It's September Already? Really?

Cripes. I let life run away with me and this is what I get. *sigh*

Between the stress of getting the children sent off to public school for the first time ever, my medical issues and family crisis, I haven't had time for, well, anything.

Thing One and Thing Two have settled quite nicely into their school routine. Thing One wakes up at O'dark-thirty so that she can leave the house by 6:15 a.m. to get to the bus. Yikes! Thing Two wakes up around the time Thing One leaves and then I take her to a neighbor's house so that I can make it to work at a reasonable time. Both girls get home by bus and are now latch-key children. I am SUCH a bad mother. Gah! What else am I supposed to do? Both The Husband and I work, and paying for childcare is an unneeded expense at this point in life. They haven't killed each other yet, so I'm counting my blessings. Hopefully things on this angle will go well.

I had a second ultrasound to check out Fred my cyst. Turns out, Fred the cyst, well, isn't a cyst. Color me confused. The cyst that was found on the first ultrasound was probably part of my normal cycle, seeing as how a similar, but much smaller cyst was found on the right ovary. But, I wasn't having this damn pain on my right side. It was still on the left.

So where does this leave me? Endometreosis or an adhesion is most likely. I'm going to put my bet on the first part. Because those cysts my mother supposedly fell prey to that made them remove all of one and all but 5% of another? Yeah, it wasn't cysts but endometreosis. *sigh* Thanks, ma, for the brain cells that have just been killed as a result of this stress. And thank you, dad, for actually remembering this information. Cocktails all around, people!

I have to get in touch with the OBGYN in Delano about the results so that we can figure out where we go from here. I still have left side pain occasionally, so the site has not changed. It just is very frustrating to *think* that you know what is wrong and whoopsie! Now it's something else. Aaargh. These are the days of our lives, right?

Now for the family crisis. Last Sunday, August 26, we received a semi-frantic call from The Husband's older brother. My father-in-law was being admitted to the hospital because he was bleeding out through the colon. Considering the man has been fighting prostate cancer (his fourth battle with it!) since May of last year and was given 3 months to live at that time, this was not unexpected. The ER doctor was giving him hours, maybe days to live. He wanted to admit my FIL to get him stable and then would release him to hospice care since my FIL does NOT want to die in a hospital bed.

This sends The Husband into a tizzy. We knew this was coming, especially since they kept delaying and delaying and then finally denying the last round of chemo because of his blood levels. We've known that he was bleeding internally because he kept having to have transfusions in order to get his blood counts back up. But now what do we do? His other siblings were flying in from Ohio and Idaho, so The Husband decided to ride his motorcycle up there and then I would follow with the children on Friday.

The Husband made it up to Carson City relatively unscathed. Well, with the exception of the rain storm and hail that he drove through and then was chased by. Yikes! He comes into a situation where his father is going down hill, but is still mostly lucid and is still eating. We're uncertain of what is going on, how fast he's going, etc. He sees all his children around him, plus the husband of one and the wife of another and says, "Well, you all are here. Now where's Sarah?" So now I'm torn. We decide to yank the kids out of school a day early and I make haste to leave on Thursday before he completely goes. No matter what happenns, we have to return on Sunday because the children have to go back to school on Tuesday and we know we're going to need Monday as a recovery day.

Guess who's still kicking as of today? My father-in-law. Doctors don't know shit. They can't predict death. He's still lucid, albeit very weak. He needs help to get up and down, and has more and more moments of morphine mania as we call it. But he's still got his humor and knows how to yank our chains and make jokes.

Just yesterday, my SIL, who happens to work in a nursing home and is very used to dealing with the elderly and the dying, kept asking him if he wanted to do the transfer to the wheelchair so that he could move from the bed to his recliner. "Nope. Not right now," he said.

"You ready now, dad?" she asked a few minutes later.

"No, not ready yet."

Lather, rinse and repeat a few times.

Just as SIL decides to sit down and rest a bit herself, FIL says, "Okay, I'm ready now." SIL moves over to him. "No, I don't think so. Let's wait a bit," FIL says.

"Are you yanking my chain," SIL asks him.

"What, you finally noticed?" he said, grinning.

The old man's still got some spunk in him yet. Gotta love that!

Depending on how things go, I may head up again later on in the week as I'm the one in the family with leave left. The Husband used all his up by going all last week unfortunately. But we shall see what we shall see. Pray for us!