Friday night.
Standing in line.
Waiting to order pizza.
It's my turn.
I am wrapping up my order when my 4 year old boy starts playing my a** cheeks as if they were a bongo.
He drummed the drum solo of his life.
I turn around to see a 15 person line behind me.
I now have red cheeks. BOTH kinds of cheeks.
Check please!
Heart Go Boom-Boom 'a happy woman's attempt to tell the world what makes her heart tick'
Monday, August 4, 2014
Sunday, July 27, 2014
hello again, I'm back with my 300th post!
Coming back here to write after all this time feels like meeting an old friend. Someone that I know and love very dearly. But at one point I was total bonehead and I didn't really say sorry. And I know it. And they know it. But they love me anyway. And so now we are meeting up to talk/hangout/shoot the breeze. And my hands are clammy and my throat is thick. I'm shaky. I'm nervous to be here again. I think, what do I even have to say? Who even READS this anymore? Well, clearly, no one because you haven't posted anything in over a YEAR (see above: bonehead)
But then........a friend out of the blue asks me........'When are you writing part 2?' and I'm like......FOR WHAT? I laugh nervously.......trying to avoid the subject......trying to avoid that I feel like a TOTAL BONEHEAD. How do you apologize for that? Do you even need to?
"Hi my name is Yana"
{group unison} "HI YANA"
"and I'm a total bonehead"
There. OK. So by now you have probably read my Disaster series (please do, they are tragic!) and know that Chris is still sick but improving and that I could probably write a book about everything we have gone through. I probably should. Maybe I will. For now, let's just work on updating the blog, shall we? Horse before the cart stuff. Typical me.
If you or anyone you know if suffering from Lyme disease and you aren't getting help or answers, EMAIL me. I an angry advocate wife and I would love to pass on the hard earned knowledge we gained.
That's all for today.
love, recovering BH.
But then........a friend out of the blue asks me........'When are you writing part 2?' and I'm like......FOR WHAT? I laugh nervously.......trying to avoid the subject......trying to avoid that I feel like a TOTAL BONEHEAD. How do you apologize for that? Do you even need to?
"Hi my name is Yana"
{group unison} "HI YANA"
"and I'm a total bonehead"
There. OK. So by now you have probably read my Disaster series (please do, they are tragic!) and know that Chris is still sick but improving and that I could probably write a book about everything we have gone through. I probably should. Maybe I will. For now, let's just work on updating the blog, shall we? Horse before the cart stuff. Typical me.
If you or anyone you know if suffering from Lyme disease and you aren't getting help or answers, EMAIL me. I an angry advocate wife and I would love to pass on the hard earned knowledge we gained.
That's all for today.
love, recovering BH.
The Disaster pt. 2
[I wrote this post a year ago. Just finished putting on it's lipstick and finally hitting publish. If you haven't read part 1, go do it. It's a doozy.]
My eyes peel open around 6:30 am.
I heard sounds of my family breathing deeply in their sleep. My body, on the other hand, aches, and my head hurts from barely sleeping. Only mothers know the feeling of their heart and brain so on edge from a child being sick that they are half asleep only to jolt awake, ready to take action at any given moment.
Except this was different. It wasn't my child who was sick this time; it was my husband. I peel myself out of bed and shower, only to put on yesterdays dirty clothes, and yesterdays underwear inside out.
I check my phone and respond to the numerous texts that I got throughout the night. Our family and friends were all wondering the same thing; 'HOW IS CHRIS TODAY???'
Soon he stirs.
After a few minutes he gets out of bed and into the shower. Gets dressed in yesterdays dirty clothes, with yesterdays inside out underwear. Then he starts to shake and his color goes from pale to ghostly white. His face goes numb and his abdomen spasms and goes stiff. He tells me he feels like he could pass out and not wake up. He needed to go to the hospital. At this point the kids are awake and I am trying to get the totally incompetent front desk woman to call an ambulance for me. Finally, she connects me to 911 and a seemingly long time later, the EMT's arrive. After checking his vitals, they report that he seems quite stable and while they are legally obliged to tell me that they should bring him in, they suspect that he has the FLU and that he needs to rest. Push your flight back a day or two and he'll be fine, they said. They leave, but not before denying me a bandaid for some injury I incurred on our hell day before; legally, they can't give me anything. I would have to be a patient.
A little while later I get a text that my good friends and sisters Karen and Maryanne were driving down from upstate NY to help us. Not long after they arrive, we tool Chris to the hospital.
We asked the front desk for a wheelchair and after looking around for a while, they couldn't find one. So we put him in a rolling desk chair and somehow pushed him into the lobby. Pushing that chair on carpet was surprisingly hard. The staff could not have been more unhelpful. This was the worst hotel in the history of bad hotels. Thankfully Karen talked to the manager for me [aka tearing him a new one] and got us a carseat for the baby and a 'discounted hotel rate due to an emergency'. After that the the staff were a little bit nicer to me. [thanks karen!]
