeah, it would have been nice for them to think of doing that after the first couple of days instead of waiting a month. Or at least to have contacted me to let me know what was happening.
We’ve also been trying to maintain our social lives in the midst of the busyness. We hung out with some friends from Matt’s wushu club this weekend. We watched “The Nightmare Before Christmas” to get ourselves in the fall spirit on Friday night with Matt’s former roommates and co. We had our neighbors over for dinner last week and enjoyed getting to know them and meet some of them for the first time. I love having a husband to meet and greet neighbors with; it’s the best Much less awkward than when you’re a small, vulnerable single female trying to build relationships with strangers who live near you. I read “The Suburban Christian” last year and wished that I could do more connected things with my neighbors, but it just didn’t feel right trying to do that with our single male neighbors. Confusing signals tend to happen a lot in our culture with male/female interactions, and I have to say it’s nice being married and not having to deal with quite as many of them.
Okay, that was about as deep as this post is getting. One final update: we’ve been thinking a lot about what we’re going to try and do next year. A few options are on the table, so please pray for us to have wisdom as we seek God’s will for our next step and when to take it.
We interrupt this series of deep, thought-provoking blog posts to present a post entirely devoted to the disgusting capabilities of the human body. Warning: graphic content ahead. You may want to quit now. But for those with strong stomachs and strong curiosity, I (Angel) will give you some insight into recent dietary changes I’ve been making. Some of you may be aware that I’ve started cutting out regular milk from my diet and drinking only soy milk. I have participated in short “detox” fasts a couple of times in the past, so I had switched to soy milk before for limited times and don’t mind the flavor. (Rice milk, however, is a whole other story. Not a fan.) Anyway, this current switch is not for the purpose of getting healthier bowel movements, finding spiritual enlightenment, or encouraging self-discipline. It came after I dislodged this baby from my tonsils:
Tonsil Stone next to a penny
The penny was not in my throat. That’s just there to give perspective on the monstrous size of the tonsil stone that was in my throat. Since many people have never heard of tonsil stones, I’ll give you the run down. They are essentially lumps of old food particles, bacteria, old mouth cells, and white blood cells. (See more detailed info here.) I have always had these things, for as long as I can remember, and thought they were a normal part of life that everyone deals with. It makes sense, especially if you still have tonsils, like I do. You eat food, you swallow most of it, some gets stuck and eventually goes down later. Occasionally an old piece of food would come out (usually very small in size, like a speck) and it smelled really gross. I still felt like that was normal. After all, decayed, old food should probably smell pretty awful. Then last year, I was at a family party and a big one (not quite as big as the one above) came out. I showed it to Matt and a few other family members, not thinking much of it, other than it was funny that such a big one had formed before being broken down and swallowed. I had even had a sore throat for the week before and thought I was getting sick, but after the “stone” came out, I realized it had just been rubbing on my throat every time I swallowed and had made my throat sore. After Matt and all of my family members told me they did not think it was normal, they had never seen anything like that before, and I should go to the doctor, I decided to research it online. I hate going to the doctor, so I do everything I can first to check stuff out before going. It turned out that these weren’t as common as I thought (not everyone deals with them), but they are still fairly common. After a bunch of research, I found out that they are more common for people who are lactose intolerant, and eating a lot of dairy contributes to them. Also, alcohol contributes to them. While I don’t drink alcohol, I am religious about my mouthcare routine, as anyone who has lived with me knows. I was gargling mouthwash (with 20% alcohol content) twice a day every day, not realizing that was actually contributing to the problem. I also am a huge dairy lover and over the past couple of years have ingested quite a lot of ice cream. I eat cereal with milk almost every day and often drink milk throughout the day. My mom has dealt with lactose intolerance for many years, and I was worried that someday I would develop it. The increasing size of my tonsil stones seems to be indicating that that day has arrived.
Over the past year since that big stone came out at the family party, I knew in the back of my mind I probably should do something about my diet and start using a tongue scraper regularly (to help minimize the amount of bacteria at the back of the throat). I didn’t know about the mouthwash problem until recently, but I had found that gargling diluted hydrogen peroxide helped clear them out, so I thought about doing that every day, but was too lazy. Tonsil stones would form occasionally, but nothing major enough to change my habits. Then that sucker in the picture above formed in the side of my throat. It was hard, big, and stuck behind a little flap of skin that made it difficult for me to push it out with my tongue. It stayed in there for over two weeks and drove me crazy. In my desperation to get it out, I went back to researching online. I found an amazing tonsil stones website that offered a lot of practical suggestions from a guy who also has had tonsil stones all his life. That was the site that taught me about the mouthwash problem and recommended gargling with grapefruit oil extract to get rid of stones and keep them from forming. I ordered some of the extract, started gargling with that and hydrogen peroxide every day, started using my tongue scraper regularly, and within a few days, the monstrosity came out. I decided to take a picture of it to remind myself of how badly I needed to change my habits so these things stop forming. A few days later, I switched to soy milk and am in the process of swearing off dairy ice cream forever. (We still have a little left in the freezer, and I wouldn’t want it to go to waste ) Happily, I found some soy ice cream at Trader Joe’s yesterday which isn’t too bad. It’s definitely not real ice cream, but it’s close enough to make me happy.
I've added grapefruit seed extract and hydrogen peroxide gargling to my daily routine
Trader Joe's Soy Creamy Mango Vanilla Flavor
Through it all, Matt has been the best husband. Last night, my dietary changes and two weeks of regularly gargling GSE and HP paid off. We were sitting in bed talking, reading, and watching “The Office,” and through it all I was pulling tonsil stones out and depositing them on kleenex. Matt didn’t get mad or disgusted (that he let on, anyway). He is very supportive and encouraging in the face of my smelly tonsils. He even checked with a flashlight afterward to see if there were any more left. Ahhh, true love. And he has been drinking soy milk with me. Quite the gentleman.
Look at all the vitamins in soy milk!
So now when I refrain from ice cream and milk in your presence, you’ll know why. I’ll keep you updated on how the new diet goes, but won’t plan to post any new pictures of tonsil stones that come out unless we get some intense interest. It really is pretty gross. Hopefully this post is enough to explain without further need for disgusting photos.
