The Ghost of Thanksgivings Past.....

It's fairly early on the morning of November 13th, 2017. I'm busy preparing breakfast for myself, my Mom, and Candis. We each eat 2 eggs, a piece of bacon and a piece of toast with some fruit every morning of the world. Mom's doctor advised her to eat eggs during the throes of the early days of her recovery, when her blood sugar kept bottoming out. That was another unexpected perk of GBS and the subsequent - and unnecessary- IVIG treatments; Mom went from a Type 2 Diabetic to a Hypoglycemic! We managed to secure an appointment with a nutritionist and a dietician but by the time the appointments rolled around, I had done my research and found a hypoglycemic diet plan online that I put into strict effect. And within 2 days, Mom's blood sugar leveled out.

Candis is watching Sesame Street -and screaming at me- from her high chair, Mom is in her room, checking her emails on her computer. Its a stark contrast from the early days of her recovery, when she would lay in her bed, her eyes closed, her breathing labored. She didn't have the energy to lift her hands off the bed, and surely didn't have the energy to come sit at the table with Candis and me. But thankfully, this Thanksgiving is shaping up to be much, much different from last year.


Thanksgiving is a hard holiday for me. Some years I want to stay in bed all day with my head under the covers.

My birthday is tomorrow, and my birthday marks the last "normal," that I can remember.

The year I turned 18 was 2007. My Dad was dying, slipping away right in front of me. We didn't have much of a party. I have always been the type that all I need is my family and I'm happy. So because my Dad was sick, we had a small store bought cake, pizza, and some visitors. I'm pretty sure I worked that morning -I was a private tudor for some local homeschooled friends at that time- and went to the grocery store as soon as I got off work. I was in college by that time but I only went two full days a week, and I just dont recall my birthday being one of them that year.

Daddy was frail, but he was in good spirits, telling stories, laughing with his visitors, tickled that he'd lived to see me turn 18. It was a reality none of us were truly willing to accept, except for probably Daddy himself. He knew he was dying, he was prepared, and ready to go when the time came. I received a video camera that year as a gift, it was the first my little family had ever had. I managed to film my Dad 4 times before he passed.

Thanksgiving that year was different, so so different. Before my Mom had always hosted her family: her sister and her children and their families. Before my Grandparents passed away we would always pick them up and bring them to our house, and with my Dad at the helm, we would always have a blast, and without fail too much to eat, which in turn resulted in my cousins and my uncle and Daddy falling asleep in random places all over the house. One year we lost my Unlce Wayne, and after a search we discovered him asleep between the bed and the wall in my parents bedroom. But that year, 2007, it was Mama and I in the kitchen alone. No 20 pound turkey in the oven, instead we baked a pack of turkey breasts. We didn't have countertops loaded down with side dishes; macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, bowls full of black olives - my grandpa's favorite. No dressing in a pan, no stuffing in the bird. No hot mulled cider in the crockpot, simmering away. No Thanksgiving Parade on tv. Daddy was asleep in the recliner for most of the day. We'd been told he would likely pass into a coma before he finally passed on and I remember being terrified all day long that that is what was happening. My parents best friends stopped by for a visit. They were such good friends that they built a home directly next door and gave me a key to go in at will when they weren't home, I still count them as my second parents. On the day I was married, the husband walked me down the isle and I, to this day, refer to them as Mama and Pa, and my daughter calls them Gramma and Pa. It was a miserable day, full of fear. I've tried to forget as much as possible, and mercifully I have.

Daddy passed on November 26th, and in the 10 years since his passing, Thanksgiving has fallen on the 26th a handful of times. Thankfully my husband and his family are sensitive to that, and they know the 26th is the hardest day of the year for me. Some years I drag myself out of bed to watch the parade, the tradition I will never break no matter how little sleep I get the night before. It was my Dad's favorite thing to do. As soon as his eyes popped open on Thanksgiving morning he would rush to the living room and turn the tv on, get his cup of coffee and settle in to watch while Mama fussed in the kitchen getting cinnamon rolls made for us for breakfast and checking on what all she needed to do to finish up preparing for the big day ahead, and while I rushed between the living room and my closet, trying to come up with the perfect outfit to wear for the day, and complaining about the hot rollers in my hair. It happened every year, without fail. Some years I sit amongst my husband's extended family and I lose the battle of trying to hold back my tears, and I let one or two slip down my cheeks. In the past when that's happened, my niece, or a cousin of my husband's will come sit next to me and hold my hand. I'm thankful for my in laws. Every year, I'm so thankful for them.


