The Rolling Beadweaver

Welcome! I am Michelle, The Rolling Beadweaver!

Soo… I have never really had a blog before, but launching my website seemed like a good time to start one. Let’s start by talking about how I became - and why I chose the name - 

The Rolling Beadweaver. 

Well, its a couple reasons, really. 

First off, the wheelchair is sort of hard to miss…lol ;)
But beyond that, its because we live on the road, literally. 

We RV full time - me as mental caregiver to a retired combat Navy veteran with PTSD/TBI, he as physical caregiver to a gal in a wheelchair and autoimmune troubles to go with her impaired mobility. Add in the service dog with the food allergies... the chihuahua with the grade 6 heart murmur… and the mini daxi with a slipped disc, cataracts, and gluten intolerance… and you get what I call “The Rolling Island of Misfit Toys” :). Just 3 rescued dogs and 2 people that most of the world didn’t have time to bother with - somehow making it all work together! 

It isn’t always easy - but then again, nothing worth doing really is easy, if we are honest with ourselves. 

It wasn’t a choice we had expected to make, to RV full time. After all, I DID have a house in SC. The sad fact is, tho, that I wanted to sell the house and get something much smaller and more reasonable in size. To make it prettier inside for sale, we installed some laminate flooring from a big liquidation flooring type place. Yes, I bet you can guess who…

That might have been the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life, that flooring purchase. To say the floor made us ill is a huge understatement of what happened next…

Headaches, joint and body aches, sleep disruptions of all sorts, no appetites (us or the dogs!), vision focus difficulty and memory impairment problems, raw throats & nasal passages, no energy to go anywhere or do anything…and, worst of all for me, an interruption in how my brain worked all together. I could not remember ANYTHING! I couldnt focus, couldn’t think, couldn’t create, couldn’t concentrate, even on an hour long TV show - much less read or attempt to work up a bead pattern, forget writing them. 

Imagine beading for 28, 29 years or so, often as effortlessly as breathing, and then in the course of days and weeks feeling so sick and mentally fogged up that you look at YOUR OWN CREATIONS, and simply CANNOT for the life of you figure out how the heck you made it. 

Its pretty terrifying, when you are already rolling from room to room in your house, forgetting where you set things down, or why you went in the room in the first place… or where the HELL is your water bottle cuz its like the 6th time you have lost it since you woke up…Sleeping, but getting no rest, looking at food and feeling physically ill at the sight and smell of even your favorites. 

It was miserable, to put it to a single word. It altered our moods, caused us to fight over nothing. Nearly broke us up. 

It took being away from the house - and noticing how much better we felt when we were - to realize the addition of the flooring had tipped the scales. And we only figured out the floor was to blame after my mom mentioned months later that certain types of flooring from certain sellers had abnormally high formaldehyde levels in them. She had seen it on a special on 60 minutes, and sent me a link to the affected flooring. 

There is was. Right on the list. Nirvana dream home. All of a sudden, our very bad health year, our year of abject misery and lost memories, all of a sudden made a WHOLE lot of sense. 

I panicked - begged him to take us away from there, back in to the RV to where ever I didn’t care, but we COULD NOT BE THERE anymore. 

It was a pretty traumatic few days, mentally putting it all together and realizing the one safe haven you have in the world might actually be killing you, ruining your relationship & sanity & health. 

So began our nomadic lifestyle together. 2 people and 3 dogs. Whatever we could fit into 2 vehicles and a 23 foot camper. 2016 marked our first real year on the road. 

Such is life, they say… others will tell you that when 1 door closes, another opens lol!
Call it what you like, but in the long run, after a solid year of illness, 2 surgeries, and a pile of other health problems for us and the dogs— getting out of the house and living tiny on the road in an RV has been one of the best moves we have ever made!

We got MOST of our brains back - tho we still both struggle these days with a bit of memory loss and extra forgetfulness. Our lungs and sinuses calmed down, loving the soothing salty air of the Coastal Atlantic. Our eye focus problems persist - I ended up in progressive lenses to keep beading and reading. We both had to get the biggest cellphone screens we could so we can read them. He has been through more pairs of readers than I can count. 

BUT:

Now, with my glasses or sunglasses (still light sensitive!), I can bead when and where I like. 

Now, he has his “dream of a lifetime” job for his favorite major league baseball team. This requires us to spend half our year in Maryland, and the other near the spring training facility in Florida. 

No more snow, very little harsh cold to deal with anymore. (Wheelchair people mostly don’t like snow - its hard to push through, and hard to push period in mittens!)

Now, I take a bead board to a ballgame…the beach…a park…just outside to sit. Or inside the RV when the rain drives us indoors. We sleep with open windows and breathe tons of fresh air. We get outdoors. We eat cookout food whenever we like. We explore, we travel.  We feel free and ARE free, freer than either of us have ever been in our lives… 

And that’s how we roll :)

(PS this original post was blogged in late July - somehow I erased it when I went to do my new blog entry! here it is again, though :)…thanks for reading!)