Utterly and Thoroughly Worn Out by "El Chapo" Guzmán

I am utterly exhausted. Physically only a little bit from exertion, but my brain is like tapioca pudding right now. When you have MS, a full day of mental exercise can be just as debilitating as hours of hiking or a reaaaaallllly long run. Don't get me wrong; it has been a thoroughly successful day on both the home front and the work front. But my gas tank emptied out a few hours ago, and I had to keep on going.

Very early this morning, some time between 3:30am and 6:30am (depending on which news report you read), the Mexican military apprehended the most notorious drug lord in the entire Western Hemisphere--Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa cartel. This probably doesn't mean much to most of you, although the name might sound familiar. Suffice it to say that his capture was a REALLY BIG DEAL for those of us who follow events in Mexico's drug war. When stuff like this happens in Mexico, I'm one of the few people who have expertise in this sort of thing for journalists to call to get a comment. On top of that, I'm one of the few experts who has the freedom to give an interview on most occasions when people call. I always know my email and phone are going to start blowing up, so I sent my husband a heads-up text about how my day was probably going to go.

Take this morning. I was at my laptop eating breakfast when I saw the breaking news on Twitter about El Chapo's arrest. Thirty minutes later, I got the first phone call, which was from a friend of mine at KVOA, one of the local TV news stations. He wanted to get me on camera that morning, and he agreed he could work me in between my kids' tae kwon do class from 10:00-10:30am and a baby shower I planned to attend at 1:00pm. True to his word, he and the reporter arrived at 11:30am at our house and we had a great interview on our back patio.

At 12:30pm, I headed to the baby shower with my bluetooth earpiece in. Good thing, because as I was arriving I gave my second interview to the Boston Herald. During the baby shower, I went to use the restroom. While I was in the bathroom (not doing my business, fortunately), the phone rang, and I gave my third interview to CBS News. As I was pulling into our garage after the shower, I gave my fourth interview to Reuters. I had dinner with my family, we went out for ice cream, I gave our boys a bath, and my husband put them to bed. At 9:20pm, I did my fifth interview with BBC World Radio. I'm done. Soooooo done.

My husband sometimes gets upset with me for wearing myself out like this because then it takes me a while to recover--and prevents me from doing some things at home that I should be doing. On the other hand, he also knows what happened today was a historic event, and the support he gave me by just letting me "do my thing" was amazing. But now it's 9:51pm, and as utterly exhausted as I am by this whole El Chapo arrest, I have to decompress. After I finish this post, I'll plop down on the couch and watch a bit of TV before I shuffle my stiff and sore body down to our room to go to bed. And I may get to do this all over again tomorrow. And Monday :).

What do Breitbart Texas and an IV Line Have in Common?

That would be me. After months of negotiating and waiting, I have officially been named a Contributing Editor for Breitbart's new brand expansion, Breitbart Texas! The "vertical" will publish news stories and analysis on topics important to Texans, like education, corruption, and immigration. I will be responsible for providing analysis on border security issues and Mexican drug cartel activity in Texas and beyond, and I've already hit the ground running with my introductory post.

To say yesterday evening after the 7pm ET launch was a bit nutty is an understatement. Breitbart News Network has a very broad reach--and following--so my Twitter followers jumped by more than 130 overnight. I had several wonderful welcome messages from new followers and Breitbart readers, and I spent plenty of time just following the progress of the rollout. On top of that, many people becoming newly familiar with my name and my work also looked up and pre-ordered copies of Border Insecurity! I knew my new position with Breitbart would help my book sales, but the fact that people are interested in my work this early on is an absolute thrill and blessing.

So I find myself this morning in the middle of my crazy dual life--at my infusion center getting my monthly dose of Tysabri, an intravenous medication that helps slow down the progression of my MS. It's a very nice and comfortable place with recliners, TV and wi-fi, and the latter is such a great bonus for me. The entire infusion process, between getting prepped, the infusion itself, and the mandatory observation time afterwards takes about three hours. That's three hours without kids yelling or the phone ringing, so I try to get work done on my laptop while I'm waiting for the meds to do their thing.

