Happy New Year

It's been a little while for me.  I guess not a lot of news can mean no bad news.  I've been meaning to get on here about every night here for the last week.  I'm sorry to say my last post was Dec 23rd.  Michelle does a great job keeping you up on the emotions of the household.  All in all, things are going relatively well right now.  I'm generally feeling decent enough to enjoy quality time with the family.  Christmas was a big goal of ours and it went as good as I could have asked.  New Years was a little different, neither of us were feeling very well and it was tabbed an early evening.  My biggest complaint of the last few weeks is that I woke up yesterday morning (Wednesday morning) with some serious pain in my neck.  I tried to brave it for half a day but I eventually called into the hospice nurse to get some advice.  My choice was go into the ER and get an xray or double up on my pain meds and increase the frequency. I chose to up the pain meds.  It helped with easing the pain to an extent but also expectantly made me pretty groggy.  In the back on my mind, I wondered if it was just a case of sleeping on my neck wrong.  I called my chiropractor who I used to go to out here in Oldham County.  I also know him from my job and he goes to same church as me as well.  He offered to come out to see me at home this afternoon late in the day.  He adjusted me in about 10 minutes and pretty quickly found the bad spot in my neck.  It has helped tremendously with my pain and it's about 90% gone.  This has really been my only anguish over the past few weeks other than the normail fatigue, digestion problems, etc.

My lack of health news has made things pretty normal BUT life is still far from normal.  I've driven my car about twice in the last 30 days.  I don't feel comfortable driving, it's an odd feeling and it's not easy to admit.  I feel trapped when I'm not able to jump in my car and run an errand.  I have to recruit friends sometimes to take me to the store or to get my haircut.  I hate having to do that.  Michelle does plenty of driving.  I hate having to force all of the family driving on her.  I don't really like riding in a car these days either.  I don't like the back roads, I don't like going too fast.  I get really light headed in the car and it can make me sick.  We've got my car lined up and ready to be sold to my brother in law; it's just sitting in the driveway these days.  The driving issue is just one of life's oddities these days.  Other thoughts that go through my head these days are mind boggling.  For example, I needed shampoo the other day, do I buy the travel size or the small bottle?  I don't have much hair but this is a stupid question.  Another example: I had a coupon where I got a nice discount for buying 2 sticks of deodorant; I had to ask myself if I really needed that other stick.  I went through a recent debate on my new tv for the bedroom which was my only "desire" for Christmas and rationalized that if my wife did not like it, she had 90 days to take it back.  These questions bother me and probably should bother me more but they are my new mindset.  I'll reiterate I still want to be on the this face of the earth very long assuming I continue to feel good like I do right now.  The conversations in this house would baffle you.  Michelle and I sometimes joke about her next husband.  Again, not a normal discussion, but we don't shy away from anything.  Every conversation is fair game.  I want her to remarry one day and be happy.  My criteria for the new husband is a little lengthy and I joke with her about my required 7 year wait time frame :)  I hope you don't think we are crazy reading this.  Michelle has been making fun of me lately because I've learned what concoction of meds make loopy to where to she can't get me to be quiet at night.  She jokes about how it used to take me a couple of drinks to make me "more social" since I'm generally a quiet person.  One of our running jokes is about how she wants me to take Sammy our cat "with me"; you know since we picked out a double lot at the cemetery.  Do you think we are crazy yet?  Let's see what else is there?  I guess there are more things to share but I don't really want you to think we really are crazy.  In some ways, we can make some pretty dang on funny Seinfeld episodes around here our real life annoyances.

All in all, I'm happy right now and am in good spirits.  I think Michelle is happy right now too, relatively speaking.  It's not always like that and every day will have a bad hour or two.  The underlying fear is still there.  This can change at any moment.  I very much crave continued quality time with my family.  In reality, I'm still resting in bed most of the day but the quality time is blissful when I'm up to it.  Over the holidays, I was given a very cool binder that many friends and family contributed to which included fond memories and lots of funny pictures.  It has been very cool to through.  It's actually emotional to go through so I interestingly still have a few pages to go; there were over 50 very personalized messages to me.  I'm afraid to finish it up.  Another cool thing I recently did was my fraternity brothers from UK got a big group of us together surprisingly to me and we got to share a bunch of old stories from back in the day.  They shared a beer or few and I had an ice water.  I loved my Lambda Chi Alpha days.  One of my fondest memories was spending time in the Dean's office trying to explain why we deserved to stay on campus after going through some of the very normal fraternity occurrences.  We were kicked out of our fraternity house for 6 months just 3 days before I took over presidency.  I was successful in persuading the dean to let us back in the fraternity house by promising to never party again and that we didn't haze.  I guess I could have done an entire post on fun memories from those days but I have to keep in mind that my mom still reads this blog.  Another fond memory of the last few weeks include going through the hundreds of photographs my mom has of me growing up.  If you haven't done that in a while, I recommend you do that.

I am still amazed at the vast amount of support we get from friends and family.  It all is very humbling and in some ways hard to accept.  I've always liked to be generous and give and that can make it hard.  We get messages all the time about how much of an impact our situation has made in their lives.  It's satisfying to see there is so much love in the world these days.  Crappy situations do bring out the best in people, it's brought out the best in our family.

I had an important though to post here but I need to better figure out a way to say it.   To be continued... (I'll continue what I wanted to say here in another post)