Wheeeeee! I had a colonoscopeeeeee!!!!!

Now, now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "Heather! You're only twenty-nine years old [in giant tortoise years], why on earth would you get a colonoscopy, surely those procedures are for people in their late sixties?"

Yes, yes, dear friends, I am very much too young to have a colonoscopy. But I did it because my poor husband has had two in the past year. No, no, that's not true. Remember my story a long time ago about how my body has suddenly decided to hang on to every little thing that goes into it? Well, after a neat little test where I swallowed a pill filled with radiomarkers and then got x-rayed a couple of times over the week showed absolutely nothing, my doctor suggested I have a colonoscopy.

And I was all like "YEAH! Cause I cannot wait to do something like that, that sounds awesome." Except for the parts between YEAH! and awesome.


You know, I was torn about it at first. Should we go on a vacation? Should I have a colonoscopy? Vacation? Colonoscopy? It was tough.


I scheduled the first one in May.* Annnnd then I cancelled it. I had a legitimate problem! I'd lost my prepwork paperwork and ate breakfast, thusly getting myself kicked out of the process. So I scheduled it again for last week. Annnnd then I cancelled it. I had a legitimate problem! I had to be in Iowa that day.

Soooo, I finally got suckered into it today. Prepwork yesterday. Yesterday, while I was in Iowa for a breakfast meeting and then Nebraska and then flying home to my family in time to pick up my kids from school. Perfect. Cause you know what sucks about prepwork? EVERYTHING.

There's the part where you can't eat solid foods the day before your torture procedure. Then there's the extremely large amount of disgusting liquid you have to chug in timed intervals starting at 4:00 p.m. and lasting well into the night. Oh, and those liquids? Yeah. They cause some very interesting reactions within your guts and you spend quite a bit of time either in the bathroom or rushing to the bathroom.

This morning I managed to get the kids to school before collapsing on the couch and waiting for my hubs to drive me to the hospital. I was even patting myself on the back about how well I was feeling, all things considered (which means without any food or caffeine in 24 hours since I am apparently addicted to both of those things) when I ran into a wall. Not a proverbial wall. No, a literal wall. My eyeballs suddenly became disconnected from my brain and their movement became unpredictable and irregular and I became dizzy. This is when I found the couch.

But! The good news because I'm all focus on the positive now is that I survived the procedure with only minor screaming discomfort afterwards and my innerds are clean as a whistle, or they were until I ate California Pizza Kitchen for lunch afterwards.

So. There you are. If you have to have a colonoscopy, you can lean on me. You will survive it. You will hate every ever-loving minute of it, but you will survive to eat another day. Oh, and I highly recommend you schedule it for a day that's predicted to be over a hundred degrees because hospitals chill you to the bone (it's so you're halfway there when they have to cool your body for the morgue) and you'll need the extreme heat to warm up afterwards.

- H


* You know what finally helped me make the phone call to schedule my torture session? I was watching TV one day, thinking about it, telling myself there was nothing wrong with me and get over it already, when a commercial came on and this young woman said "I was thirty-six years old when I was diagnosed with colon cancer." Now, mind you, I'm only 29+8 so it shocked me. I picked up the phone.

Waiting

I mentioned this on an earlier post, but I've been reading "What Happy People Know." Some of it is really good, some garbage, and a bunch of information in between.

One of the good parts that is really super easy to forget (as evidenced by my earlier breakdown this week where I thought the sky was falling and it turns out it wasn't) is that by focusing on the good things in life, your outlook tends to be rosier and then good things happen to you. When you dwell on all the negatives, your outlook is bleak. You end up bringing more negativity into your life because that's what you're looking for, that's what your antennas are up for.

This is kind of a hard concept for someone like myself to actually apply to my own life, because I'm a Catastrophe Planner. I like to have a fallback plan so that on any given day if the Worst Case Scenario happens, I'll know exactly what to do and how to handle it, and it won't be such a shock to my system.

Yeah. I know.

That just isn't how life works.

So I'm letting go! Imagine that, I'm going to try to let go of some of my catastrophe plans and let life happen, good and bad.

In an attempt to focus on the positive, I'd like to explain a little more about the Big Brown Moron that we affectionately call Ruby.

I know I've complained a lot about Ruby lately, especially the workload she's brought to my life. And that's true, she's a lot of work right now.

