A Good Week (yay!)

Monday I went to court for my stuff that was left behind in the old house.  To make a long story short, I get my stuff back and reimbursed for court costs, so I’m quite pleased about that.  Wed. my 5yo had an appointment with a pediatric cardiologist because of a heart murmur which he’s had since birth but has been getting louder.  His regular ped was worried about aortic stenosis because of the location of the murmur, but it turned out to be an innocent murmur and nothing to worry about.  So yay for that too!

Yesterday was of course Thanksgiving, and also my youngest’s third birthday.  Quite an eventful day in our house!  His favorite present was by far the Sonic game – he loves Sonic for some reason.  I think the picture captured it nicely:

It's a SONIC!

I had all the kidlets here with me and no one else, and it was pretty awesome actually.  We had a huge turkey with all the accompaniments, and plenty of leftovers.  I don’t think I’ll have to cook again until Monday.

This morning I had to get up early and go out, not for Black Friday shopping but for stupid 8 a.m. basketball practice.  What kind of middle school coach makes kids come in at 8 a.m. on Black Friday for practice?  Sadistic I tell you!  It’s a half hour drive to my daughter’s school, so we had to leave here at roughly 7:15 (I needed gas too) and there wasn’t even shopping involved.  WRONG!  I have to leave in a half hour or so to go back and pick her up.  It was snowing on the way out there, and while it did help with the holiday atmosphere I have to say that it was not welcome in the least.  I do not want snow, not now, not for Christmas, not in Jan., not at all.  Do not want.  We can just skip all this and go straight to spring, it’ll be okay by me.

In case you didn’t know, or I haven’t said it lately: I hate winter!

All in all, a great week and much welcome after the yuckiness of the past month or so.  I’ll take it!

I need something good

I’m tired of being tired.  I am not functioning quite the way I want to at the moment.  I am depressed I suppose.  If this is the seasonal stuff kicking in already then it’s going to be a long, long winter.  Hopefully it’s just that I’m rightfully overwhelmed with my life in general and I’ll be back to functional in no time.   My pain has not been under control lately, and that makes me slightly panicked.  I have plenty of potent pain killers, but they don’t seem to be working as they should.  Or if I take enough to kill the pain effectively I am also knocked out for much of the day, and I can’t function like that.  I’m waking up most mornings wondering what the fuck the point to all this is.  I am second-guessing myself and short-tempered and it really sucks.  I think maybe the younger kids would be better served if I went ahead and let their dad take them to Greece.  They wouldn’t have to deal with the day-to-day of my illness and mood swings, they’d have stability and structure to be sure.  I wonder if it’s my own selfishness keeping them with me as long as possible and not their best interests.

I just want to curl up and cry, but I can’t, because crying makes my breathing so much worse and I can’t afford that right now.  It’s bad enough already.  So I stick to a few “woe is me” moments and suck it up and trudge through the day, but I am finding no joy in my days right now and I hate hate hate that.

It’s my youngest’s birthday next week (Thanksgiving) so I’m going to try very hard to focus on being thankful for the positives and not worrying about the rest.  It sucks feeling this way.

 

Rotavirus: the fun continues

I will warn you up front in case some of my emetophobe friends follow – there are stories of vomit and diarrhea to follow.  If you’re eating or queasy, you might want to read this later!

 

I’m operating on very little sleep so please excuse any and all typos and/or grammatical errors.  They’re usually my pet peeve but today I will give myself a free pass.  It’s true (not allowed to say that word but I’m gonna anyway, ha ha!), rotavirus has STRUCK.  If you do not know the joy and pleasure of rotavirus, consider yourself lucky.  It is the stinkiest shit ever to grace the earth, and I mean shit in the literal sense.  It is accompanied by vomiting, low-grade fever, and oh yes, more stinky diarrhea.  On the bright side, it’s one of those that kids usually only catch once, or that subsequent infections are nearly asymptomatic and not troublesome.  For that reason, my olders and myself are probably safe but my 5yo?  He’s hit.  I expect the 3yo to follow any time now.

It started yesterday.  We had a great evening planned.  I picked up my daughter from her basketball practice, and had been commissioned by her to fix her hair like Taylor Swift for a masquerade un-ball she had at school last night.  So, we stopped at Taco Bell for a quick dinner and headed home to work on food and hair.  We ate quickly, and the boys set about playing football on the ps2 while I worked on her hair.  All of a sudden, my precious 5yo goes screaming across the kitchen, spewing black jack taco remnants all over the floor.  Ugh.  That shit smells and looks disgusting as upchuck (not that anything looks particularly appetizing, but this was particularly vile) and it was freaking everywhere.  I immediately had daughter get on the phone to her dad, because we were supposed to leave in about an hour to take her to the dance.  And then of course I was supposed to pick her up from said dance at 10:00, a little difficult if you’re sporting puking 5 year olds.

