This is second hand knowledge from my grandfather so I can't promise that all of the details are 100% reliable but I know I have the gist of it. My dad went to the hospital because he had a bad fall a few days ago and was complaining of severe pain. They took xrays and found several broken bones including his ribs. They also found that his lungs are filling with fluid again.

This is not a big surprise though, since they told him to limit his water consumption and to avoid alcohol at any cost before they released him. He has been drinking the same way he was before he went in over a month ago and it was only a matter of time. My mom doesn't seem to care- either she is tired of trying to make him stop or she really just doesn't care, (someone is buying him the alcohol though). I dunno. She may not know.

Anyway, the dr who examined him told him that she was alerting all of his different doctors and that in her opinion he had days, maybe weeks to live. I don't know the extent of his condition- I am only aware of these few details because my grandfather while in his panic, felt that I should be let in on it. I guess I will get ahold of my mom later today to see what she has to say about it and if I found out that I was misinformed or left anything out, I will post it.

They are all going to pick out a coffin for him and make funeral arrangements later today if that tells you anything... :( Although I will believe it when I see it. The man has miraculously recovered so many different times that I am starting to wonder if he CAN die at all...

I love that Alex is finally old enough to not only enjoy classic movies but also to understand what is happening on the screen as well... We used to try and watch Star Wars with him and about 20 minutes in he would either be asleep or he would just wander away. Now he watches, is entertained AND immersed in the story! I love it!

He is also WAAAY more observant than I am. We will be in the middle of a movie and it always catches me off guard when he asks me things like, "why are they playing sad music mommy?". Half the time I don't even realize that they were playing sad music until he points it out!!! I am busy watching the movie and enjoying it without thinking too hard and he is busy watching and processing all of it! Watching with him pretty much changes the movie experience completely. And not in a bad way.

Right now Chris and Alex are watching Indiana Jones. I hate those kinds of movies, they bore me to tears - but Alex is loving it! Alex has so many questions! Finally Chris has someone to watch boring old classic action movies with.

Ok now the random part. Why do all of the fake meat products like Morning Star Farms faux chicken strips and faux ground beef actually smell/ look like/ taste like/ and feel like the real thing? If I wanted the real thing I would just eat that... I guess some people don't eat it because they can't or miss it and want it so it's a replacement- but why can't they make a faux meat that is for people like me? People who hate the taste/ smell/ texture of real meat and want something to put in their blasted tacos without having it be gross?

:) Maybe I need to make a line of fake meat products. I can see it now: Rainbocow Vegetarian meat substitutes... Does not taste anything like a cow! Hahahah! Yea...

Today (the 25th) is Alex's 5th birthday! We had a big party on Saturday but tomorrow we are going to Gatti Town to celebrate. I am sure there will be tons of pictures of both parties soon.

To make things even more special, my baby lost his very first tooth today!!!! The tooth fairy comes for the first time tonight :) He lost the right middle one on the bottom. It was loose for the first time last night and today it popped out while he was eating a pop tart for breakfast- my kid does nothing halfway! :)


It's amazing how tiny his little tooth is! What's more amazing is how big the hole is- he kind of had a gap in those two middle teeth already but this looks like the size of a hole for two teeth! You can already see the new tooth popping up through the bottom.

I love it! My baby turns 5 years old today (at 1:30pm), and is getting his first tooth fairy visit on the same day! So exciting! This stuff is some of the best parts of being a mommy- all the new and wonderful discoveries and journeys we get to watch and be a part of!

Scarlet Fever sounds like one of those scary things you read about in history books but can't imagine. At least thats what it was to me. Until today... It has been a long couple of days.

Alex got really sick at Chris's sister's house on Monday. He had a fever and threw up on the way home. He just laid there whimpered for most of the day. Tuesday wasn't any better. I have given him Ibuprofen and Tylenol and neither has reduced his fever below 102. Once the fever starts to worsen I can tell - he starts to cry inconsolably because he has a headache and clutches his head.

He had at least 10 cups of water yesterday which is odd compared to his usual 5 or 6, but has only gone to the bathroom twice... for the rest of the day he never got off the couch. Which is also odd since he usually never ever ever sits still. The poor kid has been miserable because he wasn't getting more than an hour of sleep at a time. Every time he manages to doze off (which is off and on constantly), he sleeps fitfully for a while, whimpering and tossing- and then he wakes up crying.

