In case I haven't mentioned it 72,000 times already, my hand is broken. I know, you haven't heard this before. It's totally new news! And so, complaining that my hand really really really REALLY hurts is also news. (Feel free to punch me in the face, now.) (Maybe it will distract me from the pain in my hand?) I have been a bit preoccupied with the pain in my hand, is my point. Because it hurts. DUH. Unfortunately, life still requires that I do tremendously demanding things like get dressed, take care of my kid, leave the house for appointments, and work. Harumph. At this point, anything with...
This is not a post I wanted to write. I blog about many things, but I think I have yet to blog about this particular thing. And yet, here we are. Let us briefly retrace my medical steps of the last week. On Sunday night, I broke my stupid hand on a stupid apple. I then spent many hours in the emergency room with my long-suffering husband, and when we left we had a prescription for a heavy-duty narcotic (Narcotic 1). I had told the ER staff that I don't do well with narcotics; in fact, most of them make me throw up. So when I mentioned this, they threw in a prescription for an anti-nausea med...
I neglected to tell you that the night we went to the ER, Otto and I couldn't stop laughing. I mean, really, what can you do? "How did you hurt your hand, ma'am?" "I was making apple crisp." The questioner would do a double-take, and then we'd burst out into fresh giggles. Also Otto kept me entertained while we waited with great suggestions like, "Sooo... wanna play Rock, Paper, Scissors?" (We later decided to change it to Rock, Paper, Scissors, Crisp, but then deemed it too dangerous to play. Cue further giggling.) Eventually they wrapped me up and sent me home with an orthopedist referral....
Left to my own devices, I don't often find it hard to write. My head is always full of STUFF---some of it important, plenty not---and the STUFF gets tangled up with pesky FEELINGS and then there is something about the act of extracting those things from my skull and committing them to letters and punctuation and letting other people see it that helps me make sense of things. It helps me to make sense of ME. That's inherently selfish, and I know it. Then again, a lot of things are. I'm not convinced the way I'm compelled to write is any worse than anything else, but I know this about it. I do...
I don't really know how interesting this is going to be for 95% of you, but someone asked me to write about it and after some consideration, I decided I would for two reasons: 1) A long-time reader asked, and I like her, and I'm a giver like that and 2) maybe even if this doesn't apply to you and never applies to you, it is somehow informative to have some idea of how this goes, even if only just as a bit of an eye-opener about how health care works in this country right now. So if you've been reading along here for a while, you already know that my daughter is now in her fourth month of...
It's been just over a month since I finally dared to say it out loud, that we believed Chickadee was getting better, that our long nightmare of a year might---finally!---be headed somewhere more hopeful. Meds were changed, improvements took hold, and I felt like we could hope without holding our collective breath. Since then, life here on the "outside" has marched on without my daughter. Monkey started school; Otto started back to work; when I drive past the high school in the late afternoon and see the cross country team out running, I quietly count to myself how many of the kids we know,...
It's official; we have reached the portion of 2012 where things have been so incredibly suckalicious that my hands hover over the keyboard while I wrestle with the very real fear that you will just stop believing what I'm saying. Because it's outlandish. How can one family have such incredibly bad luck? Surely I am just making some of this up, or embellishing, or I've just completely lost my marbles or I'm just screwing with you now. (It would be nice if that was true, kind of. Except for the part where I'm either crazy or sadistic.) Anyway. EVERYONE IS FINE. Let's start with that. At last...
If Chickadee had cancer---if she had a tumor in her brain or rogue cells infiltrating her marrow---everything would be different. Well, almost everything. The thing that wouldn't be different would be the fear and the worry and the what-if-ing I try to only indulge in in the middle of the night. But people wouldn't avoid us or say, "I don't know what to say." They would say, "I'm so sorry" and they wouldn't act like we were contagious or whisper about our parenting. Our health insurance would pay for her treatment, because that's what health insurance is supposed to do. Even though brain...
I kept thinking that once I knew for sure what was happening, it would be less overwhelming, and then I could say "Hey, here's the story, I've finally unclenched long enough to tell you." I could sit down and figure out what to tell, how to tell it, and then I could assure you that everything was going to be okay and not to worry. That was a good idea, I guess. I mean, it would've been, if it had worked. It doesn't work because I don't know if everything is going to be okay. A rather large portion of my brain is convinced that nothing is ever going to be okay ever again, but even if I manage...