So, I set about cleaning up the kitchen but did a half-assed job because I was only halfway finished with my daughter’s hair and if you’ve ever been or ever known a 14 year old girl you know that hair is very important for a school dance.  She was kind of panicky, but I give her credit for holding it together.  I’m back to fixing her hair and poor little fella gets hit again – this time he thankfully makes it to the bathroom and hits the toilet.  Yay for good aim!  Threw him in the bathtub and head back to hair central.  About this time their dad shows up to pick them up, but I’m still not quite finished with her hair.  It’s more Miley Cyrus and less Taylor Swift, but I still think it looks cute.  Her dad agrees.  She is very self-critical and thinks she looks horrible, and she’s not happy with the lack of curl close to the root, etc., but she realizes that time and circumstance are not our friends tonight and she says it’ll do.  With all the hoopla we didn’t get a picture of it all done, but here it is before we picked it all out:

Before the final picking

And here’s the mask we made:

For the masquerade un-ball

She also got picked as captain of her basketball team, so I’d guess she had a pretty good day yesterday.

But back to the saga.

Poor little sick guy was up all night alternatively puking and pooping.  I have to say he did a very good job of making it to the potty and I’m right proud that I only have to do one load of sheets and blankets this morning.  Good job, right in the potty!  But the stink, oh that stink.  Rotavirus poop stinks like nothing else.

I expect 3yo to start with the puking and pooping any time now, it seems rather inevitable.  It’s only a matter of time.  I also don’t expect that he’ll be able to effectively make it to the potty for puking and possibly pooping, so I’m guessing tomorrow (my birthday!) will be spent cleaning up bodily fluids.  Just a hunch though, and I really hope to be proven wrong this time.

Oh well, it could be worse.  I can deal with tummy bugs much easier than lung bugs.  This too shall pass.

It will get easier, right?

It’s really not easy to admit that you’ve been hurt this way.  At least, not for me, and judging by the numbers of women who have sent me private messages, not for many others as well.  I feel silly, stupid for having believed, for trusting.  Taken advantage of, played, like the joke is on me.  The bitch he was cheating with sent me a private message saying that she understood why I called him out the way I did, that I must be a person who thrives on sympathy.  It made me think, because honestly I did get a lot of sympathy and it did feel nice to know I have awesome friends who’ve got my back.  But when I look at it honestly, I came out the way I did (in public and guns blazin’) because other than a little (understandable and justifiable) immaturity with regard to the exact manner in which I handled things, I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.

Why should I keep it to myself?  So he’s facebook friends with some kids who idolized him.  That is not my fault, nor my responsiblity, and if he was going to put himself out there as a role model then he should have behaved as one.  He loves to play the “poor me” role, and I wasn’t about to have him go back and tell our mutual friends that I am the bad guy, keeping him away from his children because I refuse to move to Greece when I know darn good and well that he had to go.  They really ought to know that he’s not perfect.  As for her, well, I kind of feel sorry for her because she probably got taken by him too.  He is very convincing, and you do want to believe him.  Ask me how I know – it’s hard not to.

Anyway, why the stigma associated with being the cheatee?  Why have so many people contacted me privately with, “Don’t tell anyone else about it, but it happened to me too.  In fact, my xhusband had no less than 3 affairs before I finally saw the light.”  No one wants to talk about it because it hurts too much?  Or more likely, like me, not only are they hurt but they also don’t want to admit that they were taken for a ride.  Just like victims of fraud who don’t want to have to admit that they fell for a scam, no one wants to feel stupid.

It seems jerkface has finally given up on proclaiming his innocence.  I made it very well known that I had evidence beyond any doubt and that I wasn’t going to listen to his excuses (no really, I was possessed!  Someone hacked my emails, and facebook, repeatedly, and hers too!)  What.ev.er.  I didn’t hear from him for a day, and today he’s skyped twice and sent a facebook message, “I need to talk to the kids, where are you?”  Which I have to say really makes me want to respond, “None of your damn business, but they’ll be here tomorrow at 11:00.”  It’s not the kids’ fault, and they’re the ones who will suffer the most.

In the meantime, I was set to go out job hunting and such today, but my youngest gave me a wonderful black eye when he chucked a toy across the room last night.  I’m putting it off until Monday or so.  I hope the asshole will still pay his child support, but I”m not counting on it.  This month sucks, I have so much to do and just really can’t deal with anything else right now.  My stress-o-meter is full.