He has been refusing to eat anything since Monday morning, although I convinced him to eat a slice of bread and a few crackers over the past few days because I was afraid the ibuprofen would tear up his stomach if he didn't have SOMETHING. He has thrown up several times.

I noticed a bright red rash on his cheeks and arms yesterday. It looks just like a bad sunburn!!! That freaked me out the most and when I Googled fever plus rash- it gave me two options: scarlet fever or some strange thing called fifths disease. I have only heard of the latter once before and it was while I was pregnant because they test all pregnant women for it. That was enough to convince me he needed to see a doctor.

First thing they did was test him for strep. 5 minutes later the doctor came into the room and explained that he had strep and that it caused the scarlet fever. Apparently this is actually very common, and all it needs is antibiotics. The only scary part is that it can (and has) cause his fever to climb very high and very fast, so we have to monitor it and treat it as soon as it starts. Apparently the rash is supposed to last for almost a week. Weird. And we have to put lotion on him at least twice a day so it doesn't hurt or peel. Especially because it itches. Sounds like a sunburn to me!

Since we started the antibiotics this morning and gave him Tylenol, he seems to be feeling a LOT better. Still no sense of humor, hahaha, but he is talking and walking around a little bit now. Still not willing to eat anything other than 1 or 2 saltines but no throwing up either so that is good. All in all I think my baby is getting better. I wish we had gone to the doctor on Tuesday instead of waiting it out because he would have been feeling better even sooner.

Scarlet Fever sounds scary but really it's not. If not treated with antibiotics it can cause serious damage to your heart and etc (I don't remember, you can google it if you care), but otherwise its just basic strep with a few extras for fun! :)

Friday night, my dad was complaining of a horrible headache and Saturday night my father told my mom that he couldn't move his legs. He is always complaining about something being horribly wrong, especially when he is drinking, so she ignored it. Sunday morning she called Chris because she was finally starting to believe that he really couldn't move his legs and was scared. Chris of course told her to call 911.

When they got to the hospital they found out that he was bleeding into his brain. They said that the massive amounts of blood thinners that he was taking to keep from having a heart attack or stroke probably caused it. The swelling in his brain was restricting the nerves that sent info for certain motor functions, including the use of his legs. The neurosurgeon decided that his only chance was to reverse the blood thinners, give him a clotting agent and hope he didn't die from stroke or heart attack first. He was of course in horrible pain, and they were telling us that he could very well die that night.

They managed to stop the bleeding in my father's brain earlier today, but that's about it. Nothing else has changed. The nurse said that no news is usually good news in situations like this but that it is simply something they have to wait and see with. He is still in the ICU.

Click these and it will take you to see the whole thing.

Newport Aquarium - May 2008


My Birthday - April 2008


Thunder Over Louisville- April 2008

Ok so my computer actually truely really does hate me and I finally have proof!!! SERIOUSLY!!! All my months of hard work taking these blasted pictures for the church website and the bulletin boards, and of course then there is my art...  Now it’s all gone.

Technically it’s not actually gone, it’s just in hiding. According to Chris’s hard drive (we each have our own just hooked into the same computer - I would go nuts if I had to share- oy!), my computer has a corrupted partition table. Which I have actually suspected for some time now but knew nothing about so had no way to fix it. Duh Wikipedia. Anyway, my computer is invisisble now... and so is everything on it- which means my music, my pictures, my programs, my everything...

We have had to use the windows disk to boot the blasted computers for several months. That alone should have been an indication that something was seriously wrong, but Chris being Chris didn’t bother to do anything about it or let me because it wasn’t completely dead yet and it wasn’t really affecting him. I started trying to backup my stuff knowing it was only going to get worse but just adding my music to his computer slowed it down because it pretty much filled it up completely! Not even half of my pictures would fit on it even without any programs other than windows (and it’s basics like paint, word pad, etc..) installed. Even when I zipped it and compressed it in every way I could think of, it still wasn’t going to fit. We had a very nice friend give us one of his hard drives Sunday night, and I was overjoyed- finally I was going to get to back it all up!

When we finally got that hard drive formatted and ready to fill up with all my happy stuff- it was invisible- poof- gone! I think I lost many years off of my life... hours and hours and hours of work- missing!!! So now I have the joys of using data recovery programs and hoping to find one that not only works but that I can afford. We found one that did locate my files but they wanted $200 which we do not have. In the end, if it is the only one that can help me though, I will sell my soul if I have to just to get it back.

