a dramatic week

So.  Long time no see.  It has been a crazy week which has really inhibited the time and energy to get much up on the blog.

Everything started at 3 AM last Friday morning.  I got up to use the bathroom and I had a really strong pain in my side.  Like a “I can hardly move” kind of pain.  But I pushed through it and got myself into the bathroom, took care of business.  As I tried to head back to my room, I got a huge rush of nausea and stomach cramping.  I managed to wash my hands and felt like I desperately wanted my bed.  I tried to walk the few paces it takes to get back there.  But instead, I lost consciousness and fell to the floor.

Luckily, my husband, who normally can sleep through anything, heard a “thunk” and came running.  He thought I had dislocated my knee (I have had problems with that).  Nope.  I had passed out. 

Folks, I am not the faintin’ type.  I can think of one time I almost fainted.  In my life.  Sometimes I feel a little light-headed with the stomach flu but I don’t faint.  But shortly before I passed out, I remember thinking, “Something is seriously not right.”  I even wondered if maybe I was going to die (chalk that up to my worst case scenario thinking that apparently is instinctive enough even for these situations). 

When my husband found me I got conscious pretty quick but wasn’t making a lot of sense and I was really pale.  This totally freaked us out. 

So this past weekend and week have been spent in a flurry of tests and doctor visits to try to figure out what went wrong.  It has been a scary week.  The whole hypochondriac in me has bad enough worries about things just on my own but when you add the fact that we are coming up on the one year anniversary of my dad’s death to cancer, and when you add the fact that I had to have a breast biopsy six months ago (thankfully, it was benign), the uncertainty of things this week was pretty tough.  I remember saying to my husband, “Just when I hit my stride, this kind of stuff always happens to me.”  But as came to the end of the week, with relief I found that it appears that there is nothing serious wrong with me.  Ovarian cysts are the cause, they are normal in women my age and mine don’t look particularly worrisome.  Now, most women don’t pass out from them, but likely one ruptured.  The doctor says there’s a good chance it’ll never happen again. 

I am so glad that things appear to be ok in my body, at least.  I’m mindful though that I have another breast check-up in March to make sure things are still fine and nothing has changed.  Is life just a series of heart-pounding worries, sighs of relief, and returns to worry?  Sometimes I fear that by the time I turn 80 and actually have real reason to worry about mortality that I will have whiled away my life shrinking into the corner of fears real and imagined.  I hope not. 

I know that having a toddler has helped me to embrace the moment much more than I used to.  With her, everything is immediate.  Everything is now.  She runs through life with a flurry of excitement.  She routinely runs around kicking her legs up in the air (karate style) with joy.  She gets pumped just going to Costco.  She can hardly wait to meet go see her “new friends” at church.  She laughs with abandon.  Yes, I might be a worst case scenario person, I might have gone through some things in recent years that make me look at the world a bit gloomily, I might be a worrywart, but I have a ray of sunshine in the Burrito.  In ten million ways a day, she makes my life better.  I’m so happy to have gotten through this week, so grateful for life and health.  I want to embrace every moment of life with abandon, like Burrito does.  Or at least more of them than I do already.  There’s a reason Jesus said, “If you want to be the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven, become like a little child.”  All I have to do is look at Burrito to know why.