Thanksgiving 2016 was supposed to be laid back. My Father in Law's sister always hosts in her home, but that year, she had no home. She and her husband had sold the home they'd raised their family in and were in the process of building a new home, so it was decided amongst the family that Thanksgiving temporarily be moved to the local community center and be held on the day afterThanksgiving. Meanwhile, we were still dealing with Mama's health. She'd been home from the hospital for a couple of weeks and was doing well, she was in physical therapy and managing at home on her own. We'd stayed with her for a week and then she kicked us out, saying we needed to go home and she needed to do this on her own. Candis was a couple of months old at this point. A week or so before Thanksgiving, my mother in law had had a light heart attack and after a couple of days at home decided she felt well enough to go back to work. But she'd jumped the gun and gone back before she was completely ready and had a second heart attack [at work] and was in the hospital on Thanksgiving day.

We got up and watched the parade like normal. I have pictures of Candis sleeping like an angel in her swing that sat next to our entertainment center in the small house we'd made our home. I tried waking her up to see Santa, but she was too little, and just didn't care. I baked cinnemon rolls, another Thanksgiving Day tradition. We decided to go out to eat, just the three of us, for a quick meal, and then to see our Moms. While we were getting ready, his oldest sister called and gleefully told us that their Mom had been released, and she was going to stay with her and her family for a few nights before going back home. We quickly formulated our plan. Out to eat, his mom, my mom, home.

Cracker Barrel on Thanksgiving Day is no ones idea of festive or fun, or traditional, or at all what I wanted my child to say was her first Thanksgiving meal. But that's what it was. We dressed up, cause it's whatcha do for Thanksgiving, and off we went. Our meal was fine, pretty normal for Cracker Barrel, and then we went to Aaron's sister's house where the whole family had gathered to welcome their Mom home, and give thanks that a serious situation with her heart had been averted.

After about an hour there, we all decided to watch It's a Wonderful Life, it's always the first Christmas movie of the season in my husband's family and so we all settled into the living room to watch. I found a secluded back corner in the living room, and started nursing my very hungry, very sleepy 2 month old.

We didn't even get past where Old Man Gower slaps young George Bailey's ear till it bleeds. My cell phone rang. It was "The Bare Necessities," the eternal ringtone for my mother, and I knew it was bad.

Did you know that an ultra slim percentage of patients with Guillain Barre Syndrome will have at least ONE relapse? It's so rare that whenever a relapse happens it throws the physicians treating them into a tailspin, questioning what exactly it is. That's what was happening. Her chest was constricting, her swallowing was impared, she had the full body quivers, she was studdering, couldn't think. We rushed to her house. After one look at her, I made my husband call an ambulance.


It was a more swift experience in the emergency room. Her neurologist left his Thanksgiviong table to see her in the ER in person. Here is where my fondness for that man ends. He was so horribly ill informed about GBS that he immediately told us that "GBS doesn't come back, so thats not what you have." We were terrified. I'll never forget standing in my Mom's driveway (which, unbeknownst to me, would later become my driveway) looking at my precious 2 month old sleeping in her carseat on one side, and the paramedics loading my mother into an ambulance on the other, and crying, hyseterically, into my husband's chest. I spent the night in the ICU with Mom, the first time ever away from my baby, and when I went home the next morning, all I knew was that life was different now.


Life takes some wild and crazy turns. One thing I have learned is that NOTHING is certain and to be thankful for everything good (and in turn, everything bad - the Bible says "in everything give thanks") all the time. I'm thankful that last Thanksgiving saw my mother in law home from the hospital, and I'm thankful that my own mother survived last Thanksgiving. I'm looking forward to a much more "normal" Thanksgiving this year, Good Lord willing. I'm excited to wake my baby girl up and tell her all about the parade, and watching it with her "Pappy" when I was a little girl. I'm anxious to see her eat cinnamon rolls for the first time. I can't wait to see her engulfed with the love of my in laws. I'm excited to cook a special "friendsgiving" later on for my parents friends. I'm excited to cook in the kitchen with my mother once again.


Being a caregiver is taxing. It's trying. It's hard. When you see a person you love go through what my mother has gone through, and come out clean on the other side, Thanksgiving isn't just the last Thursday of November. It's all day, every day. She could have left me this time last year, and by the grace of God she didn't.