Why me? Why not Chris’s computer which has nothing important on it at all! Why mine that has blood sweat and tears ingrained into its very being??? Why me, the one who needs the computer to function in almost any capacity, from the flyers for events I have to promot to the pictures I have to print/ share/ sell??!!! ARGH!

Another wonderful little problem is that even if we do get it all back, it will probably happen again. For whatever reason my hard drive keeps announcing that it has ______ many bad sectors and the numbers go up every day. Its up to 20 now. Any ideas what the hell is causing that??? Or better yet, what to do about it???  Anyone??

I came home to find his very colorful cake waiting for me a few weeks ago (yes it took me awhle to get around to writing about it, hahaha!). Chris and Alex had worked on it while I was out for the evening. Not for my birthday or mothers day, but just because they wanted to be sweet. Alex was so excited about it that he had to show me the minute I walked through the door! Technically it wasn’t very pretty and it wasn’t really all that yummy, but to me- it was the best cake EVER! I feel so loved!!!

I got an endoscopy and a stomach + small intestine biopsy early Thursday morning. For those of you who don’t know, that is where they shove a big camera down your throat and take pictures of your throat/ stomach/ and small intestine. Then they cut peices out to look at under a microscope later.               I haven’t been feeling very well and I have been extremely overwhelmed and busy lately or I would have written about everything leading up to this a lot sooner. They were supposed to do it laast friday, the 14th but I had taken some advil and they were afraid it would cause me to bleed too much during the biopsy.

I was afraid it would be really painful and scary but it was actually neither. I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink anything after midnight which is no big deal, but it was hard not to drink water in the middle of the night when my mouth was really dry. They gave me an IV which was the only painful part of the whole thing, and once I was wheeled into the procedure room, they sprayed my mouth and throat with lidocane which was incredibly nasty tasting but it made EVERYTHING go numb. After that, they said they were injecting me with the sedative and the next thing I remember is waking up in another room with Chris and Alex sitting by me. They took out my IV, gave me a drink and started telling me about what I was not allowed to do for the next 12 hrs.

Apparently the drug they gave me was in the xanex family, but a lot stronger, so I was pretty out of it. I wasn’t allowed to drive at all until the next day, not allowed to cook (they were afraid I would forget I was cooking and catch the house on fire :), hahaha!), or be alone just in case. The medicine wasn’t that bad, I was just a little woozy and I slept pretty much the whole rest of the day. I started to feel like myself again that night around 8ish. They told me to take it easy and to "limit travel" whatever the heck that means, because of the biopsy, which was fine with me since I wasn’t exactly able to get up and go anywhere anyway. The only side effect of the procedure that I could tell was a pretty sore and achey  stomach for the rest of the day, which they said would be normal.

They found a few interesting things during the endoscopy. I won’t get the results from the actual biopsys for 3-7 days, but here is what I already know: in addition to the acid reflux that I have been taking prescription prilosec for, I have something called bile reflux. I never even knew there was such a thing but apparently the bile goes from my small intestine to my stomach through something sort of like a leaky valve type thing. I was half asleep when this was explained to me so I am still a little uncertain about this part. The Dr. said it wasn’t something that can be fixed with diet and that pretty much the only treatment is medicine and surgery. Fun, right? Supposedly bile relfux is almost always accompanied by acid reflux, which makes sense and that explains a lot of my stomach pain.

He prescribed me two weeks  worth of Nexium and said that if that didn’t work to help with the pain, he would have to prescibe something stronger. Hopefully the purple pill will work. :) He also found some "erosions" on my stomach, which are basically just little ulcers all over it, which ALSO explains the pretty much constant pain in my stomach. It also explains why coffee has been almost impossible for me to drink anymore, among other things. He said that could have easily been caused by the acid and taking advil, asprin or ibueprofen too much. I have been taking advil about once a week because of my migranes when the imitrex and Tylenol aren’t helping. Guess I will have to talk to my doctor about finding something else since I am no longer allowed to take any NSAIDs.

It will be interesting to see what the biopsy reveals, and in the meantime I have some lovely pictures of what looks like a slime filled swimming pool (the bile in my tummy), and some pretty white spots all over a shiny pink thing (the erosions). I don’t have a scanner anymore or I would probably upload them and subject you to them, hahaha! Lucky you...