 

Lying, Cheating Bastards (and the floozies they flooze with)

So, as it turns out, I do need to find another means by which to support myself.  And I will.  Because I am a strong woman and I can do it.  I haven’t felt that way in quite some time, but for the benefit of myself, my integrity, and my kids, I have to find it again.

I discovered a couple of days ago that my husband was cheating all along.  With the floozy that I suspected him of cheating with, which he vehemently denied and called me silly and paranoid.  That’s not the worst though.  I could understand cheating.  Really I could.  I was reading through their facebook love messages to each other, and they are more or less waiting for me to hurry up and die so that she can come pick up my boys and take her boys and my boys all together to live in Greece for happily ever after.  THAT threw me for a loop and I’m still reeling from the shock of it.  Does he not realize that he could just as easily DIVORCE me?  I mean, I keep going back and thinking I must have read it wrong, but the conversation goes something like:
Her: Isn’t her disease terminal?

Him: Supposedly

Her:  How long do people live with it?

Him: Usually like 5 years they told her, and it’s been two and a half so it can’t be long.

Yes, really.  I printed and screen capped and saved everything, but damn.  I keep remembering little things, like when I was in the ICU fighting to breathe following my open lung biopsy, guess who was watching my kids?  You guessed it.  She has pictures of MY kids on her facebook.  Which I’m going to kindly ask her to remove after I call her out tomorrow morning.

Right now the plan is that tomorrow morning I”m going to call them both out publicly on my facebook because I don’t want either of them lying to our mutual friends about what a bitch I am.  Our mutual friends should know exactly why I’m being such a bitch.  Then I’ll sit back and wait for the phone call, and I’ll remind him that he promised to pay 800 euros/monthly in child support so that the kids and I could live in this house.  If he doesn’t want to pay then I’ll be forced to move somewhere cheaper, and I probably won’t be inclined to share with him my forwarding address.  I think he’ll be cooperatve, because his green card expires in Jan. and if we’re not married and he has no job here there is no basis upon which to renew said green card.

Still, I have to pull myself together and quit relying upon him for my financial well-being.  There’s no security there any more, and I’ll go crazy worrying about this stuff every night.  If I drop the cell phones (that he insisted on having) then I’m only $500/month short.  Surely I can find SOMETHING that I can do which will pay that piddly amount.  There has to be something out there for me.

 

Changes and Stuckness

I really need to change the banner picture on this blog, as it’s a picture of the WV house and it mostly serves to remind me that I miss it muchly.  In a few weeks I have to go to court with the owners of said house to try to recover financially some of the stuff they lovingly deposited in the dump which belonged to me.  I hope it goes well.  I don’t see how it can not, it’s not a question really of whether or not they were in the wrong and owe me compensation for my stuff, but rather how much was my stuff worth and can I prove it?

I hate the stupid time changes.  I woke up at 4:30 this morning.  5:30 is ridiculous, but acceptable; at least I have a chance of making it through the day.  4:30 is just too much.  But I do enjoy the early morning hours, before the TV gets turned on, before the boys start demanding milk and food and mommy time.  It’s my time I guess, although I’d rather have it at night.  I guess I’ll have to accept that I’m an early riser rather than a late-nighter these days.

In other news, hubby is such a jerkface that if I never had to deal with him again, ever, it would be too soon.  Every time I talk to him it gets me more riled up.  He is living in a fucking fantasy world and it is maddening to try to talk to him.  We got into a fight the other day, via skype, because he got mad when I said it would be at least several years before I would entertain the notion of moving to Greece.  Silence.  Mad face.  “OH, it’s SEVERAL YEARS NOW???!  I love how things keep changing!”  Dude.  Nothing has changed, other than me being very, very sick, which in my opinion should have been enough to make you change your precious plans and stay by my side.  However, I’ve always said that I couldn’t entertain a move until my older kids were grown, and the youngest of them is now 9.  How has anything changed?  Oh that’s right, it hasn’t except in your fucking fantasy world that you live in.

Then he got all belligerent about how I wouldn’t be away from my kids but it’s okay for ME to keep HIM away from his kids.  WTF dude.  You’ll notice that I’m not the one who moved half a world away from said kids.  I really think he is seriously mentally ill or something.  He believes this shit.  He thinks he is wronged, and he’s going around telling his family and friends that I changed the rules and said I would come and now I’m refusing.  It’s stupid, it’s childish, and it’s pissing me off.  I wish I had the ability to just not answer his stupid skypes (which come almost daily and he gets pissed if he does not know my whereabouts for the day) and could just stop.  It’s tiring, and I’m done.  I’m trying to live my life and enjoy my kids and whatever time I have left, and I don’t have the energy to deal with his bullshit.