I am THANKFUL.

I am GRATEFUL.

I AM BLESSED.


Happy Thanksgiving - 2017 - from my blessed household, to yours!

Start at the Beginning.... It's the Best Place

Hi. Welcome to Choosing Joy, and the first post, ever! As a warning, this is a long, introductory post. I will go further into detail about my Mother's diagnosis, and recovery in subsequent postings....

This is been a struggle over the past few months, deciding whether or not I wanted to blog about this. In the end, I decided that I have a lot to say. I want to raise awareness, I want to inform the uninformed, and I want to record these days, so that when they are far, far behind us, I can look back and say "Thank you, Lord, for leading me through the Valley."


For starters, you should probably know me. I'm Missy. I'm 27 years old, I'm a wife to Aaron, a mother to Candis. I'm a stay at home Mom, and I freaking love it! It's quite plainly what I was meant to do. I have a degree in Commercial Digital Photography, but after a few years in the business I decided to retire. I don't love it like I thought I would when I chose that as my major. I love to write. I've got a folder full of half finished stories on my desktop that, when the urge strikes and time permits, I peck away at, hoping to finish. I am a semi-retired theatre actress. I've been acting steadily since I was 15. It was always my goal in life to be an actress, for the love of acting, not because I wanted to be famous. I have never had any sort of nerves when it comes to being on stage, it's where I'm most comfortable, where I know I'm good, where I know that I can make a crowd laugh till their sides hurt. We live in Kentucky, in a small town that some would say is behind 30 years. We love it. It's home. We are an old fashioned couple, with old fashioned values and a great belief in God.


My parents were the type of couple that are just MFEO - you know, MADE FOR EACH OTHER. Period. They complimented each other so well. After they each had suffered through disasterous, and dangerous, first marriages, they found each other, and you could say it was love at first sight. They ran off one Saturday morning to get married and when they called my Mom's Mom to tell her the good news, my Grandma said "Well, finally. I knew ya'll was gonna do it, I just didn't know when!"

They were married 10 years before I was born, finishing the family they had built that included my much older half brother from my Dad's first marriage.

My parents owned a business. I was raised in my Mom's office and the marine dealership. If I wasn't sitting there, reading a book, or watching a movie, I was playing in the showroom, pretending the pontoon boats were a stage, acting to the birds that flew in and out of the room, or I would find a houseboat out on the lot, open all the doors and pretend that it was my own little apartment. In the winter months my parents would let me bring my roller blades to "the shop," and I would cruise all over the concrete floors, pretending I was a figure skater.

As I got older, the pretending gave way to actually working at the shop, taking inventory, cleaning the boats with my uncle, helping to install keel protectors to the hulls of fishing boats, making bank deposits and doing bank statements with my Mom. Due to health issues, I was homeschooled from the time I was in 5th grade, and I never minded spending all day every day with my parents.  I loved them. My parents were always the parents all the kids wanted to be around. My Dad was the funniest man alive and my Mom was such a caring, attentive parent. My parents were always the chaperone's on school trips.

During a field trip when I was in 4th grade - the year before being pulled out of public school - a friend of mine suddenly started treating me very poorly. She began, very abruptly, calling me names, shooting me bad looks, and just generally being ill towards me. My parents watched the whole thing, but remined silent on the issue. After a week of being treated like dirt by this "friend," I finally approached my parents about the situation. What I hadn't seen at the end of that field trip was that my "friend," had been forgotten by her parents. They were divorced, and busy with their own lives. One said they would pick her up, and the other said no, they would pick her up. But no one picked her up. Fortunately in a small town, everyone knows everyone, so someone saw her sitting alone outside of the high school and took her home. My parents explained to me that not everyone has parents that love each other, not everyone has parents that love them the way they loved me. My friend was hurt that she didn't have what I had in the way of my family. She was hurting, and the only way she knew to act on it was to be ugly towards me. Our friendship never did quite pick back up, but I learned a great lesson, and I knew that I never wanted to put my children in that position. I began praying then, at 10 or so years old, that the Lord would send me my soul mate and that we could raise a family in love, with no worries of being forgotten.


When I was 17, my whole world changed over night. Suddenly, without any warning, my Dad had to be rushed to the emergency room, having a seizure. The news wasn't good.

Cancer.