I wanted to take and share this photo so you could see how the glamorous and not-so-glamorous halves of my life mix in this one little infusion center. You can see the IV bag and line going into my left hand, my custom-painted walker to my right, and me working furiously on my laptop on my monthly column for Homeland Security Today and scouring Twitter for news stories to write analysis on for Breitbart Texas. Take a look at my large head shot and compare it to real life this morning--yoga pants, fleece, no makeup, and my naturally curly (and often frizzy) hair. Fun, right? In all honesty, there's something about the dichotomy of my life that I absolutely love. If one half of it gets to be too much, I can roll over to the other side and indulge for a bit to stay sane, whether that means finger painting with my 3 ½ year-old for a little while or having an adult phone conversation about weapons trafficking for fifteen minutes. My monthly infusions are just one of the MS-related things that pepper my days, and keep me going so I can take care of my kids and do some cool work stuff :).

Tucson Rodeo Days and the Miracle of Cowboy Boots

For those of you who have never lived in southern Arizona, the Tucson Rodeo and the whole Rodeo Days series of events is a big deal. Actually, it's enough of a big deal that my older son--and most school-age kids, I believe--get two days off of school so they can attend with their families. The rodeo has been a regional event since 1925, and apparently it draws a crowd of tens of thousands of people from all over the world.

Last night I attended the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce monthly mixer, aptly titled "Noche de Vaqueros," which is Spanish for "cowboy night." Attendees were encouraged to wear cowboy attire, which is standard for many Tucson residents even when they don't have a themed event to attend. Most people there were in business attire because they came straight from work, but some folks--myself included--got into the spirit with some great-looking boots.

Just the fact that I have cowboy boots and can actually wear them is a HUGE deal. That may seem odd to "normal" people, but once again, please bear with me. Many years ago when I was healthy, I wore stiletto heels all the time and pretty much everywhere. I spent a LOT of money on heels by designers like Manolo Blahnik and Guiseppe Zanotti. Yep, I was "that girl," thrilled with the style espoused by shows like Sex in the City. But then MS came to visit my body, and by roughly 2006, wearing high heels was a thing of the past. To this day, it's still one of the losses caused by my MS that I mourn the most. It sounds like a superficial and vain thing; why don't I miss as much my ability to play volleyball, or snow ski, or swim? (As a side note, I will NEVER miss the ability to run because I always sucked at it and thoroughly hate it.)

For you men out there, few things scream femininity like wearing high heels. Long hair and makeup are two other examples, but you know how sexy a great pair of heels can make a woman look, and for us women (pain and discomfort aside), they generally make us feel pretty darn sexy. These days, I'm relegated to the arduous task of endlessly trying to find pairs of ballet slippers and other flats that (a) will stay on my feet when I walk, (b) allow me to walk safely, and (c) don't make me look like a 39 year-old grandmother. For me anyway, I can manage to feel professional in some of my nicer shoes, and maybe even cute. But sexy? Far from it.

Enter the cowboy boot. When my husband and I drove from the St Louis area to Tucson for our military move in June 2013, we stopped one night in Amarillo, Texas. Right next to our hotel was an enormous boot store that had a good reputation for quality and selection. We figured, where better to buy a good pair of cowboy boots than in Amarillo? I was skeptical that I'd be able to find something that worked for me, given my issues with shoes, but my husband was excited, so I tried to be optimistic.

To say the selection was overwhelming is putting it mildly. Fortunately, it was a slow night, and my husband and I had the full attention of two very nice sales assistants who made it their mission to fit us with the perfect pair of boots. I told my assistant exactly what I needed: a low heel, a snug fit, and a toe that was short enough that it wouldn't catch on the ground when I walked. Weird requirements for sure, but he swore up and down he had heard much weirder requests. I chose to believe him.

After about an hour, we were at the checkout counter with the perfect boots. My assistant found me a pair that had these amazing insoles that made the inside of the boots feel like running shoes. The heels were about an inch high, which is by far the highest heel of any shoe I own, but they were wide and didn't make me teeter or lose my balance. And here's the little unexpected miracle of these cowboy boots: because boots are stiff, they naturally kept my feet and lower legs in a perfect L-shape, which prevented my right foot from dropping and dragging on the ground! My WalkAide electrical stimulator helps with this anyway, but I was just floored at how easy it was to walk in boots I thought would forever be off-limits.

