Winter may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I absolutely love it! My mast cells are definitely less reactive during the colder months which means I feel better and can be more active.

It’s partly why we got into recreational mushing.

That and we needed an excuse to have so many huskies! 😆

Of course I’m still sick in the winter and I still need to pace myself and take my mastocytosis medicines or else I pay dearly for it, but the wintertime offers me a reprieve from the worst of my symptoms so I try to make the most of it.

It’s a good thing we live where winters are, well, quite wintry!

The best part of living here, though, is we’re not just trapped way out in the middle of nowhere. We have the best of both worlds; a nice sized city nearby and miles and miles of world-class skiing, snowmobiling and dog sledding trails right in the wilderness of our “backyard”.

Yellowstone park, which is just an hour away, is open to cross country skiers right now and if I felt like my immune system would let me (it won’t) I’d be all over that!

I can ride in the dog sled for a few hours at a time, though, so we spent the weekend up the mountain, playing in the snow with the pups and also enjoying the beautiful views…

By the time we loaded them all back into their boxes to head home I was definitely feeling ready to be done, too, but it was great to be able to get out and feel somewhat normal again.

Everyone just wants to feel normal, right?

The reality is I’m not normal and it will still take me a few days to recover completely from the weekend but it’s totally worth it. I feel like I owe it to myself to make the most of the time I have because I know this could go south at any moment and it all could be ripped away from me.

I also feel like I somehow owe it to my brother who recently passed. He used to love getting out and really living life to its fullest before he was struck down and made bedridden in his forties. By the time he died he had spent a decade bedridden and had long forgotten who he was, let alone who I was or what his former life was like.

I remember, though. His favorite song was “Live Like You Were Dying” by Tim McGraw and I could almost hear it playing as we slid across the snow yelling “Hike!” to the pups.

I could almost imagine him there right with us, laughing and smiling, too…

It’s very difficult living with a debilitating, degenerative disease but I do try to stay positive and not let the negative aspects of being “allergic to the world” get to me. If I did that, I’d have to just give up altogether and I’m not willing to stop living just because I have an overactive immune system.

After all, life is for the living, right? 🙂