Catching Up!

The reason for the hiatus on this blog is twofold. To my delight and surprise I was invited by my youngest daughter and her husband to go to Cape Cod for 4 days in Sept. Not only was Cape Cod somewhere I had always envisioned seeing, but the opportunity of spending time with three of my favorite people was too good to pass up. Jack is at that great age, 3 and a half, when it doesn't take much to entertain him or bore him and happily he thought I was pretty good at entertaining him during the car part of the trip. The four of us had never traveled together and I found that I was a bit anxious about slowing down their usual vacation pace. My fears were unfounded. Once I was on the plane headed to Boston a lot of the syptoms I'd been struggling with for months seemed to have stayed home allowing me to take a vaction from them. The weather was outstanding with none the heat and humidity I had expected and the area proved to be everything I'd envisioned.


Then when I returned home word came that Stacy was going to have a much-needed hysterectomy on Oct. 4th. and suddenly I couldn't write one word in any of my journals! At a time when writing might have helped me through the rough days I was frozen. I also couldn't create visual art. I had no idea just how depressed and anxious I was and once the practice of journaling stoppped I couldn't get started again. All of my intentions to write about the vacation didn't come to fruition once the date for surgery was made. It's now weeks later and I'm just now getting some of my equilibrium back. Inthe last couple of days I've been able to put pen to paper again but not without a nagging sense of unfinished business. And then it occurred to me that if I just listed the events rather than fill in the details I could put those weeks behind me and start the practice of journaling again. I felt completely unbalanced during the weeks I wasn't journaling and at odds with myself and the world.

The list is in my private journal, but suffice it to say that the month before and after Stacy's surgery was extremely rocky. We came close to losing her a couple of days after the surgery. Morphine and renal failure aren't a good combination. She saw the surgeon yesterday who told her that she's doing remarkably well and has healed better than most of his patients do. She hasn't had anything for pain since the 5th day after the complete hysterectomy and didn't have what he refers to as the "after surgery shuffle" where most women walk into his office bent over, holding their stomachs and barely lifting their feet off of the ground. Stacy has a completely different outlook on pain than most people do. She doesn't expect to be in pain so mostly she dismisses the discomfort. Seizures, however, are a different matter! We had expected that she might not have as many once her periods stopped, but that doesn't seem to be the case. . . and so it goes.