Inspired by a homework assignment...

Adaptation is also  known as healing or recovery and it is most simply put as the process of changing your life, emotions, or thoughts in order to handle the loss that the person experiences. This takes many different forms depending on the person and the situation. For myself personally, I will use the most recent occurrence of loss and that was when my grandmother died. She had been declining steadily in her health for a long time so it was not sudden and though I had years to come to terms with it, it seems as if it just came out of nowhere.

In the years previous to her death, she developed and suffered greatly from advanced stages of Alzheimers. It was heartbreaking for me to go see her knowing that she did not recognize me, but the hardest part was trying to remind her of who I was because you could see the war that raged on within her as she tried to remember what everyone told her she already knew. I cannot imagine how difficult that must have been for her. To see her first granddaughter grown up and married with children of her own when all she could remember was the 5 year old that followed her every movement and wanted to be just like her. I guess my grieving really began when she stopped recognizing me. It felt like I had lost a part of my childhood. Sure my grandma drove me nuts sometimes, okay a good deal of the time, but I loved her and being with her was like being a little girl again. It hurt deeply when I could no longer share those memories with her without seeing a look of frustration and pain when she realized she did not remember. I slowly stopped visiting my grandmother because it was just too hard. I look back now and regret doing that to her. It was not her fault and I feel as though I was punishing her for things that were beyond her control. I see now that I was adapting to the situation by trying to lessen my pain, but I never thought about the pain it caused her.

When I got the call that she was very sick and may die, it felt like I was stabbed in the chest. Here I was this little girl all over again scared and afraid of the world outside. Though at the time I was very sick, I went to the hospital to await some news. It’s funny, or not, but almost everything bad that has happened to one of my family members takes place at that hospital. I hate that place. Well, maybe not the entire hospital, but certainly the second floor. It is where people go to die. That is another adaption I have made in my life. If something happens to myself or one of my children that would result in one of us going to the second floor, I will drive out of my way to go to a different hospital. I cannot take the pain of seeing another family member admitted to the second floor. They almost never come back from that place. But on that day, I sat with my family on the second floor and waited. Discussions on what the family wanted took place all around me and medicines were given and then stopped and then given again. The air was thick with hurt and anger and I felt as though I couldn’t breathe. It was a crappy way to spend a birthday that was for sure.

I didn’t think of it until just this second, but that was the second year in a row I spent my birthday in a hospital. The year after that was spent there too. Maybe I will be skipping birthdays from now on as another method of adaptation….The next 2 days were a blur of hospitals and driving back and forth between it and my home. I rarely saw my husband or my children. The stress of the situation made my illness worse and I decided to go home for a couple of hours and rest as my grandmother’s was on the mend. It was a 30 minute drive home. When I walked into my house, my phone was ringing, but I ignored it and went straight into the bedroom and flopped down on the bed. My husband knocked and brought me the phone and said “It’s Jessica….and she’s crying…hard”. I knew what she would say before I even touched the phone. In the 30 minutes I had been gone, grandma took a turn for the worse and died. I immediately grabbed my keys and flew back to the hospital. In no time I was outside of her room with my family. I was angry at myself for leaving and made a change that day that no matter what happened in the future, I would never leave another hospital while a family member was fighting to live. No matter how well they appeared to be doing, I would never leave again.

I have adapted my life in many ways to deal with the pain that event caused me and the grief that came with it. I believe most of these changes will be permanent and deeply rooted inside of me to help protect myself from the same kind of pain again. We cannot change our past, but we can make changes to make our future different and that is exactly what I have done.

I have decided that the Internet is a terrifying place whenever you try to get helpful information from it. I want to know as much as I can sight I feel prepared for my surgery and may have some sort of sense of what to expect in the coming weeks. Maybe being prepare will help to ease this cripple apprehension I seen to be suffering from. Of course, all the research I am doing is making me more nervous. Leave the ovaries and still e hormonal an crazy or take them and go into menopause and have a greater risk of having a heart attack? Leave the cervix and risk still having pain and. Lessing every month or take it and risk losing pleasure from sex. Most people tell me there is no right or wrong answer to these question a each person and case is unique, but I really wish there was some sort of concrete answer so that I did not have to agonize over making the right choice. I sure hope this all gets easier to figure out because the stress of making this choice may very well make me crazy. White padded room, here I come.

Eviction notice served, now get the hell out.

I have had a week to wrap my head around this and now I feel I am okay enough to share with the world. I am having a hysterectomy in 18 days. Kind of blunt, I know, but I just had to throw that out there that way any whiny babies who get freaked out about this kind of thing could just leave. I am not sure how I feel about this. When I was younger, I thought the whole idea of a hysterectomy sounded awesome, but now I think it feels terrifying. There are times like now that I am in so much pain I want to count the seconds down, but even hidden in there, I am scared that I am making the wrong choice. I have tried lots of other options and it seems like my symptoms are not only not getting better, but that they are deteriorating faster. I wake up every night since the decision was made in a panic about the surgery and I lay in bed for hours questioning whether my reasons are good enough. I knew I was apprehensive, but I didn't understand how scared I was until my doctor called to book my appointment. I thought maybe she was calling with more test results. As soon as she said she was calling to book my surgery, I began bawling.

