When It Rains, It DOES Pour! (long)

Thanks so much for the PM’s. This week has been a doozie! My replies have been short and sweet because it’s just all been so much to handle, but here’s the full explanation of what I’ve been up to…

It all started on Friday night when our very expensive Sealy Posturpedic pyramid air bed, which we sleep on for my sciatica, ripped a seam and we went to the floor with an instantaneous THUD! It was so hilarious, we laughed for a good 20 minutes before climbing in bed with our children to finish out the night. I got 3 hours of sleep!

Then it was off to Sears to purchase a new bed and on to Lowes to make a HUGE purchase for our house remodel. Ends up the one Lowes didn’t have everything we needed so we went to another Lowes to finish up where their security measures would not take our debit card nor check even though I had triple the amount we were spending in the bank. Ughhh! Before the 2^nd Lowes trip, our 8yo son had called crying wanting us home, we were exhausted, gas was $4.50/gallon and scarce, so it just sucked that it ended up a wasted trip. Heck, hubby had even loaded NINE new windows in the truck while I was paying. So we unloaded those and went home to unload the trailer of other stuff.

No sooner than we set up and got crawled into our new bed (did I mention *exhausted?!), our 20 year old daughter called. She and 5 friends were stuck at the WNC state fair because the car she just bought that week would not start. It took an hour of anxious waiting by the phone before we knew they had a ride large enough to pick them all up and that we didn’t have to make the long drive to go get our daughter.

Sunday morning we started on working on the deck remodel and got a call that the same daughter had fainted in a church parking lot. The last time I got changed so quickly was the night of her car accident! We rushed there just in time for her to be coming around and then took her back home with us. I think it was the culmination of all the stress she’s been under and lack of eating. She spent the day here, mostly sleeping, and was totally better.

In the meantime, while disassembling part of the deck for new decking, we found that the entire 42’x12’ of it has to come down to replace the ledger board which connects it to the house and that most of the railing components need replaced as well! Man, what a job.

So, by the end of the weekend, with several other stressors factored in (you wouldn‘t believe it all if I could type it!), I was starting to feel pretty blue. We hadn’t budgeted all those trees having to come down before we could start the remodeling work, we certainly hadn’t budgeted for a new bed, and we definitely hadn’t budgeted for such an extensive deck renovation. That has now taken away the amount of money we had planned on using to finish the interior of the house, but thankfully all the exterior can be finished and we have most of those materials already.

Monday came and I was left home alone feeling very stressed, to say the least. THEN, hubby came home from work that evening and announced that the week vacation time he thought he had leftover this year actually isn’t available until January 1^st, not September 11^th (his anniversary) like he thought it was. This was the vacation time that he was going to take for the week of my post-op recovery. I spend around 2 hours a day in the car taking care of all their school/athletic activities this time of year and there is no one else to do it! What on earth were we going to do?

Then it hit me…I can’t do this right now. I cannot take the time-out needed and spend the money on this surgery RIGHT NOW. I need to just keep taking my new thyroid medication, stay on my new vegetarian diet for my IBS, go ahead and join the gym like I was going to for post-op workouts and start working out as best as my sciatica will allow me, spend the money that I am sitting on to pay for my surgery to finish our house, take care of my family, and just see what happens!

So, the next day, I called and let the clinic and the psych’s office know, I was putting everything on hold.

Then, I started crying. I cried and cried and cried. I don’t remember when I’ve cried that hard. It had been a long time!  I was grieving because I just knew I was going to be sitting here, a year from now, not at goal weight, but still in the same miserable shape I am sitting here in now instead.  I felt like I had lost my one last shred of hope for normalcy. 

It was finally getting close to time to go do my afternoon rounds with the kiddos and I just couldn’t pull myself together. Called my husband at work in hysterics and he was like, “Whoa! First of all, I am not going to let you not put yourself first for once in your life. We will figure everything else out. I want us to hang up, you call the psych’s office and get that appointment back and I will call the clinic to let them know what is going on.” So that is what we did. I pulled it together long enough to speak with the psych’s office, somewhat legibly I think, and then I was back to snuffing when the gal from the clinic called me after speaking to my hubby. Bless that sweet woman for her TLC!

It’s just so sad that instead of spending today with my husband going to the psych consult and then the support group tonight, I have to wait until next Friday now for the psych consult because my appointment had already been taken. We do still plan on going to the support group tonight, as long as we can get gas to get there this afternoon!

I am still waiting to have peace again about the decision to have the RNY. Where I had felt so elated about it, I now feel like the weight of the world is on my shoulders. Hopefully I will feel more optimistic soon!