Things We've Been Grateful for in June

Mara here. It's hard to believe June is almost over! I always feel as if, once we hit this time of year, the months quickly tumble by and it's the end of the year before I know it!

Here are a few things I was grateful for this month:

Air conditioning

Okay this is a bit repetitive from last week's post about how to keep cool, but my love of air conditioning cannot be emphasized enough! Honestly, I often think about how grateful I am that I was born at a time when air conditioning exists. (I know...clearly, I'm a deep thinker.) But I don't know how I would survive without it. I can't imagine not having it my house, my car, at the mall, at the movies...everywhere! This month was our first heat wave of the year and air conditioning has been my very good friend.

Malia and Brad's shared love of music

My husband and my daughter have a love of music that I don't. I like music and I listen to it, but they have an emotional connection to music that I don't seem to share. They also love going to concerts—something which I actually dislike. This past month, they went to a couple of concerts together. It makes my husband so happy to be able to share music with his daughter. And it makes my daughter happy to have someone who will pay for concert tickets! In all seriousness though, it's been a truly special shared interest that the two of them have bonded over. And I love that they get to have something special that's just between the two of them.

The mail order pharmacy

I know that a lot of people don't like Kaiser as a health provider. I really like them for a variety of reasons; one is that Kaiser has a great mail order pharmacy service. I can go online, refill my prescriptions, and they're mailed to me. It makes it so much easier to keep all my various medications in stock. I can certainly go pick them up in person, and some people may prefer to do it that way. But if you're like me and would rather not have to deal with the driving and the parking and the waiting in lines, mail order is the way to go!

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Toni here. Now for three things I'm grateful for in June:

What Mara said: air conditioning

If you read our last piece, you know that Mara grew up in a house without air conditioning—and in a locale that gets hotter than where she lives now. Well, that same house now has air conditioning, and it's been working hard in the face of several 108 degrees (F) days. And so, absolutely, I'm grateful for air conditioning. 

My primary care doctor

June was a rough month for me. I don't usually share my medical woes on social media, except to the extent they might help people with the practices I write about in my books and in my Psychology Today articles. So I didn't share that I've had unremitting pain in my right hip the whole month of June. It's been so bad at times that I'll use a cane to get around the house.

After two weeks of increasing pain, I called to make an appointment with my primary care doctor. I was told that he was on vacation and I should have the pain evaluated by the doctor "on call." But I wanted to wait for my guy. And so I did. He returned on Tuesday, June 21. The next day, he fit me into his jammed schedule and, by the end of the day, he'd set a plan in motion to figure out what's going on. I had an x-ray taken as part of our appointment and a CT scan on Friday that ruled out the more serious stuff, such as a fracture.

It makes the hip pain easier to bear knowing that my doctor is on it.

He's been my doctor since I got sick 16 years ago. In fact, he's never known me not-sick because, while I was off in Paris getting that viral-infection-that-never-went-away, my primary care doctor abruptly left, so the clinic had to "deal" out her patients to the other doctors in the office. I like to joke with my doc that he drew the short straw when they were passing out those patients!

My husband, Tony

He was gone for half of June but that's not why I'm grateful to him (which speaks well of our relationship!). For the first half of his trip, I didn't tell him how bad the hip pain was because I didn't want him to worry and I knew he would. When I finally did tell him, he was with me all the way via text and sometimes phone, helping in any way he could, sometimes just by listening. I love him so much.

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We hope you'll let us know what you were grateful for in June.

Mara's dad and my husband, Tony (Photo credit: Mara)