Instead of driving to the nearest ER, we drove to a rich part of town about 30 minutes away.
Another achingly long wait in the ER waiting room. When you are in a crisis, time creeps by in the most painful manner. Finally, we get into triage and then into a private room. 3-4 hours later we FINALLY see a doctor. We explain the whole story to him and he thinks the same thing - a flu, or a virus. They take lots of blood and run lots of tests. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. But Chris's temperature is still up and down, his blood pressure is up through the roof and then down again, he was shaking, his face was numb, he was nauseous and his body was stiff with muscle spams. It was so frightening. And nearly every nurse and doctor that came into our room would barely look at or touch him, they would only check the monitors. The hours crept by. Tests result came in. All seemed well. But he was looking worse and worse. 8 hours later a new shift of nurses and doctors came and we had to explain the whole thing over again. Some were more compassionate than others, but for the most part, everyone was awful. NEW JERSEY IS THE PIT OF HELL. A nurse came to discharge us in the middle of one of his intense episodes - shaking, spasms, numbness, blood pressure spiking - and she was asking him to sign his discharge papers. I yelled at her "OH Noooooo! He's not going anywhere! We are NOT leaving. Look at him!! Stop looking at your freakin monitors and LOOK AT MY HUSBAND!" She patronizingly told me to calm down and suggested that I should step out of the room because I am adding to my husbands anxiety. OHHHHHH. If looks could kill, I would be guilty of cold, blooded, murder.
Eventually, because they couldn't find anything technically wrong, they discharged us. We made the drive back to our funky hotel and settled into bed, praying that tomorrow he would wake up ok, and we could fly to Hawaii. The next morning I got up, showered, put on my 3 day old dirty clothes, and ditched the underwear. Chris woke up in rough shape. We quickly realized we were not flying anywhere, and the only place we should be going was back to the ER. We had to explain to the hospital staff why we were there again. They literally rolled our eyes at us.
Thankfully, my sweet 4 month old baby slept through most of this whole thing, and when she wasn't sleeping, she was smiling and making us smile through our tears. I am a highly emotional human being, so naturally, I was an emotional wreck. I was irate from the medical care we were getting and freaking out that my husband was dying!? When I realized that second day in the ER was our 4th wedding anniversary, the tears started flowing and didn't stop. As I sat next to my husband, holding his hand, praying for him, reading the Psalms to him, crying, remembering our 4 years of marriage, remembering the vows I made to him. The vows to stand by his side 'in sickness and in health'. Those words sounds so romantic when you say them, and you know that you meant them, but you hope you wont have to.
After another pointless day in the ER, we were discharged again and like wounded soldiers, we hobbled back to our hotel. After our three days of hell on earth, Chris's concerned parents drove through the night from Maine and arrived at our hotel in the morning. They brought us car seats, food, clothes, clean underwear (HALLELUJAH) tissues and great big hugs. Then they packed us into their tiny car and drove us home. Never been so happy to see my house in all my life.
That was June 2012. We spent that summer in and out of the ER. We saw dozens of doctors. We went to John Hopkins only to be discarded like yesterdays news. We ran countless tests. Gave a minimum of 80 samples of blood. He had CT-Scans, x-rays, Spinal Taps, Lumbar Punctures, saliva tests, stool samples and met a Psychiatrist. We searched and searched and searched until we came to the conclusion of: Lyme Disease. It's a beast of a disease. That is a whole other blog post.
That all began 26 months ago. As of today, my husband has improved to the point where he can work part time 20 hours a week, but still feels the sting of this disease daily, in some way or another.
We only got this far because of the endless support of our family and friends, and mostly, our Faith in the Lord. Even though we have absolutely no idea why this happened, we still trust that He is good.
Sorry it took so long to write all this. I guess in one way or another I had to weed out all the things that weren't vital to survival. Because some days, surviving is the only option I had.
I will try to post again....soon.
My eyes peel open around 6:30 am.
I heard sounds of my family breathing deeply in their sleep. My body, on the other hand, aches, and my head hurts from barely sleeping. Only mothers know the feeling of their heart and brain so on edge from a child being sick that they are half asleep only to jolt awake, ready to take action at any given moment.
Except this was different. It wasn't my child who was sick this time; it was my husband. I peel myself out of bed and shower, only to put on yesterdays dirty clothes, and yesterdays underwear inside out.
I check my phone and respond to the numerous texts that I got throughout the night. Our family and friends were all wondering the same thing; 'HOW IS CHRIS TODAY???'
Soon he stirs.
