Life truly is but a vapor

Our brother and our friend went in for emergency open heart surgery yesterday.  He was a young man of 55 and now a days (to me anyway) open heart surgery is an every day occurrence!  His words were, " I guess my aorta is leaking into my chest and they need to do a little valve replacement. I will be here for about a week. " He did not make it through the surgery and we are all in a state of shock!  The waves of gut wrenching sobs just keep coming.  They are inter mixed with the laughter of memories of this dear person that one minute you could wring his neck and the next there was nothing but love for the kindness that came from him.  I like to think of him as the little cartoon character, Pigpen, in the Peanuts cartoon....  He would laugh at this as well.  It was common knowledge in our/his family that Steve was 'an accident waiting to happen'.   He was like a faithful little mutt that was so happy to be a part of a family that loved and accepted him with all of his little quirks.  He did the same for us.  No matter how bitchy any of us were, he just kept coming back and with a couple of packages of his homemade baklava....and shallow as we are, all was forgiven :)
A missing piece of puzzle that makes this family what it is ( complicated and very hard to understand) is missing and we are all floundering.  We take turns crying and then getting strength  from the gales of laughter that escapes from our fond   memory of Steve Seidel. 

I don't understand this at all and my eyes are swollen from the salt in my tears...God, please help me to understand what the purpose is in this. 

I realize that I have depended on this quirky, mischievous, caring  man for a lot of things.  My main dependence was that he kept tabs on Mark as closely as I did.   The roles switched when Mark started having brain seizures.  By the roles I mean the one between him and Mark.  Mark had always been the 'big' brother and Steve the little one that was forever getting himself into "fixes" that Mark had to get him out of.  Steve quickly 'grew up' when Mark needed someone to watch out for him when I wasn't around.  He would text me secretly when he had a concern for Mark and I would do the same.  Oh, now, DO NOT get me wrong --there were times that I wanted to knock him out--but mostly, he was my little brother and Uncle Steve to my girls and grand kids. 

My mom called him 'el hermano' when she lived with us.  She considered him part of our pack as well.  She loved Steve because he loved us.  She loved him because he loved to eat like all of us do : ) She loved him because she thought he was a good man.  She loved him because WE loved him.


I did not realize how much we loved him nor how much I love every member of my family and my friends.   I do not want to wait until any of you die before I realize that.  I am NOT ready to have family gatherings without our brother.  I weep because I will not ever see him on this earth again.  I smile because I know that he is peace filled and worry free.  I am so very happy that I told him that we loved him and that we were all praying for him...my last words to him were....'see you soon' !  

So much to process...the veil between life and death.  I want to just shake God and ask "WHY!!!" and 'what does this mean?'  How much more God?   Cool side bar here...today we had to go to Steve's apt. and his bible was on his bed.  I took it for a sign (because I like signs) that - it's all good! 
 
Tomorrow is a new day so perhaps I need some sleep because the bible says that  "Joy comes in the morning".  Amen :) 




 

New Years eve thoughts

Another whirlwind week...I had my stitches taken out on Wed. which is exactly a week from when my port was removed.  My scar is itching so I am assuming that it is healing.  The stitch removal was super easy and super fast and I floated out of the dr. office feeling that something was different. I even voiced it to Mark.  Nope, I have no clue what is different but something is!

We spent a couple of days with Dana and Summer and kids because Autumn had her first dance recital...She was the star (as well as Dana who played Mother Ginger ;)   We just got home a little bit ago.  Friday was my most favorite day of the 2 and a half days that we were there (after the recital of course) because  I had gone to see my COS while the family napped.  I had to track her down and in the process I ended up having a little meeting after the meeting with a couple of old mutual friends of Bill W. that I had not seen for a very long time.  We ARE ALL GRAMMAS NOW!  Where did the time go?  It was wonderful!  We laughed and laughed at all of the crap we have had to go through in our journey.   Sometimes all we can do is laugh, right?

Summer, Mark and I had our own little meeting that morning about how so much had gone on in all of our lives these last 10 months.  Life did not get put on hold just because I had cancer...Guess what? We even shed some tears...this family that does not crack under pressure with tears (except Mark, he is very tender hearted and cries easily) shed some pretty serious crocodile tears while we shared our feelings.  We like to say that we laid our guts on the table.  I realized that healing of a different kind needs to take place for our family.  Emotional healing.  I am a little afraid because I didn't know that I was walking around so emotionally wounded.  I am not going to go into what Summer and Mark said because that is not my place, but I know that I felt raw emotions coming through our conversation.   How awesome of a family do I have that we can sit and share from the depths of our gut and have it speak straight from our hearts!  I felt like all of this time we thought that we were all staring cancer right in the face yet we were so afraid in the dark recesses of our souls!  Too afraid to say " I am afraid that you are going to die" or "are you afraid of dying"?  I have to honestly say that I never thought I would die but a few times in the middle of the night I sometimes would think  "what am I gonna do if I die?"  HA!  You die, bird brain!!