Stage 4, non small cell Lung Cancer that had already metastisized to the brain, liver and spine. They gave him 6 months without treatment, and a year with.

The world literally stopped spinning. My parents walked away from their booming boat business, leaving it in the hands of their capable employees. I had just graduated high school and was working hard on my amateur portfolio for college, which I was scheduled to start in September that year (2007), acting, taking intense piano lessons twice a week, and I was trying desperately to catch the eye of a boy I'd had my eye on for years.


I could tell you all the horrific tales of what we had to do to care for him during the six months he lived after the diagnosis. I could tell you about him wasting away to literally a skeleton in pajamas. I could tell you about the night before he died, how he was out of his mind, calling out for a friend that had died 30 years prior. I could tell you about his last Thanksgiving, how he slept through it all. I could tell you about the blood thinner shots, the morphene pump, the radiation treatments, the horrific after effects of the one chemo treatment he took. But I won't. Cancer is a horrific, terrible disease. It took my Daddy from me, right at a time when I really needed him.

What I will tell you about it a moment of peace he and I had, not too long before he passed:

He had gotten into the habit of getting up with the sunrise. It was his time to be alone, to drink his coffee, to pray, to think. My Mom would sometimes join him, it was their time together, to get everything out in the open, secrets they'd kept from each other - he said he didn't want to go and not tell her everything -, but more times than not, he did it all alone.

It was a late September morning, a chill in the air, the fog thick across the cow pasture behind our house. I heard Daddy get up and paddle down the hallway to the kitchen, and heard him wrestle with the coffee pot - oh the days before Keurig. Then I dozed back off. It was still dark outside. I had been out late the night before with some friends that had made it their mission to "get my mind off of the thing at home." I don't know how long it was, but it wasn't much later that I woke up to my Dad's tiny, frail body sitting down on the side of my bed. "Melissa," he said, calling me by my full name, something he always did, even though he chose the name "Missy" for me, "wake up, hon. I want to watch the sunrise with you. I want you to take pictures of it." I reluctantly crawled out of bed, and grabbed my camera off of my desk.

We sat in silence that morning, but I saw it move across his face, and I felt it in my heart. This was the last peace we would ever share together on Earth. And we both started to cry. We sat there, tears puddling on the concrete patio, holding hands, watching the miracle of a sunrise together, for the last time.

He passed away on November 26th, 2007. I was at school. Right in the middle of my History of Photography class, I felt a shift inside my spirit, it sounds crazy but its true, and I knew that something was wrong. Without a word, I packed up and drove the hour and a half home. When I got there, my Mom met me in the garage with tears streaming down her cheeks. "Your Daddy's gone."


After that, even though my Mama and I had always been close, we pulled together tighter than ever. We were all we had. Just each other. No one knew how badly our hearts were hurting but us. We had the same pain.


In the midst of it all; my Dad's death, the struggle with deciding whether to continue with school or quit, the heartbreak when the boy I'd been in love with and had held me at arms length for months finally ended things, and the ache of daily life without the reason the Earth turned, I met Aaron.\

We were set up on a blind date by some mutual then-friends. To say I was in a strange way would be an understatement. I didn't want to date. I'd had my heartbroken and I was eyeball deep in grief all at the same time. I was not a fun person to be around. I was a tutor for some homeschooled kids I knew at the time, and I found myself snapping at them every morning, I would leave feeling like crap. I just wanted to go to school, go to work, and come home. I didn't want a social life, and I sure as sure didn't want to go on a blind date! But our friends insisted. So, on February 8th, 2008, I met Aaron for our blind double date and by the end of the night, I was praying that he wanted to see me again. He was FUN, he was FUNNY, he seemed like a really decent guy, the kind of guy that they just don't make anymore.

We met up again one week later, on Valentine's Day. We both had colds so we just met at my house. He brought me flowers, and my Mom hugged him when he came through the door. After that, there was never a thought of anyone else, Aaron and I had found each other, our searching was over.

5 months later he "put a ring on it," and asked me to marry him, and of course I said "yes."

We decided to wait until after I finished college to get married, and we set our wedding date for December 12th, 2009. As it turns out, I needed to do an additional semester to get my degree, and wouldn't you know it, I started classes for that semester in January of 2010. Oh well.


