Small improvements are better than no improvements

Last week I mentioned bleaching my hair. This week I've colored it purple! I was gonna wait another week or two to have my blonde hair for endometriosis awareness month but figured I should while I still have some of the stronger pain meds if needed. The next time I color my hair it will be back to brown! Makes me sad to think about it but I know it's the right thing to do. That'll probably be a while though. Because my hair is shorter than when I used to dye it purple I still had about a third of the bottle left. Normally you're not supposed to keep left over hair color but for the unnatural semi-permanent ones it's okay. If even comes in a resealable bottle and you don't have to mix it with anything. So I've been mixing some in with my conditioner to help is last longer. It also helps that I don't take a shower everyday and hardly ever shampoo. It'll still probably end up being a light purplish gray for a while before I color it again but I'm okay with that.

Thankfully my mouth is healing well and I've been back down to my regular meds for a few days now. I'm even taking it less often than I can which is great! I usually only take it twice a day now with some Motrin in between. I left the house Friday to go to a drive in movie with my mom and some friends. We watched Frozen and Catching Fire. Then on Monday (I think?) I went out to dinner and grocery shopping with DH for the first time in a while. My previously broken ankle started bothering me though so I've been keeping it up and iced a few times a day.

A while back I won a Fitbit Zip and finally opened it to see where I stood. You're supposed to take 10,000 steps everyday and yesterday I managed a whopping 505! It's a little low because of my ankle, but even without that I'm sure I'd be less than 1000. I just can't move very much when I'm at less than 75% (which I have been for a year minus a few good days) or things are even worse the next day. It's depressing. I remember when I used to walk a mile every other day with Scotty and do 45-60 minutes of yoga the other days. I had to stop walking so much because my stupid ankle was getting inflamed but I miss it. I hope I can get back to at least doing something soon.

I Wear Yellow For Me

I bleached my hair! You might remember in the fall I got my hair cut and the stylists said they wouldn't even try to get the red out of my hair. Well I decided to try it myself, and they were right lol. I bleached it twice and the bottom where it was the reddest and has been red the longest is still a strawberry blonde (a little lighter than the picture shows). I decided to go ahead and do it now for a few reasons. First it's endometriosis awareness month so no better time to have blonde hair, right? Second I'm on some super strong pain meds so now is when my neck arthritis would hurt the least. It still bothered my neck and shoulder obviously, but not nearly as much as when I tried to color is myself 6ish weeks after getting it cut. I got some purple I'm going to do one last time in a few weeks and once that fades I'll be going back to brown.

I have that dress in the picture which is kind of yellowy tan, some yellow skinny jeans, and a black and yellow floral shirt I've been wearing plus yellow nail polish. I did have someone ask about all the yellow recently but it was my little sister lol. She already knows I have endo so not much awareness raised there. It's hard to raise awareness though when you never leave the house! I also made myself this bracelet which has yellow for endo, teal for PCOS, and pink & blue for infertility/miscarriage. I am trying to wear it everyday this month. So far I've only taken it off to shower so I won't have as many opportunities to forget to put it back on!

I saw my therapist on Monday and we talked a bit about how my plans never seem to work out. I've been feeling like there is no point trying to plan anything if it's just going to not happen anyway. I've been feeling especially bad about always cancelling when we have plans to go see my friend who lives two hours away. My mom was asking me when I'd like to reschedule our visit for and I told her what's the point I'll just have to cancel again. I wish we could just spontaneously go one day when I'm feeling pretty good but it's just not possible. If I'm feeling okay either her, her husband, my husband, or my mom are busy. Talking about it helped though because she pointed out I'm probably hardest on myself. My friend probably isn't as frustrated and angry with me over it as I picture in my mind. She understands. But it's still hard.

My next lupron shot is supposed to be anytime now but they haven't called me about it yet. They said they'll call me whenever it comes in instead of me making an appointment. Tomorrow is my birthday and I was hoping it wouldn't be until after that. I don't know if the side effects will increase again and that would be a terrible way to spend my birthday. So that prayer seems to have been answered at least!

How I lost 10 inches in one day!

That's right, I got my hair cut! Oh, if only it was that easy to lose 10 of the other kind of inches... I would totally spend like 2 hours and $50 to do that. I've been planning on getting my haircut since I started having neck and shoulder pains in the middle of freaking July and finally got around to doing it. They cut off 10 inches everywhere and up to 12 inches in some places for me to donate to Locks of Love. Then I got it colored since I also haven't dyed my hair since the middle of July lol. I had like an inch of roots; it was bad. I wanted to go back brown but they said that was basically impossible. There was too much red in it from when I got the supposedly violet permanent color from England that actually turned out to be maroon. They said they'd have to do too much to strip the color out especially since I haven't used that color since I think January and it was still holding strong. (Since then I've been doing something called medium mahogany brown which is way more brown than red but just red enough that the top three inches of my hair blended in with the old stuff decently.) They gave me a row of reds to choose from and I picked something called 6RV Dark Red Violet Blonde, though I'm not sure how something can be dark red, violet, and blonde at the same time. /shrug It came out a lot redder and a lot brighter than I thought it would!

Saturday as I was about it get in the shower I looked at my hair and it was so long, so naturally curly I just knew I would miss it when I cut it off. Then I got in the shower and started washing it and immediately changed my mind! This is going to be so much easier to maintain with a bum shoulder, plus it's amazingly lighter so I suspect my neck will thank me the rest of the time too. Usually getting my hair washed is my favorite part of going to the salon but my neck was not having it today! I was pretty bummed out but I know a little extra temporary pain will be worth it to save me from the recurrent pain of dealing with so much hair. I even think when my roots start to show again I might be able to color it myself without being in agony, unlike I would have been before. I don't know, we'll see when the time comes.