Oops! Or, Where I've Been For The Past Month

How did a month go by without my posting? I'm not sure, exactly. 

After that last post, we went to spend a couple days visiting the inlaws, who live about a 4- to 4.5-hour-drive away from us. It's the first time I made the trek since soon after I got sick in 2007. In fact, the two are somewhat linked in my brain. I remember planning that trip figuring that it was just as easy to lay around on someone else's couch when I didn't feel good as it was at home. But it didn't turn out that way, and I always wondered if I would have ended up in the hospital when I did if we hadn't made that trip. Of course, I'm not sure avoiding that hospitalization would have made me any less sick, so it's probably a moot point.

Scott and Ellie have made several trips without me over the past four years. For the last year, I've wanted to try to make the trek with them, but I'd either flare up or something else would come up (once, the pet-sitter flaked and we couldn't leave the sick kitty without someone to come give her medicine twice a day) and I'd end up sending them without me.

So we went April 16-18, which in hindsight was a ridiculously short visit for the amount of travel time, which I found exhausting even though we timed both car rides so that I didn't have to wake up too early. It could have been a lot worse, but it was bad enough that I had Scott drop me at the hotel so I could nap while he and Ellie went and spent the evening with his parents. The next day, they went over after breakfast (and a quick trip to Wal-mart after mommy discovered she forgot to pack Ellie any underwear) while I napped. He came and got me so I could attend lunch and meet my new sister-in-law as well as see everyone else. She was just a few days post-op from a shoulder surgery, and I was determined to last as long as she did. But boy, when she went home to crash, I was definitely ready to go back to the motel to nap and slept through dinner. The next day was a repeat, without a trip to Wal-mart and a lunch just with Scott's parents, and then back in the car to head home. I think I spent over 9 hours in the car and maybe 4 or 5 actually awake and visiting with folks I don't live with.

And then I came home and promptly ended up canceling every medical appointment I had for the next two weeks other than acupuncture.

I pretty much just barely felt like I had my head above water again and then discovered that what seemed like a manageable amount of activity over a weekend was way too much. For me, at least. It was actually too little activity for Ellie, but that's a whole 'nother blog. 


On April 30, we had ballet tickets for a performance that lasted a little over 2.5 hours, including two intermissions that totaled 25 minutes combined. I took a pain pill at the first intermission, and I'm pretty sure that's all that got me through the rest of the performance. (Which was amazing, btw.) Sitting for that long without being able to change positions very much was painful. Very painful.


On May 1, I had signed up for a 2-hour class for me and Ellie to attend together to dye silk scarves at Oregon College of Arts & Crafts. I wasn't recovered from the ballet (how lame that attending the ballet wiped me out!), so rather than getting Scott some woodshop time on his own, he drove us to the campus and hung out in his nearby office while we painted on scarves. Which was a mixed success thanks to Ellie's lack of physical activity over the weekend as mentioned earlier. 


And it's been, what?, two weeks since then? I'm still wiped out and wondering when I'm going to find the energy for doing things like, oh, laundry. 

So that's what I've been up to. How about you?