But you know what? I love her. Ruby, more than anyone else in this house, is my constant companion. Ruby would choose me hands down over anyone else in a competition. Binnie was my dog, I had her when I met my husband. But the second she met him, she fell in love and hasn't been my dog since that day. She would forsake me in a red hot minute if it meant she could lay around with my hubs. She spends time with me out of spite and because there's no one else who's willing to give her constant eye drops to keep her one blind eye from swelling out of her head. And because that time when my husband put his hand in dog poop he instantly fell out of love with her and hasn't loved her since then.

But Ruby? Ruby was supposed to be for N. A guy's dog, a manly dog. And she loves me! If I walk down the driveway to take the garbage cans to the street, she's right at the gate waiting for me, wishing with every ounce of her being that she was on the other side of the fence. But polite enough not to try to squeeze through the bars, unlike her unruly older sister who regularly does such a thing.

Ruby is my girl. She's a pretty cool girl, too. So the next time I'm pissing and moaning about how hard it is to raise her up right and how much time it takes out of my day, just ignore me. I must have put my happy-ness book down for a minute.

Where did it go?

My post has disappeared which is odd and slightly disconcerting.

That's ok.

I got a lot of help, and I appreciate every single bit of it.

Cooper will be starting the new pre-school in August. I'll find the balls to tell his current pre-school that he's leaving. And that his brother is staying.

Things will change. They always do. They'll get better, and then some day they may get bad again, but I'll survive it.

I'm in Iowa today, stopped for lunch before a meeting. I got to spend a beautiful morning driving through the hills of northeast Missouri and southwest Iowa, looking at farms, barns, Airstream trailers, cows, horses, more barns, more Airstream trailers. It was nice, I needed it. I'll be back tonight in time to give my kids a bath. For one blessed day I was the not the one to make sure Ruby got the exercise and pottying she needs. And that's a good thing.

- H

Shoot. I thought I had ennui but it turns out I didn't know what that meant.

I had a lovely morning today. I had the day off for the 4th holiday, my mom came and took Griffin for his first date alone with Grandma (a tradition Cooper has enjoyed hugely this past year), and my hubs took Cooper fishing. The fishing only lasted ten minutes but the drive there and back afforded me an entire hour free.

I decided to work on my front yard's landscaping. It's an annual exercise in frustration, whereby I dig up the rocks surrounding the landscaping bed, cut out all the grass and weeds that have snuck under the rocks, and put them back in place. Oh, and I dug out a lot of the stinky chameleon plant I put in years ago and have regretted ever since. If you're ever at the garden nursery, DO NOT succumb to the lure of chameleon plant. Don't say I didn't warn you. Friends don't let friends plant that stinky dirt hog.

Anyhoodle, as I was out there sweating and pulling, swearing and whatnot, I suddenly had this overwhelming feeling. I don't want to call it a psychic moment or anything, because I didn't see anything or learn this week's lottery numbers. I just had a feeling.

It was the strangest thing. I suddenly had this feeling that change is on the wind.

OK, that's sounds dumb. It was a little breezy. No, it felt more like there's a cloud of change coming my way, only I couldn't tell if it was good or bad. It just is.

Ok, this still sounds dumb. Dumb and vague and slightly New-Agey, and for those of you who know me in person I'm not in the slightest bit New Agey.

I don't really know how to describe what it felt like, except maybe that it was a premonition that things for us will change soon? I tend to like change so it doesn't freak me out. In fact, after the events of the last month or two (or thirty-six) it would be kind of nice to have some forward movement (and yes, I'm assuming it'll be forward movement because I'm going to start being an optimist now).

I stood in the yard trying to figure out what to call this feeling, so I decided it was ennui. But then I googled ennui in the car tonight and as it turns out it means a gripping listlessness caused by boredom.

Clearly, that's not going on around here.

- H

The kiss

Our town's not-so-little Fourth of July parade was this morning. While we were waiting on the front steps for my parents to get here, I tried to get the boys to pose for a picture.

This is the stellar picture I got after telling them I wanted them to smile. Like with their mouths open. Say cheese or something.

Then Griffin got upset because of something, who knows what, so Cooper tried to make him feel better, unprompted if you can believe it.

Which was an open invitation for Griffin to bring the love, G style.




Thankfully no one was hurt in the process.

- H