Buck Shot Post
Ok. I have a lot of things floating around in my head. None of them seem quite like a whole post in it's self, but it's stuff I want to say. So welcome to disjointedville.
1. I got my first letter from my niece on the stationary I gave her for her birthday. It was so sweet. She sent me her class picture (and her sister's too). My god does she look like her mother. It made me catch my breath just looking at it. She's so much like her mother in so many ways. God, I hope life doesn't user her for it's personal punching bag too.
2. I'm so terribly bored with my music selection. There is a CD that I want to get from Amazon, but paying shipping for one CD feels silly. So I'm thinking you guys should recommend some music for me to check out. What really turns you on? Is there anything that you think I might like that I haven't heard a million times before? I tend to veer away from top 40. I'm looking for new.
3. Part of the reason I'm so squeamish about posting about my troubles and the stuff that makes me sad is that I really don't want to be a negative person, and more so, even if I am I don't want to -seem- like one. I know I break down and bitch and whimper from time to time, but for every one of those there are 5 to 10 posts that I just don't make.
But the biggest reason I don't feel very comfortable complaining is the constant reminder that so many people have it so much worse. Sure there are the big things like the tidal wave in Asia, but there is the stuff so much closer to home. There is my friend with the MS who is facing a possible future in a wheel chair with more and more of his body no longer under his control. There are the friends who have been unemployed for long stretches over the last couple of years, who have watched comfort and stability drain away from them a slow and demoralizing trickle.
I don't know how much I've talked about my friend Leann with the brain tumor. She's been fighting her benign acoustic neuroma for a couple of years ago. While it's not cancer it still has threatened her life. She's had brain surgery to remove a part of it, but they couldn't take the whole thing out. The surgery destroyed the hearing in her right ear. It threatened to kill all the nerves in the right side of her face. Then, when it started growing again, she had radiation treatments. Every day for a month she had to drive to the hospital, climb into a machine and let them shoot laser like radiation beams into her brain to try and kill the tumor without killing too much of her brain. The radiation causes swelling in the brain, so she's been on steroids to help keep the pressure down. She's had constant headaches for about a year now, ones so bad that darvocet only takes the edge off. The swelling was only supposed to last a month and then she was going to be all better. But when she went off the steroids she got dizzy and the headaches got worse. So she went back on the drugs for a while. Repeat 3 times. Now she's going in for a CAT scan tomorrow to find out if she has some complication that makes it so this won't ever really go away. She finds out sometime this week if she's going to have surgery again to put a tube in her brain that will work to drain off the excess fluid. She will need this forever.
Her daughter has never known her mother healthy. All her life her mom has been in pain. She's been in and out of hospitals. The first surgery was when Rowan was 1 year old, and when we thought that the surgery was going to do the trick, we all hoped that she would have no memory of it. That she would go untouched by her mother's mortality. But just before the tumor started growing again, Rowan, now two and a half, started asking why mommy had to stay with the doctors all that time. What was wrong with mommy's head. That just killed Leann.
Now it doesn't really matter. This just keeps coming for her, and it's clear that Rowan's whole childhood will be colored by this.
So no matter what is going on in my life, I have zero room to bitch.
1. I got my first letter from my niece on the stationary I gave her for her birthday. It was so sweet. She sent me her class picture (and her sister's too). My god does she look like her mother. It made me catch my breath just looking at it. She's so much like her mother in so many ways. God, I hope life doesn't user her for it's personal punching bag too.
2. I'm so terribly bored with my music selection. There is a CD that I want to get from Amazon, but paying shipping for one CD feels silly. So I'm thinking you guys should recommend some music for me to check out. What really turns you on? Is there anything that you think I might like that I haven't heard a million times before? I tend to veer away from top 40. I'm looking for new.
3. Part of the reason I'm so squeamish about posting about my troubles and the stuff that makes me sad is that I really don't want to be a negative person, and more so, even if I am I don't want to -seem- like one. I know I break down and bitch and whimper from time to time, but for every one of those there are 5 to 10 posts that I just don't make.
But the biggest reason I don't feel very comfortable complaining is the constant reminder that so many people have it so much worse. Sure there are the big things like the tidal wave in Asia, but there is the stuff so much closer to home. There is my friend with the MS who is facing a possible future in a wheel chair with more and more of his body no longer under his control. There are the friends who have been unemployed for long stretches over the last couple of years, who have watched comfort and stability drain away from them a slow and demoralizing trickle.
I don't know how much I've talked about my friend Leann with the brain tumor. She's been fighting her benign acoustic neuroma for a couple of years ago. While it's not cancer it still has threatened her life. She's had brain surgery to remove a part of it, but they couldn't take the whole thing out. The surgery destroyed the hearing in her right ear. It threatened to kill all the nerves in the right side of her face. Then, when it started growing again, she had radiation treatments. Every day for a month she had to drive to the hospital, climb into a machine and let them shoot laser like radiation beams into her brain to try and kill the tumor without killing too much of her brain. The radiation causes swelling in the brain, so she's been on steroids to help keep the pressure down. She's had constant headaches for about a year now, ones so bad that darvocet only takes the edge off. The swelling was only supposed to last a month and then she was going to be all better. But when she went off the steroids she got dizzy and the headaches got worse. So she went back on the drugs for a while. Repeat 3 times. Now she's going in for a CAT scan tomorrow to find out if she has some complication that makes it so this won't ever really go away. She finds out sometime this week if she's going to have surgery again to put a tube in her brain that will work to drain off the excess fluid. She will need this forever.
Her daughter has never known her mother healthy. All her life her mom has been in pain. She's been in and out of hospitals. The first surgery was when Rowan was 1 year old, and when we thought that the surgery was going to do the trick, we all hoped that she would have no memory of it. That she would go untouched by her mother's mortality. But just before the tumor started growing again, Rowan, now two and a half, started asking why mommy had to stay with the doctors all that time. What was wrong with mommy's head. That just killed Leann.
Now it doesn't really matter. This just keeps coming for her, and it's clear that Rowan's whole childhood will be colored by this.
So no matter what is going on in my life, I have zero room to bitch.