Recovering

I've spent the last week trying to figure out how I'd write about the last week. In the end, I am incapable of summing it all up into some cohesive story. So bullets will have to do.

I flew to Colorado.
I flew to California.
I drove up and down the coast working a territory that was completely foreign to me.
Southwest lost my luggage on the flight to California.
If you're flying, don't wear underwear that binds, in case you end up having to sleep in it.
My oldest boy got sick as I was leaving town with a head cold/viral something or other.
I got his virus the second day in California.
My husband finally got a diagnosis for his mysterious wasting/GI disease while I was in California, by way of an alarming call from the health department that he'd tested positive for an obscure protozoa. Yes, folks, that means he had worms, or something like them.
My son got sicker, and had to be taken to the doctor, who noticed an irregular heartbeat and sent him for an EKG. He's on medicine and his heart is fine, thank God.
I got sicker, and instead of working through Friday and having time to visit my friend Sara in Orange County (which is remarkably far away from the northern side of LA where I was staying and working), I ended up leaving Thursday night so I could come home.
My thoughts about what the hell I'm doing and how we're going to possibly keep this thing going were abundant this week.
I landed just in time to enjoy the 100 degree heatwave with high humidity. Yes.
I woke up this morning with a pinched nerve in my neck/back/shoulder area. I can't look up, or to the right. I can kind of look left, as long as it's slowly.
I realize that with children, you must be extremely specific with your instructions. When I say "only draw on paper" to my son, I must also explain "and by paper, I mean blank paper and not books or mail or anything else that resembles paper or is made of paper.
I read Little Bee. I loved it, if you are the sort who reads I highly recommend it.
I read Her Fearful Symmetry. It stunk. I didn't care for it. If you like shallow character development and lots of details about a stinky old cemetery in London, you'll love it.

- H

Just in case I thought I didn't have an impact on my kids...

Yesterday Griffin and I were in the yard, picking up toys and dog poop. He asked me what I was doing, and when he didn't hear my answer he yelled "I'm eyeballin' you, mama!"

Then just now, as I'm sitting in the office avoiding the kids surfing the net, I heard Cooper tell Griffin to move so he could see the tv. Griffin's response? "You aren't the boss, Cooper."

- H

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