Someone send me a lotto ticket.  Being financially dependent upon someone else’s bullshit sucks.  There’s really no other way though, I don’t know how people make it on just disability.  My (bare bones) bills are roughly $1200/month – I don’t have a car payment and have few credit cards which I don’t normally carry a balance on.  My disability is not quite $700/month.  I don’t know what I could cut to make it work.  I couldn’t.  Being stuck sucks.

BUD Visit, October Edition

I went for a visit to Ohio State Thursday, and was really nervous because I’m still recovering from this H1N1 and not back up to my baseline.  I didn’t know how he would interpret that, and whether or not he’d be pushing for surgery again or changing meds, or if he’d just let it be since I’m obviously still recovering.  As expected, my pulmonary function test results were lower than previous tests’.  However, they weren’t that much lower, and in fact weren’t really even statistically significant in their difference.  Just a smidgen.  So, BUD thinks that had I not gotten sick we would have seen a pretty good increase instead, and I get to hold the course until my next follow up at the beginning of February.

He said I should consider myself very lucky, as he had a whole ICU full of people with my same disease and H1N1 who would not recover at all, and for those who did recover it would be with significant further damage and fibrosis to their lungs.  Now I just rest and do as much as I can and wait for my lungs to heal and then reevaluate to see how much if any permanent damage was done.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to my previous level of activity, as I was feeling pretty good and able to do a lot with the kidlets and such.  Right now I’m really not and it really sucks.

Two days ago I finally started walking the dog again, first time I’ve been able to do more than throw a ball in the yard with her since getting sick.  Yesterday we went again, despite the crappy weather, and the kids were excited to cross the newly opened bridge on the bike path.

On the Bike Bridge

We’ve been walking down there daily, and the kids have been anxiously awaiting the opening of this bridge.  It has made our neighborhood much busier, as it connects this end of town with a much busier section of town but I suspect that will slow down as the weather worsens and the bridge novelty wears off.  The path is beautiful right now though:

Fall Path

That’s the path leading up to the bridge, and it’s beautiful with the leaves all different colors and falling everywhere.  It’s motivation for me to get these kids and dog out of the house for a little while and at least get a little exercise in myself.  It’s too easy to sit here in front of the computer and be depressed and not do much of anything, which only adds to the depression and general feelings of malaise.  I hate winter, but I’m trying to convince myself that it’s good to go out of the house daily, even in the cold.  We’ll see how long that lasts once the real cold weather hits.

Added bonus to my BUD trip, I got to meet an online friend for the first time in real life, and she’s just as lovely in person as she is online!  We had lunch at my favorite Greek place and it was yummy and she was awesome, and she’s only an hour from me so not bad at all!  I now have something to look forward to next time I have to go to see BUD, and hopefully that will alleviate some of the tension and trepidation I feel when I know I have to head north.  Friends are a good thing indeed.

In other news, and maybe this should be a separate post but I’ll mention it here for later discussion – my ex-husband has been hanging around a lot since moving, mostly helping out here and there and talking about kids and what not… nothing suspicious and nothing I’d raise an eyebrow at.  However, he stopped by without kids the other night and hung out for a while, and then yesterday he asked me out (via text message) to dinner, sans kidlets.  Interesting.  Not sure how I feel about that, so I’ll leave it at that for now.  I do know that I’m not ready to “be” with anyone right now, but beyond that I’m not sure.

Our Health Care System Sucks

AKA I no longer have a primary care physician.

Today, I drove to my doctor appointment in WV.  It’s a two hour drive for me, but I asked her last time I visited (just before my move) if she’d still be my PCP after I moved to Ohio.  I really, really like her, and that’s hard to come by in a doctor and I really didn’t want to look for someone new.  Not to mention the one day I tried to call for someone in this area it was a total disaster.  I figured I could deal with the drive once every few months.

Well, I got there today and they asked if I now have Ohio medicaid.  I said yes, and the registration woman kindly told me that they couldn’ t see me.  I said I would pay for my visit if they wouldn’t accept my medicaid, because I’d rather pay $75 for an office visit after driving 2 hours than come home without having seen her and without my meds for however long it takes me to find a replacement.  The girl said, “You don’t understand, we can’t see you.  I’m not allowed to take money from you, it’s illegal as a medicaid recipient.  You have to go where your card is accepted, and that’s not here.  Someone should have told you when you made the appointment.”