Our wedding was a Christmas wonderland. We chose deep reds, and golds as our wedding colors. We had a late afternoon ceremony, complete with singers, Christmas trees and poem readings. We had a large wedding party and an even larger reception, by my towns standards. It was the wedding that everyone still talks about. I worked for months, agonized, over every little detail. The processional was timed out by the beats in the songs I'd chosen. A theatre friend of mine was a bridesmaid and she helped me organize the whole thing. My best friend came up from Alabama, where she'd been living since high school, and helped me put the finishing touches on everything in the two weeks leading to the big day. It was perfect.



We knew we wanted to have kids, but just not right away. We decided a minimum of 3 years was a good time limit and we set about getting settled in our home, careers and saving money. But roadblock after roadblock, lost jobs, sudden, unexpected deaths in the family, general hard times, kept us questioning whether or not we should bring a child into the world. But I couldn't shake the desire, the great, great need within myself to be a mother. We didn't try, but we didn't prevent. And it began to hurt when people I knew would announce they were expecting.

In the summer of 2012, I was in rehearsals for a new play. I had rushed to town (40 minutes away) after work (I was a receptionist at an optometrist at the time and doing photography on the side) to make it to rehearsal on time and had to skip out on the spur of the moment family dinner that my sisters in law texted about. My in laws often spring family dinners up at the last moment, so it wasn't unusual. What was unusual was the phone call I got in the middle of rehearsal. Because my husband's aunt was at deaths door at the time, I stopped the rehearsal so I could answer the phone. Aaron's voice on the other end, and the news he had to tell me, took me to my knees. His sister was pregnant. Her only other child was 10, they thought they were done, but she's pregnant. I feigned excitement, but as soon as I hung up, I collapsed into tears. My theatre group is part of my family, and they rallied around me that night. Holding me while I cried, encouraging me to not give up hope. I'm forever grateful for that night. My nephew was born in December of 2012, and as we traveled back home from the hospital the night of his birth, we decided it was time to start trying. We naievely thought that by Valentine's Day, we'd have our own news to share.

3 Valentine's Days came, and went, without any news. Somewhere in those three years I started seeing fertility doctors. And every one that I saw told me nothing was wrong with me, that I was young, that I should just keep trying. I kept explaining to them that something WAS wrong.

The next part of our story is hard to tell, and I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea about us. I believe that the foster care/adoption system is greatly needed and is a good system, but it wasn't good for us. Some people are just perfect for foster care and adoption and we were not.

We somehow found ourselves so desperate to be parents that we started taking the classes for foster care in Januaryof 2015. I went in open minded, I wasn't sure what it all entailed, but I wanted to be a mom. But by the third class I knew that I wasn't going to be able to do it. I highly esteem those that can and do participate as foster parents, I esteem you higher than myself. This caused a rift between Aaron and I. I kept it to myself that I didn't think this was the right path for us. And because of our deep religious faith, I prayed about it. The answer I always got was that there was still hope for us, there was something great out there for us, it just wasn't going to be foster care. There are children out there that need love and care, and I would have resented them for not being born through me. I think it stemmed from my Dad's passing, I wanted a physical piece of my father back here on Earth. It explained why I was so attached to my brothers kids. When I finally got up the nerve to tell Aaron, we'd almost gone too far. We were two classes away from finishing, one stack of paperwork away from a homestudy... But I sucked in my gut, and told him how I felt. It didn't go over well. In fact, it went over so not well that I packed a bag, took the dog, and went to stay with my Mom.

I hadn't even been there a whole night when he called me and asked me to come home. We didn't talk about it, we didn't speak for days, and we didn't go back to classes. We didn't mention it again until after Candis was born.

By Easter that year, we still weren't completely put back together. There were pieces of who we used to be together still missing. But we dutifully plastered smiles on our faces for pictures in front of our church on Easter Sunday, and paraded to my sister in law's house for our family Easter Dinner as if nothing was wrong.

But everything was wrong.

That is, until Aaron's 90 year old grandmother pulled us aside just before we ate our meal. She sat us down in front of her wheel chair, and with huge tears rolling down her face and puddling in her lap she told us that the Lord had sent her a message to tell us. God speaks to us in all sorts of ways, he sends us signs, he sends us peace, and yes, at times he sends us words. She said that she knew we'd been trying to have children, without any success, and that we'd tried to do foster care but it didn't work out. The message from the Lord was to "hold on just a little bit longer. God wants to send you a baby, and he's going to, if you just keep the faith, cling tight to each other, and hold on just a little bit longer." She had barely started talking when the tears started flowing from my eyes. I buried my head in his grandmother's chest and cried, thanking her for praying for us when we couldn't even pray for ourselves. After that, we started actively trying to get our relationship back to where it needed to be.


