Friday, July 10, 2009

Next episode...

I think these are going to turn into "episodes". I can only write a little at a time and I am not sure if I can finish all at once. :)

That night was especially stressful. Emily did not sleep except on me, which by this time was not all that different than any other night really. But I did not sleep at all and worried myself to death. I worried that I would lose her and how was that going to affect me and the family. Finally the sun came up and the night was over.

I found that I dreaded the night. The night was when I was really unable to keep myself and my thoughts under control. The day I could function and I could make everyone believe, or so I thought, that everything was okay and under control.

At nine that morning we are the doctor's office. Sitting in the chair waiting for the the nurse to call us back. One thing about Emily she got really used to going to the doctor. Still to this day she will go and hardly make a fuss at shots and they can poke and prod her and she will just sit there and endure the whole thing. So she was quiet in the office, as usual. No one saw what we were seeing at home. No one saw her be inconsolable. No one saw her cry for hours and not stop, even if you were holding her. Was I crazy? These were the thoughts going through my mind as I waited.

The nurse finally calls us back and we go to "our room". It was uncanny, but we were always put in the same examining room. The pediatrician comes in and sits on her stool. She is very concerned and quiet. I can tell she is trying to figure out how to tell me what she needs to tell me.

"Melissa, I am not sure you know what an elevated red blood count means or not, but it is really indicative on one thing. We are concerned that Emily has leukemia."

WHAT? LEUKEMIA? What? Immediately the tears begin to roll down my face and very soon I am a complete and total blubbering mess. The pediatrician remains calm and tries to console me. We are friends after all. She puts her arm around me, but nothing helps. I finally get myself under control enough to listen to what she has to say.

"I want to do a few more tests to rule some other things out while the culture is out. It will take seven days for the culture to come back and give us any definitive information. But she could have a UTI that she is just not able to tell us about so I am going to do a test for that, and we will take some more blood and I want you to come back each day and lets take her blood and keep an eye on her counts. Also, I want to warn you that if she gets a fever you must take her to the Emergency Room. I will meet you there, but she must go immediately. If she starts showing the signs of the infection in her body it could be bad."

By the end of this speech I am numb. I can't cry anymore which is amazing because most of the time that is all I do. So I consent to the tests she wants to run on Em and we begin. If you have never seen a baby get a catheter, this is something that you want to avoid like the plague. I am telling you that it is quite possibly the worst thing I have ever had to endure in my entire life. Including unmedicated childbirth, kidney stones, gall stones, and the like.

As you can probably imagine, the tests come back negative. We know before we leave the office that morning. I resolve to go home and find that hospital paperwork and scour it for any reason this might be happening to us. And I must go home and figure out where we are on the tea and what's going on.

On the way home I call Chris and then Tracye. I tell them both what the doctor has said and Chris has almost no reaction. This pisses me off. To no end. How can you hear news like this and have no reaction. Then I move from pissed off to real white hot anger. How could you let me go through all this alone? How could you make me hear this news all by myself and then when I call you and tell you, you have absolutely no reaction? But...I said none of this. I just added it to my reasons why he was going to leave, and started to simmer. You see we could not be in the same room with one another without eventually screaming at one another. It was around the kids we would hold off until they were in bed. But, the screaming match would commence. And OMG...we were good at it. We had been married almost 12 years by this point and lots of bitterness and resentment can build up over 12 years.

In the midst of all this I was in charge of our finances. YEP...that's right crazy woman in charge of the money. How could anything go wrong there, right? I was a freakin disaster looking for a place to self-destruct. Because one thing I am not good at, is money. I can fake it for awhile, but in the end I am just not good with it. This is because I don't really care about it. I can live with it or without it. Either way, my life can be good. That is when I am sane, and take meds and am not possessed by some other evil force. During this time, I was not sane, I did not take meds, and I truly believe that I was possessed by some evil force. I would not let Chris know what was going on with our money, and we weren't really making it. I was paying some bills but not others. I was stashing cash away for the time that he left me. We were paying outrageous medical bills. I took out a cash loan to have extra money. I was spending it left and right. We ate out every night, pharmacy bills were eating out lunch. I really could have used some help from the financial genius who lives in my house, BUT.....remember me? So most of our fights were over money and him not having a clue what was going on in our finances. I could not admit to him that I really had not clue either.

Okay this is it for today...I can't do anymore. This brings up so many feelings for me that I just can't put away easily. Now on to other things in my life. Life is good really good for me and our family. We have our struggles like everyone else, but we did make it through this. I think that is what I am supposed to see here. We made it, and really it lasted only a very short time. It felt like forever when we were walking through it, but, in retrospect it was only a year of our life. One year. In the grand scheme of things that is not much right? But it is bittersweet because I also realize that we wasted a year. That I wasted a year of my life, Emily's life, Chris' life, and Ben's life because I was too prideful to ask for help. I didn't want anyone to know what was going on inside of me. The war that was being waged in my mind was something that I felt like I should keep quiet. And of course I had to hit rock bottom before things would get any better. I am not sure I can keep writing to tell you how I hit that bottom, but I will try. This part of our story, right, and the blog is called the story of us, right?