So last night, I donned my favorite pair of Lucky Brand boot-cut jeans, my favorite white dress shirt, and my Ariat leather cowboy boots for Noche de Vaqueros. And you know what? I did feel sexy (my husband confirmed I looked that way after I got home)...and normal.

Waiting for Divine Intervention...Again

When I talk about my MS, I tell people that the diagnosis may have saved my life, and that it brought me and my husband together. Both of those things sound kind of odd, but bear with me. I first started having MS-related symptoms in August 2002. I was on active duty in the Air Force, and was about to start graduate school full time at the University of South Florida as part of a special program. I lost vision in my right eye due to something called optic neuritis, and while my vision came back, it was the start of what would become a 2 ½ year-long process to get diagnosed.

Over the course of that time, I had new symptoms crop up every several months or so, but my MRIs kept coming back clean--meaning they didn't show any lesions on my brain or spinal cord--which prevented an official diagnosis. So, in the fall of 2005, right before I was due to get married, I was scheduled to deploy to Kirkuk, Iraq about three weeks after my honeymoon. I was crushed, but I knew it was coming and it was my turn to fulfill my military obligations.

Then about a week before I was due to deploy, my first MRI results showing spinal lesions came back. The good news was that I was put on medical profile and could no longer deploy. The bad news was that a definitive diagnosis of MS was probably on the horizon. That obviously did happen, in January 2005, and I was medically retired from the Air Force six months later. At the time, my new husband and I had been living apart for about a year and a half, so while I was devastated at having to leave the Air Force, I was thrilled about getting to finally live with my husband under the same roof. Had this not happened, I still owed the Air Force time for paying for my master's degree, and given that we both would have been active duty officers, who knows how frequently we would be stationed together or be forced to live apart?

I like to think that getting MS was a sort of involuntary deal I made with God to be with my husband and put me on the track to my life where it is now--a pretty amazing place. It was the price I had to pay, and while it seems strange to think of it that way, it's a price I'd gladly pay all over again. Who knows where I would be now; would my husband and I still be married? Would we have had our two amazing children? I probably would never have been in a position to become a subject matter expert on Mexico's drug war or a published author. This, along with some other things that have happened in my life, demonstrates to me that on occasion, God does intervene in people's lives to set them on the path they're supposed to be on. Of course I didn't know where that path would go at the time.

I'm Catholic and not a particularly religious devotee, but I have a decent measure of faith. Being an analyst who scrutinizes and questions a lot of things is sometimes hard to reconcile with religion, which requires you to believe in things you can't see and in writings you can't always historically analyze or prove. While I've had my moments of doubt and certainly many questions, I've also seen too many things to not believe there is something out there greater than ourselves.

So now I find myself--to be accurate, my husband and I find ourselves--in a position to need some divine intervention again. We're at one of those intersections in life where we're having some difficulty deciding which way to go. More or less two options are available to us, and both have their pros and cons. We're also REALLY lucky that we'll be fine financially whichever way we go; I guess we just want to pick the path that will leave us with the least regrets. But some days I find myself strongly leaning in one direction, just to sway in the other the next day. I'm not naïve enough to think
that a sign from above will manifest itself in some incredibly obvious way, but nevertheless I find myself looking for signs every day. Does the beauty of the sunrise over the Rincon mountains (see the only slightly enhanced picture) and my emotional response to that every morning mean we're destined to live here in Tucson? Or does my husband's continued professional success mean a full military career is our path? I just don't know, and as an analyst and a control freak, I hate not knowing.

And this is where the whole "faith" thing comes in. I've experienced what I believe is divine intervention in my life on at least three separate occasions; I have no reason to believe that God's response to our arrival at these crossroads will be any different. I'm apprehensive that the benefits of the choice we'll end up making won't be immediately apparent; I'm not a patient person, and I know that the real reason for things happening the way they do often doesn't make itself apparent for years down the road. So, my husband and I will do what we've always done--make things happen that we have some measure of control over, and everything else we have to have faith that divine intervention will once more put us on the path where we're supposed to be.