 

Vote for Mert my doggy!  Just click link and hit vote button under his picture quick and easy!  Pretty please!


Vote for Mert

It has been a crazy couple of weeks around here. So much happening all at once, and so much to reflect on. I loved every minute of it, and yet, I am so glad that it is OVER!!!
I didn't even find time to send out Christmas cards! Not even one!

Usually Christmas stinks for me. Too much drama, not enough happy at all... but this year was actually really cool. Nothing really went wrong, everyone got along with no fighting whatsoever between my relatives, we watched movies and played games, and my family came over to my house on Christmas day for a change, which I absolutely loved! Sounds boring, but compared to Christmas's past, it was magical. I have to say, of all the Christmas's I can remember, this one was the best. I hope all of you had Christmas happiness too!

New Years wasn't crazy but it was fun. We spent most of the day doing chores, but the evening was a lot of fun. We cleaned out the spare bedroom, it was literally crammed with random crap that I had planned to sell in a yard sale that never actually happened this summer. So we piled all of it into the bed of Chris's truck and filled up his cab as well. Unfortunately the Salvation Army was closed both New Years Eve and today, so it is now sitting there covered in almost two inches of snow!!! Eh. Either way, the spare bedroom is almost usable again, and that is nothing short of a miracle!!!

Chris, Alex, Gabe and I went to my friend Regina's new house. She had some other friends over and we had dinner and played games together. Alex had a blast because even though his friend Jonathan was at his dad's house, he got to play with Regina's 11 yr old stepson Dalton all night. Gabe turned into a pumpkin around 12:30 but he didn't yell at us when we stayed just a little bit longer... :) He probably wanted to but he is such a super duper awesome nice guy that he didn't, hahahah! Thanks Gabe! I still feel bad, like we should have invited Tommy, but unfortunately I didn't think about it until we were on our way home. oh well.

Christianna has been gone since a few days before Christmas, and I have missed her. I didn't really get to see her much the week before either because we were all so busy with Christmasy things that there just wasn't any time! It will be nice to have everything calm and back to normal again so we can all hang out and be calm and have fun with no pressure or rushing or a huge list of things to do. I hope she will have a safe trip home...

Yay for 2008, although I can barely believe it is already here... Christmas came and went just like that- poof! And now its January... strange. Soon it will be my mom's birthday, and then Gabe's birthday, and then it will be Chris's birthday. What shall we do on Gabe's birthday? Last year we decorated his car with balloons and then made him a really yucky sugar free cake. I don't think we shall try that again this year... at least not the sugar free cake part...

Chris turns 30 on February 14th. We don't usually have a party because it being Valentines Day and all, most of his friends are slightly busy, as are we. But since 30 is a big deal, I think maybe we will have to have a party anyway. We could maybe do it the day after or something. Everyone gets to help me figure out how to make it work and make it super special. In the 5 years we have been married, I have never had a birthday party for Chris!!! He always claims Valentine's Day is more important, but I think he is wrong and I think that will have to change. :) Birthdays are important after all- they are my favorite days!!! I love everyone's birthday!!! I get to give presents, everyone is always happy at birthdays, and then there is the cake...

Ugh. I just realized that this year, on my birthday I probably won't be allowed to eat any cake! Hmmm... I think 2008 is going to be a very interesting year...

So while I was away on the women's retreat this weekend, Alex hurt his foot. Chris's family had a bonfire and while he was sitting on a trailer, a bunch of pallets fell on his foot. :( I was worried that it would be broken but thankfully, according to the six xrays they took, he just has a bad sprain.

The xrays actually showed the bruises on his foot and the back of his leg! I had no idea that bruises could be seen on xrays but the doctor explained that if there is a lot of swelling it can be seen. Weird. Alex loved getting to see his bones! He says they took a picture of his feet.

The doc says he should not try to put weight on it for at least a week. He also said that it would probably be at least two before he would even be willing to try. My poor baby can't walk- he has to crawl!! And he can't pee because he can't stand up by himself... lots of fun!

Trick or Treating will be very interesting on Wednesday with a child who cannot walk. Overall I am just very glad that it isn't broken.

I took a few pictures with my phone's camera while he was getting the xrays.



..