The insanity is so obvious to me now but I think that I have to go through a little bit more of the crazies before I can speak with any kind of survivor wisdom.  All I know is gut talk and my gut has been asking me lately...where do I fit in?  I am fearful of who knows what....there is free floating anxiety all over the place and I feel like I really don't belong anywhere....I guess I didn't plan past one day at a time.  This I know... I am alive, and I will live until I die. 

I feel so unprepared to take care of Mark and be the wife that he needs.  Life keeps happening and tonight is a perfect example.  I can choose to see the ugly of a situation that came up or I can choose to understand that Mark is facing his own journey and his does not seem to have an end to it.  I choose to 'hold my face up to the light even if for the moment I cannot see' (Bill W.)  I MUST believe more deeply.  Yes, I am a little bit afraid tonight.  I think because I don't have a whole team of doctors and nurses telling me what to do or where to go on a daily basis.  I truly am back in the saddle again....however I am sitting off to the side of the saddle about ready to fall off. HA!

I sound like Chicken Little don't I?  I do feel better that I got to sound off and spill some of my guts here.  2012 - you are a welcome sight for these tired bones (how's that for a little drama?)

Happy New Year all!  God is forever good and faithful! Amen? 

Port removal( feel free to click on any picture for a closer look);)

I was a nervous wreck this morning but a very quiet nervous wreck.   Thank you very much :)  The very thought of being in the same doctors office where I had my horrific experience with my biopsy earlier this year, struck sheer terror in my being.  I don't think I was even this nervous for my mastectomy (s)! The younger of the two nurses put some blue patch thing on me and I asked her if that was a pain patch and she said "no, it's the ground."   Me thinking to myself....'isn't a ground necessary when there is electricity involved!'...yep.
The numbing stuff was quite stingy painful and apparently very fast acting because it seems to me that Dr. W started carving on me immediately. Then when Dr. W would cauterize whatever he was cauterizing, he would ask me if it hurt....uh, no.  I think I could smell burning flesh but that could have been my over active imagination.  Nurse Laurie would dab, dab, dab, and tried to keep smiling but I am certain that I could see a look of  - OMG this is awful!  Mark kept chattering away and I found it very distracting and a little bit (ok, alot ) annoying.  If he had not been holding onto my leg, I am sure that a few times I would have kicked him in the chops...sorry Lord, forgive me.  The younger nurse left the room in quite a hurry and when asked where she was going she said 'out'.  Hmmm, wonder what she saw that made her leave.  Mark tried to explain and I don't think I would want to see what he saw.   Dr. W is such an awesome doctor.  I am very grateful for him and his gift.  I am even more grateful for pain/numbing medicine

It is all over now and am a little sore but the healing is taking place and I will be back to my new 'normal' very soon.  I  got to keep the port and I sent a picture of it to Summer so she can post it on my blog...yuck.  But it is fascinating how I had that thing in my chest for 10 months!  Summer said, "it's purple like a purple heart for courage" .  Nice, I like that.

No  more cutting on this poor old body anymore.  I have no more foreign objects to be cut out!

Merry Christmas to all if I don't get to blog before Sunday.















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Monday Monday, so good to me (tra la la)

Woke up a little nostalgic today.  I think that is the word for the 'feeling' that is going on.
I am finding that I am beginning to border on hypochondria in my thoughts....and I hate that!   I took my compression sleeve off last night and I immediately felt a pain shoot up between my shoulder blades!!!! OMG is that a blood clot racing through my arteries?!  Is this a heart attack?  I thought women don't feel pain when they experience a heart attack!  OMGosh, I better go sit down so I don't drop to the floor and hurt myself...please don't let me feel pain before I go home to be with you Father.....and on and on it went for quite awhile!   I never mentioned it to Mark because he might make me go to the hospital and 'they' might tell me that I AM HAVING A HEART ATTACK!!!! HA!   Night time is awful for me....the mind is really like a dangerous neighborhood.... I finally took my meds and went to sleep...and I woke up this fine Monday still here on planet earth ;)  Like my friend Kay says, "spring broke-no clang clang"..... that's me on occasion.

 I am delivering cookies to Peace Hospice for the cookie plate party that they have every year.  They need around 120 doz. cookies!   Whit and I baked cookies yesterday .  It was quite fun for me because I felt so normal making rosettes and visiting with Mark over the mounting pile of yummy little delicacies. 

God has so richly blessed me and now I am praying for a sound mind.  I wonder if that is the chemo and radiation working its way out of my system or if I am just getting a little bit koo koo?  Either way, I know that God did not give me the spirit of fear and that is what I am fighting now.  Or at least I was last night....gee, that was quite the battle.