Crying? I was actually crying over booking my surgery? I was scared and at the same time I was angry. Angry at myself for crying over something so stupid. Did I not just have surgery 6 months ago and come out perfectly fine? Am I not aware of how severely anemic I am because I cannot control the bleeding that comes with my periods? Do I not hurt so bad that I have to take narcotic pain medication-which I loathe-just to make it through my day? Why on Earth was I crying? I felt like I was one of those silly cartoon characters with the angel and devil debating on her shoulders with the warring that was going on in my head. I have not rectified the two sides, but I am trying to comes to terms with this surgery and as I get closer, you can bet the emotions will get stronger and even more confusing, For now, I just sit here and worry endlessly about what it will be like before, during, and after and I turn to my new amazing friends over at Hystersisters. I honestly do not know if I would be able to breathe in and out without their amazing support and advice.

Accident Prone doesn't even begin to cover it...

I don’t think in any of the posts that I made about myself that I shared the most fundamental aspects of who I am. I am a magnet for accidents. You know when they make new products they have people who test them to see if they can be hurt on them and they pass and then a few months later some schumck gets hurt on it and there is some mass recall? You can bet that 9 out of 10 times, that schmuck was me. If it is even remotely possible to be hurt on something, I can do it.

There are products that are made to help keep people safe. Take for example those rubber texturized mats that are made to go on the bottom of bath tubs and showers.

Those are there to help prevent people from slipping and falling. I used to slip and slid all of the time in my bath tub so I invested in a huge bath mat that covered the entire bottom. There was no way I was going to slip in the tub anymore. WRONG. Not a week after purchasing the mat I was taking a shower and went to turn around and then all of the sudden I was on my back on the floor of the tub and my left elbow felt like it had EXPLODED. I knew as soon as I hit the tub that I had broken my arm. I fell on a no slip shower mat and broke my arm. ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? The pain was at least a 11 on the pain scale. 

Unfortunately for me, it was a Sunday night. Not only a Sunday night, but a Sunday night on a holiday weekend and I just happened to work for a company that had a policy that you had to work a full 8 hours before the holiday and a full 8 hour after the holiday weekend in order to receive the holiday pay. Doubly unfortunate was that it was the Thanksgiving holiday and I would have lost pay for Thanksgiving day and the day after as the company was going to pay us for both days. If I went to the doctor, they would have made me miss the following day and even if they didn’t, the cast would have made my boss send me packing. Not to mention that my boss would have been pissed if I called in for a broken arm. She did not like it when someone was gone from work regardless of the reason. So, I made the decision to just suck it up and go to work. 

Let me just tell you that if you work a job that uses your hands and your arms exclusively and the job CANNOT be performed in any way without the full use and range of your arms, do not try to suck it up and go to work. The pain was unbelievable. As soon as I finished my 8 hour shift, I drove myself to the doctor and got my arm put in a cast. To add insult to injury in the most literal sense, my doctor did not believe me when I told him that I slipped and fell on a no slip shower pad and he brought his female nurse in to confront me in a domestic violence intervention. The humiliation was priceless, but that was nothing compared to the orange beam incident. Perhaps I will share that story tomorrow.  

I can be right too

It does not happen often that I am able to say that I am right about something and that my husband was wrong. When it does happen, I relish in it. It is those rare moments that make me feel like I may actually be a little bit smart because I know something that Mr. I Know Everything does not know. Mr. I Know Everything was born and raised in the south. He has not been around snow very much and he thinks his driving skills are amazing and when you add the two together, you just know there is going to be a problem.

So, knowing that there was a storm on the way, I tell Mr. I Know Everything that he needs to not go to work today because it is an hour away in this really crappy weather, but he knows everything (remember the name) and says that he is going to go. So I tell him to at least take my car as it has full coverage and will cover everything in the event of an accident. Mr. I Know Everything says no because he wasn’t going to get in an accident. Uh huh. Can you imagine the surprise when the phone rings not long after he heads out to work and he tells me he has been in an accident? Actually, there was no surprise. I knew it would happen because I saw his reckless abandon driving in the snow only 2 days prior. Flying down the freeway doing 75 in a 60 mile an hour zone when they snow was just falling out of the sky. Yeah, I was not a little bit surprised.

I am glad that my husband is okay and that his vehicle is not too badly damaged, but I can’t help feeling that if he had only listened to me, this would not have happened. The accident is not what bugs me, it is the fact that he felt my suggestions were meaningless when it turns out that sometimes, I am not as dumb as people believe.