January 3, 2019

• My Year

  Well, here it is the first of the year and here I am thinking I need to make more of an effort to blog this year. This happens nearly every year, and most of the time I respond with a year in review post. I didn’t bother last year, because 2017 sucked and, although my troubles were all I could think about, I didn’t want to write about them. In fact, I was instructed not to discuss them on social media. It’s probably okay to write about everything now, but I still don’t feel like it.

  2018 was, if anything, even worse than the previous year. It started out spectacularly badly and went downhill from there. I got really, really sick. I’d reached the point that I couldn’t eat much besides applesauce, bananas and Jello, and even those sometimes made me ill. I had a fever for months, often accompanied by chills, I lost a lot of weight, my coloring was… let’s be nice and say ashen. I got so weak I was on the verge of turning in my car keys because my reaction time had gotten so slow and I couldn’t stay focused enough to remember where I was half the time.

  I was well enough to drive to Arkansas in April to visit my mom and many other family members. I also drove to Cincinnati in May for GeoWoodstock. A five hour drive followed by a long uphill hike to grab the oldest geocache in Ohio on Friday left me completely done in and had to rent a wheelchair for the event on Saturday. After conserving my strength all day, I was fine to drive home on Sunday once we'd found all the caches on the Butler County Donut Trail. Krysten drove for that, but I drove us back to Michigan via a slight detour in Indiana to drop murisopsis off at her home.

  

  Later in the year, after I was feeling about a million times better than I had in years, I took my daughter with me to Washington Island, Wisconsin to spend a few days with my cousin. I try to go every year and it’s always a fun and relaxing week. Every time I’ve gone, I’ve taken somebody with me and introduced them to the island. So far, I’ve taken a cousin, each of my sisters, and my daughter. I love doing this because it gives me an excuse to visit all the places I enjoy most on each trip. The Stavkirkke, the lavender farm, the lookout tower, The Red Cup, Nelsen’s, Schoolhouse Beach, and of course Fair Isle Books and Fair Trade – my cousin’s shop.

  

  The following month I returned to Arkansas for my annual autumn visit. My sisters and I had so much fun during this visit! We dressed in our similar but not identical LulaRoe outfits for church, visits with our mom at the nursing home, and general sashaying around town. We even had photo shoots with my niece twice and a friend once. Those photos make me smile whenever I look at them.

  

  I couldn’t imagine having the strength or stamina to make those trips when I was so ill in the spring and summer. Happily, I’ve been blessed with the best daughter and sisters in the world, as well as a determined doctor, and they took good care of me. I finally had a test that showed a slight abnormality, went in for exploratory surgery and they found the problem and fixed it. It turns out, when my gall bladder was removed three years ago, some of the sludge and stones got trapped in the common bile duct. By the time the problem was discovered, there were stones the size of marbles completely obstructing the bile duct and toxins were backing up into my liver. My coloring was so bad because I was jaundiced. I probably would have died if they hadn’t finally found the problem. To top it off, the doctor who performed the surgery had access to the pathology report on my gall bladder and told me that it had been gangrenous, so I was probably fairly close to dying three years ago, as well. That’s two brushes with death I didn’t even know about at the time which is probably a good thing because this last time, had I known how ill I was, I would have just thrown in the towel and welcomed oblivion. Melodramatic, I know, but that’s what depression will do to you.

  

  I’m fine now. My hands still tremble sometimes, but not as badly as they did before the surgery. The best part is that I can now eat things I haven’t been able to eat in years - even Chinese food, which brings me in a rather roundabout way to the next few posts I’ll publish. You see, I got a new wallet for Christmas and today as I was taking things out of my old wallet to put into my new one, I found a stash of fortune cookie slips from probably five years or more ago. Those will be one post in my review of 2018. I’ll also look back on books I’ve read, movies I’ve watched and photos I’ve taken. None of those are as numerous as in previous years because of my long illness, but I did get out from time to time, and I read when I couldn’t sleep. At least I tried to.

  

  I don't know why my photos are all uploading wonky, and why I can't rotate them. Just tip your head to the left for this one.

  So now you are caught up with as much of my life over the past year as I’m willing to share publicly. I’ll share my fortune cookie fortunes, my ticket stub movie reviews, my favorite reads and probably a few other favorites of 2018 in subsequent posts. Hopefully, it won’t take me until the end of the year to write them!

  • 8:00 pm
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