Less than THREE weeks until Nate comes home!
I bet you're all wondering where I've been! Well. I didn't really want to post until I had something post-worthy. And some pictures. Well, I can't show you those pictures. I think you'd all be scarred for life. Let's just say that mud masks makes you look less like yourself! Haha! Well, Nate and I are both twenty-five years old now, and other than the fact that we are now able to rent a car, not a whole lot of difference! We are still 3000 miles apart, so the beginning of being twenty-five is rather lonely. But not for much longer!
Something that I should've posted about but I haven't yet, is that my father's mother was in the hospital for some time and is now in rehab. No, not THAT kind of rehab! Let me start from the beginning:
Beginning of November, on a Saturday before Halloween, I'm pretty sure, because my parents and I had just been visiting them that very afternoon, my grandparents were out eating Popeye's. As they were coming home, Grandma got a sudden pain in her chest. She thought she was having a heart attack and told Grandpa to go straight to the hospital. Miraculously, they were less than ten minutes from the hospital and not at home, which would've taken longer. They went straight to the emergency room and they gave her a CT scan and they weren't really sure what was wrong at first. The doctors were puzzled, though, because her blood pressure was unusually low. They later find out that the main artery coming out of her heart, the aorta, had a tear in it, but wasn't a complete tear so she wasn't leaking blood. If her blood pressure had been high, the tear might've been complete and she would've died within minutes! Another miracle!
She was in pretty rough shape for a while. She was on pain medication for about a week and on a breathing apparatus that helped push the air into her lungs. They were also giving her lots of drugs to keep her blood pressure down, hoping that would allow her aorta to heal on its own. They gave her another CT scan on Wednesday, and by Thursday she was sitting up on her own, and she looked better in general. My dad was visiting her that evening when the doctor came in and said without warning that she needed surgery right NOW. She didn't have much of a choice, and Dad encouraged her to do it. She was taken away within minutes after signing the consent papers. About 8:15pm on November 3rd, my grandma was having open-heart surgery. And we found out they got her there just in time. The tear in her aorta was leaking blood into the pericardium (the lining around her heart) and if they had waited for even ten or twenty minutes longer, her heart would've been strangled and she would've died that night. Miracle #3! Most of Uncle Kevin's family was there, Uncle Dan was there, grandpa was there, my mom and dad were there, and even Grandma's sister, Sandi, and her husband, Alan, from Illinois, were there in the surgery waiting room. We were there till after one in the morning, when we heard that the surgery was successful. Mom and I went home exhausted, but thankful to have Grandma around for a little while longer.
Grandma was in ICU for another week and on my birthday she moved out of ICU and was put in a nursing home with a rehabilitation center where she could work on getting her strength up. And that is where she is at right now. They thought she would be out in a week, but she is not very motivated to work on her rehab, so they projected her not to get out until the 16th of December. We all hope she will get out of there soon! It's not a happy place to be at all.
So that, is my grandmother's story, and we've all been doing what we can to help.
Three weeks ago, Nate's aunt Lynette had a baby girl. Her name is Hannah. Nate's mom and I decided that we should go and help. She went up the first week, and I went up the second week to help. Lynette and Wayne have a cute little house near Roanoke. Lots of room to run around, and not to far from the interstate if they needed to get anywhere. They have another little girl, named Grace, and she is about twenty months old and is the life of the party. She is talking and expressing herself and being the cutest thing ever. While I was there, we became good friends. I hope she'll remember me when we meet again. I was there basically to help with laundry, feeding, and general cleaning. Although Lynette would protest, I was more than happy to do these things for her, because I know one day she might repay the favor- haha! No, that's not really why I did it. I knew that I was always going to be busy with something, and my week went by so fast being there. Something new to do everyday! I got to play with -well, more of just holding- the new baby, I would watch movies with Grace, I would try to translate Grace language, and I would pick up after Grace. I realized that some of these things I was doing for Lynette were things that she probably wouldn't be able to do if I hadn't been there. At least not all in a week. Over the span of many weekends, maybe, because a lot of these things needed multiple adults supervising the situations. Someone needed to nurse baby Hannah, while somebody else needed to get Grace in her high chair to feed her, and also someone needed to make lunch ALL AT THE SAME TIME!!! I take my hats off to Mothers everywhere. I don't know how they get it done! It made me appreciate what my parents did for my sisters and me even more. It also makes me think that maybe I am able to raise children someday.
-Erin
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