One night at the end of July in that same year, Aaron and I were out on date night when I suddenly realized my period was three months behind. Ok, so I hadn't had it in a year, but I had had it steadily for three months prior to that.....so.... maaaaybe??? I had Aaron stop on the way home and get pregnancy tests. I took one as soon as we hit the front door of our little brick house with the blue front door.

It was positive.

I was stunned. I was shocked. I was scared. I didn't believe it. I went to bed that night feeling uneasy, and unsure. So I decided to take another test in the morning. I was awake at 6am. I peed on the stick, and it was negative. I'd had an ultra rare false positive test. I was in emotional agony for the rest of the day. I didn't speak, I didn't want to be spoken to. I sat in the chair, ate pizza and dry Apple Jacks right out of the box, watched movies and cried. I decided I was through messing around, we needed to find me another specialist.


My doctor, Dr. B, is a miracle sent straight from Heaven. I called her office actually asking to get an appointment with a different doctor, but as it turned out he was only accepting new patients if they were already pregnant. And I definitely was not. "But Dr. B is accepting new patients," the receptionist said. "She's amazing." So I set my appointment and went in.

She listened to me when I told her I felt like something was wrong. She listened to all the details of the past years of trying. She advised what I knew she would. "Lose 10 pounds if you can." I went on a diet and started working out. I was growing hair in places where women don't grow hair. My mood swings were out of this world. I wasn't having my period, having bouts of serious pain in the ovary region, and no matter how hard I dieted or worked out, I didn't lose an ounce, literally, I AM NOT exaggerating.

So a month later I went in for my follow up. She ordered an ultrasound of my ovaries to be done that day, and saw me after. "I can pretty confidently diagnose you with PCOS." Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. It's like a death sentence to your fertility. I'd heard countless women talk about having PCOS and never becoming pregnant, or it taking millions of dollars of fertility treatments and countless miscarriages to finally have one child. I sat on the exam table, on top of the crinkly paper, and tried not to panic. "But I don't want you to worry, cause I've got a plan." She told me. If I hadn't already realized that Dr. B was different, I knew it then.

The plan of action was: something to start my period, Clomid to help me ovulate, and wait, then come back in a month.


At my follow up, I was pretty sure I was pregnant, but according to the doc it was still too early for it to show up on a test. So the next morning, I woke up at 5am, and took a test.

Positive. A REAL positive. I was pregnant. After the inital "OMG" moment, I called out for my husband, who came running into the room in his pajamas with some serious bedhead. He couldn't believe it. We were so happy. But, looking back on that moment, it didn't hit us the way we expected it to. It wasn't joyful after that first inital moment of seeing the test read positive. It was just like another detail in our day. We had a full day planned. His Mom's birthday party was that afternoon. We had to get ready and get going.

Nothing went the way we planned for it to. Even telling our parents. His Mom and sisters were very excited, but I didn't feel right about any of it. His Dad just simply said "Oh that's great." And my Mom questioned it to the point where she made my husband angry. I was emotionally miserable for the entire pregnancy.

It ended on October 28th, in Pigeon Forge TN while Aaron and I were on vacation, alone. I started spotting a week before, but it was managable, and there was no pain involved. I called Dr. B's office everyday and they assured me that if I wasn't in pain, not to worry. My appointment was in the first week of November anyway. We nearly didn't go on the trip, but decided that we needed the time away. My spotting had majorly slowed down, and I felt like as long as I didn't overdo it, everything would be fine. But nothing was fine.We checked into our cabin, and went out for groceries for the week. It was inside the grocery store, that there started to be pain. Horrible, horrible pain that would nearly buckle me when it hit. I didn't want to admit it to myself. When we got back to our cabin I took some Tylenol, but it didn't even touch the pain. My darling husband ran me a warm bath, and then crawled in with me to hold me while I cried from the pain. It all ended the morning of the 28th. I'd spent most of the night in the tub, the only place I could find relief, or in the bathroom. We knew what was happening, we were accepting it. We cried on each other and prayed for strength. I woke up with pains shooting down my legs, and made my way to the bathroom. We gathered him up and packed up and came home. We say "him" because we both feel like that baby was a boy, but it was too soon to know for sure.