I of course melted into a panic attack because I will be out of meds in about 10 days and now apparently have no PCP.  However, my doc (or former doc I guess) is frikking awesome, as they left her a message with my predicament and she wrote me 3 months’ worth of scripts so at least I have a little time to doctor shop now.

Still, how much does it suck that I can’t go where I want to go, even if I’m willing to pay for services.  The doctor who is listed on my insurance card as my PCP is not taking new patients, which cracks me up.

Ah well, I go tomorrow to Ohio State for new pulmonary function testing.  I don’t expect it to be good since I don’t feel fully recovered from my brush with H1N1.  I stopped in the lab today and my oxygen levels were 93%.  Not that bad, but not that great either.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings, maybe he can recommend a PCP for me.  If not I guess I’ll hit the yellow pages.  Sucks that I have to switch though, and doesn’t make for great continuity of care.

Bummed.

I’m part of a couple of differnt online fora (forums?), mostly for moms but one in particular for people with interstitial lung disease.  It’s kind of a slow board, but there are lots of people there with the same disease as me (IPF) as well as many other similar diseases which share many of the same treatments.  Some of the people there use the same doctor as me at Ohio State, and it’s nice to commiserate with others who are going through the same thing.

At any rate, I’d been absent from there for a little while with the move and the hospital and all that, but I went back yesterday and discovered that one of the members there passed away.  Now, this is nothing terribly unusual; there are a lot of people there awaiting lung transplants and in various stages of health/disease.  What made this particular case so striking was that she was only 33, and a single mama to 3 little girls.  She hadn’t been diagnosed for very long, and apparently she just got sick and went downhill fast and in a hurry.  It was shocking and heartbreaking, thinking of her daughters and wondering if their dad is an active part of their lives and what will become of them.  I didn’t know her all that well, but I will miss her presence all the same.

It just serves as a reminder that we’re on borrowed time here.  I guess in the end it forces me to be thankful that I’ve done some things for my kids that I wouldn’t have done without this disease to force me to think about mortality.  I’ve left them letters and videos and journals, and links to this blog and message boards that I participate in, so that someday, if they really want to know, they can search these things out and know who I really was and what they meant to me (EVERYTHING!)  How many parents leave their babies far too young without the chance to say everything they wanted to say?

Still, I feel cheated and like I can’t really enjoy myself sometimes because there is this dark cloud of doom hanging over everything.  I don’t want to let my daughter know that I get out of breath doing laundry.  I know that she worries more than anyone, and understands more than she lets on.  I know that she spent the whole day crying when she found out I was in ICU.  I know losing me will be really hard on her, but I know she has strength (she got that from me!) and she will make it through.  I hope I’ve done everything I can to make it as easy as possible.

Well, that’s too much to think about on this fine Saturday morning so I’ll stop for now.  I hope I live to be 100 and no kids of mine ever have to read this to know what I’m really like because they’re sick of putting up with me.

Home!

I guess my big October plans will need some fine-tuning on the wake of my latest hospital stay.  In good news, I have a new (local) pulmo who I like very much.  He sprung me from the ICU and took on the infectious disease doc for me, and I really enjoyed his sarcasm and wit.  Nevermind the fact that he took the time to get my previous tests and ct scans from Ohio State and compare them so he’d know what to do for my current situation, rather than just throwing steroids at me and hoping for the best.  According to him (and what I’ve read agrees), this is what this disease does.  You go along just fine for a while, maintaining, and then BOOM!  One day you’re not fine any more.  A flu, or cold, or something sets you off and it’s out of control.  I was really bad when I got to the hospital, and feel lucky that it was only a 6 day stay.  The new guy recommended that I go ahead and be evaluated for a lung transplant, because at some point in the future I’m going to be “not fine” again and at that point it will be too late for an evaluation.  Not to be listed, mind you, just to have all the legwork in place just in case.  I guess options are good, but I didn’t want to think about that.

The kids are coming home today, and I’m excited about that!  I’ve missed them terribly, especially since coming home two days ago.  The house is empty and quiet with no little boys running around.  Funny, because I think a couple of weeks ago I was wishing for just a few minutes (hours) of peace and quiet, and it was impossible to come by.  Now I’ve had my share of peacefulness for a while, and I will embrace and enjoy the chaos of little boys for the time being.  My mom tells me my youngest kept saying, “Mommy’s sleeping” – he’s never been away from home this long so I’m glad he handled it okay.

That’s about enough update for now.  So many things wrong with that stupid hospital and oh how I wish I had the energy to be someone who worked on changing those things.  But right now I only have the energy to worry about me and my immediate surroundings, so it’ll have to slide.  It’s good to be home.