Catching Up To 2016 & The Start of Everything Bad

I have been away from my blog a lot, I know. I keep feeling the need to write. I am just at a loss for words. I haven't been consistent in updates, but it would seem wrong to pack everything in all at once. I am not great at giving the nutshell version. This is probably going to be long... 

I realize that I never finished posting updates about how last year's garden did. We enjoyed the fruits of our labor very much, harvesting from every plant we planted. 


The home-grown watermelon were an absolute favorite. They were small (we got excited and greedy), but they were delicious. We even got to share our very largest watermelon with our favorite neighbors; a little family that lives two houses down from us. We do not talk a lot, but we do occasionally. They seem to be really nice people. :)

We had a beautiful summer and fall, dotted with trips to the zoo and the apple orchard. Smiles, love, laughter, an early start to the school year, surprising several-week stretches of the flu, but overall a very good year.

In August we got to bring home a new dog, Coco Chanel. :) She is four now, but was three at the time. 

She's a huge bundle of fur that we ended up trimming down to a much smaller bundle. Isn't she pretty, though? She is such a well-behaved girl. Giraffe is especially fond of her. Koala is too, but that passion is not exactly returned in spades. lol I'm sure she'll be more affectionate as Koala grows up a little. 


Winter came but did not really come. A sneeze of snow here, a dusting another time or two. Christmas came, with much preparation. It was an 'us' year. (We rotate on a three-year schedule of my family, his family, just us.) I knew we would not be able to afford a huge amount of gifts so I put every extra penny that did not go into the reduced number of gifts into food. (We were not able to make very much the last several years.) 

Why food? Food means time invested. It means that the girls and hubs and I laugh and sing and get messy together in preparation. We made way too many goodies. Giraffe and I threw ourselves into crochet, too. I made a ton of snowflake and peppermint dish/washcloth/potholders. Giraffe made and sold over fifty dollars worth of Christmas ornaments. It was so fun and so fulfilling! Come the actual day, we smiled as the girls opened their gifts and spent the day stuffing ourselves like pigs. It was lazy, messy, and lovely. It was perfect. :)



A day or two later, we got a cat! This is not a big deal to many people, probably, but considering that my husband and I are "not cat people", it is a big deal to us.

Her name is Katniss (yes, yes... HG). 

She's almost five and needed a new home with a loving family, so we gave her one. She was a slow warm-up (cats do not like change), but she is a lovely addition to our little nest. :) The girls are excited and Hubs and I have been won over, too. 

New Year showed up with plenty of fixings still in the fridge, freezer, counters, and containers of every size and shape. My parents came down to spend the day with the girls and me since hubs had to work. It is the last time I remember feeling like a person, actually.

The Start of Everything Bad...

I went into pains that came and went like a brewing storm in my body. This had been happening for three years. I always brushed it away as trapped wind even though the surgery that gave me that side effect was long past. 

By January 7th, I went into an attack that would not end. Ten hours later (the next morning) I was in the emergency room, utterly embarrassed that 'gas' had brought me here. The doctor came in and declared my gallbladder was full of stones and sludge and was inflamed. He said that I needed to have it removed, but figured the surgeon would rather schedule it. He sent me home with an appointment for five days later. Those five days were pain-wracked days of misery. Grandparents took the Koala and Giraffe, and I laid around wanting the pain to end. I couldn't read, couldn't relax, couldn't play games to pass the time. I felt every minute like I was just waiting... waiting... waiting to get this poison out of my body.

Dr. S, the surgeon, walked into the room at his office the following Tuesday - literally took one look at me - and sent me in to have the offending organ removed. Hallelujah! We drove around the side of their building to the hospital entrance and rolled in, relieved that this long wait (Ha! Five days! Long!) was almost over. 

I was quickly admitted and placed into a 'jump' room so my new surgeon - Dr. M  - could get right to me after the patient he was already working on. The nurses tending me said the same thing we'd heard at Dr. S's office earlier that morning. Nobody could figure out why I'd been left to sit on a sick gallbladder for five days when my bloodwork spelled out clearly that it needed to be removed. 

Dr. M came whooshing in, touting his 26 years a surgeon and his 5,000 surgeries. He said, simply put, that by leaving me the extra five days, my gallbladder had become toxic and would more than likely leak and quite possibly kill me, were he to remove it that day. 

The First Drain Placed

To my dismay, he recommended a billiary drain be inserted into my badly infected organ... aaaand left there for six weeks. He wanted to drain as much infection as he could. We were really shocked by this news but he assured us (stating again his experience) that this was the only safe way to do things. 

My Disgusting Biliary Bag

In truth, we did not have too much time to process it as I was sent down to interventional radiology right after he left. I was supposed to be loopy and mildly sedated enough that I wouldn't feel/be aware of anything during the surgical procedure. 

Instead, I was wide awake and ended feeling the three pops of the needle followed by the indescribable pain of it searing into my sickly, inflamed organ. I panicked and began to sob, the surgeon panicked, the staff panicked... it was hell. I gripped the sides of the table and tried not to flail around or run for the hills. They yelled at each other to add x amount of drugs to my drip. I still feel like crying just at the thought. I wrote a longer version of that in a trauma group but I don't feel capable of reliving it again in greater detail right now. 

Flowers From Hubs and Sis

I was kept for two or three days and then sent home. It took me an additional six days for things like moving around and using the toilet to stop making me want to scream and cry. I finally got into the groove and tried to patiently wait out the six weeks. I also tried so hard to forget about the trauma of the drain insertion itself. I've had too much trauma in my life. This was not going to get me. I said to anyone who would listen, "I am okay as long as I never have to go through that again."

(Continued in another post, since this is already too long.)