The winter of 2001 was one of the most dismal seasons of my life. It should have been a great year according the schedule that I had laid out for my life. After high school, I spent three years at a Bible College, as planned. After Bible College, I went to University to finish my teaching degree, as planned. I met and married my wonderful husband, not planned, but a very wise addition to my plan. After university, I got a job teaching in a Christian school. I worked there for five years, and then moved on to my next five-year goal, which was to provide two future students for the school. We had our first bundle of joy on July 22, 1993. The next phase was to stay home, have another baby in two years, and then go back to work part-time when baby number two started kindergarten. Baby number two came along right on schedule. The Full-Time-Stay-Home-Mom phase got cut short by a couple of years when I got a call from the school asking if I would consider coming back to work in the library quarter-time. Since this would be a dream job for me, I allowed some flexibility in my life plan. I had no idea that my life plan was going to have to get way more flexible in the near future.

Sometime during the next two years, my life plan was significantly altered without my knowledge or consent. For some reason, my fingers were becoming rebellious- they would get tangled up whenever I was typing, and it started to become difficult to hold a book and turn the pages. Soon the rest of my body followed suit – my left knee, which had always been susceptible to repetitive strain injuries, was hurting all the time. It became difficult to walk, and almost impossible to climb stairs. I had been doing aerobics and weight lifting rather diligently since baby number two was born, but now even the three-pound weights felt too heavy, and all of my joints were starting to hurt. It was like a cascade: my knees would hurt, so I would do upper body aerobics, but then my elbows and shoulders would hurt. Physiotherapy didn’t help. What started as a pain that kept me from exercising was now interfering with every aspect of life: I couldn’t do housework, it was almost impossible to cook for my family – I couldn’t even cut my own food, never mind theirs; and trying to work in a library when I couldn’t lift a book, type, or put books on shelves was ridiculous. In February of 2001, I made the incredibly difficult decision to quit my dream job at the library.