After a few minutes he gets out of bed and into the shower. Gets dressed in yesterdays dirty clothes, with yesterdays inside out underwear. Then he starts to shake and his color goes from pale to ghostly white. His face goes numb and his abdomen spasms and goes stiff. He tells me he feels like he could pass out and not wake up. He needed to go to the hospital. At this point the kids are awake and I am trying to get the totally incompetent front desk woman to call an ambulance for me. Finally, she connects me to 911 and a seemingly long time later, the EMT's arrive. After checking his vitals, they report that he seems quite stable and while they are legally obliged to tell me that they should bring him in, they suspect that he has the FLU and that he needs to rest. Push your flight back a day or two and he'll be fine, they said. They leave, but not before denying me a bandaid for some injury I incurred on our hell day before; legally, they can't give me anything. I would have to be a patient.
A little while later I get a text that my good friends and sisters Karen and Maryanne were driving down from upstate NY to help us. Not long after they arrive, we tool Chris to the hospital.
We asked the front desk for a wheelchair and after looking around for a while, they couldn't find one. So we put him in a rolling desk chair and somehow pushed him into the lobby. Pushing that chair on carpet was surprisingly hard. The staff could not have been more unhelpful. This was the worst hotel in the history of bad hotels. Thankfully Karen talked to the manager for me [aka tearing him a new one] and got us a carseat for the baby and a 'discounted hotel rate due to an emergency'. After that the the staff were a little bit nicer to me. [thanks karen!]
Instead of driving to the nearest ER, we drove to a rich part of town about 30 minutes away.
Another achingly long wait in the ER waiting room. When you are in a crisis, time creeps by in the most painful manner. Finally, we get into triage and then into a private room. 3-4 hours later we FINALLY see a doctor. We explain the whole story to him and he thinks the same thing - a flu, or a virus. They take lots of blood and run lots of tests. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. But Chris's temperature is still up and down, his blood pressure is up through the roof and then down again, he was shaking, his face was numb, he was nauseous and his body was stiff with muscle spams. It was so frightening. And nearly every nurse and doctor that came into our room would barely look at or touch him, they would only check the monitors. The hours crept by. Tests result came in. All seemed well. But he was looking worse and worse. 8 hours later a new shift of nurses and doctors came and we had to explain the whole thing over again. Some were more compassionate than others, but for the most part, everyone was awful. NEW JERSEY IS THE PIT OF HELL. A nurse came to discharge us in the middle of one of his intense episodes - shaking, spasms, numbness, blood pressure spiking - and she was asking him to sign his discharge papers. I yelled at her "OH Noooooo! He's not going anywhere! We are NOT leaving. Look at him!! Stop looking at your freakin monitors and LOOK AT MY HUSBAND!" She patronizingly told me to calm down and suggested that I should step out of the room because I am adding to my husbands anxiety. OHHHHHH. If looks could kill, I would be guilty of cold, blooded, murder.
Eventually, because they couldn't find anything technically wrong, they discharged us. We made the drive back to our funky hotel and settled into bed, praying that tomorrow he would wake up ok, and we could fly to Hawaii. The next morning I got up, showered, put on my 3 day old dirty clothes, and ditched the underwear. Chris woke up in rough shape. We quickly realized we were not flying anywhere, and the only place we should be going was back to the ER. We had to explain to the hospital staff why we were there again. They literally rolled our eyes at us.
Thankfully, my sweet 4 month old baby slept through most of this whole thing, and when she wasn't sleeping, she was smiling and making us smile through our tears. I am a highly emotional human being, so naturally, I was an emotional wreck. I was irate from the medical care we were getting and freaking out that my husband was dying!? When I realized that second day in the ER was our 4th wedding anniversary, the tears started flowing and didn't stop. As I sat next to my husband, holding his hand, praying for him, reading the Psalms to him, crying, remembering our 4 years of marriage, remembering the vows I made to him. The vows to stand by his side 'in sickness and in health'. Those words sounds so romantic when you say them, and you know that you meant them, but you hope you wont have to.
After another pointless day in the ER, we were discharged again and like wounded soldiers, we hobbled back to our hotel. After our three days of hell on earth, Chris's concerned parents drove through the night from Maine and arrived at our hotel in the morning. They brought us car seats, food, clothes, clean underwear (HALLELUJAH) tissues and great big hugs. Then they packed us into their tiny car and drove us home. Never been so happy to see my house in all my life.
That was June 2012. We spent that summer in and out of the ER. We saw dozens of doctors. We went to John Hopkins only to be discarded like yesterdays news. We ran countless tests. Gave a minimum of 80 samples of blood. He had CT-Scans, x-rays, Spinal Taps, Lumbar Punctures, saliva tests, stool samples and met a Psychiatrist. We searched and searched and searched until we came to the conclusion of: Lyme Disease. It's a beast of a disease. That is a whole other blog post.
That all began 26 months ago. As of today, my husband has improved to the point where he can work part time 20 hours a week, but still feels the sting of this disease daily, in some way or another.
We only got this far because of the endless support of our family and friends, and mostly, our Faith in the Lord. Even though we have absolutely no idea why this happened, we still trust that He is good.
Sorry it took so long to write all this. I guess in one way or another I had to weed out all the things that weren't vital to survival. Because some days, surviving is the only option I had.
I will try to post again....soon.
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