We had suffered it alone, and during the 5 hour trip back to KY, neither one of us said a word.


We decided then to never try again. We couldn't even risk the possibility of it happening again. It would kill us. We decided to enjoy the holidays, and focus all our attention and energy on each other. Dr. B said that we could try again after the first of the year if we wanted to, that she would be with us the whole way, and it was comforting, but the memory of what happened in that tiny cabin lived at the forefront of our minds. It still lives with us daily.


My Aaron's birthday is January 11th, and I always have a big birthday party for him every year at our house. We were planning the party for January 10th, a Sunday, and so I needed to go to the bakery to get his cake on the 9th. I am a methodical planner. To Do lists are everywhere around me and a day without my planner is like a day without oxygen. I'm also super frugal, so I stopped by the Dollar Tree and got three sacks full of decorations for $10. My Mom was my shopping compaion, any time I needed to go shop for anything, I called her and she tagged along. It was no different on this day. Plus, she said, she wanted me to be with her when she picked out his gift. I was feeling super sluggish, I chalked it up to be the rush from the holidays and throwing myself into the party for him so soon after. It is a lot all at once. I was on the hunt for a new planner that day, and my Mom suggested we go to Staples. She and I were standing in the computer isle, looking at the laptops, when I went to adjust my cross-body purse strap across my chest. It rubbed against my nipples, and I was in agony. Now, some women have tender nipples during their periods, but I never had. I'd only experienced the sensation when I was pregnant. And it's like the world stopped spinning for a second. My Mom was still just jabbering on to me about something but she turned into Charlie Brown's teacher. It was all I could do to get myself out of the store. I was nearly shaking when I pulled the car out of the parking lot.

But between then and the 12th, I had so much on my plate I seriously didn't even think about being pregnant. I forged ahead with the party and then I needed to go get groceries, and it snowed and it was all just too much. I didn't mention it to anyone. Not even Aaron. I wanted to know myself before I told anyone. The morning of the 12th, I got up and texted my best friend in Alabama. I told her what was going on and she said she was waiting with me. So.... I peed on the stick.

Instantaneously POSITIVE!

I told my best friend and said "now what do I do?" She said "Ummmm tell you husband." I couldn't wait until he got home to tell Aaron, so I called him at work. His reaction, "what???" And then I couldn't call my Mom because the crying thing would give it away. I texted her. She already knew!

So, I was pregnant, and it was an entirely different feeling that what it had been before. I was excited. The people around us were excited. And the pregnancy was going so smoothly!

We had our ups and downs during the time I carried Candis. We had house problems, car problems, family problems, but in the end, they all ended up working out. We called it the "Summer of Everyday Miracles," because everyday the things that seemed impossible would literally just work themselves out. Early in the pregnancy they discovered I had a severe placenta previa, where the placenta is over the opening of the cervix. It's a problem. It causes bleeding, and is a one way ticket to a C-Section if you make it to delivery. Miraculously, it corrected itself. My placenta was still low, I carried Candis between my knees the whole time, but it didn't cover my cervix, and I wasn't at risk for a C-Section.

My due date was September 15th.  But my doctor said she could nearly guarantee that I wouldn't go that far. And she was right. At my scheduled checkup 2 weeks before my due date, Dr. B told me I was 5cm dilated, but that she wanted me to go into labor on my own, she wanted my water to break without intervention if possible. She told me to go home, but that she might even see me later that night.

She didn't. I didn't even go into labor on Labor Day. I was sure I would. It would have been hilarious. My appointment on the day Candis was born, September 8th, was scheduled for 3pm. But early the morning before I got a call from Dr. B herself. She wanted me to come in first thing, and told me to be ready, just in case.

So on the morning of September 8, 2017, Aaron and I packed up the truck and drove to the doctors office. Meanwhile our entire family was sitting in their cars, ready for the ok to come to the hospital. My father in law was literally circling the hospital waiting for news, like a buzzard. Dr. B checked me and said "you wanna have a baby today?" The short answer was "yes."

I was dilated to 6cm when I got to her office that day, and anything past 5 is active labor, I'm told. I'd been having real contractions every 5 minutes or so, and didn't even feel them. I had leg labor. I didn't know that was a thing, but apparently it is, because I had it. I was admitted to the hospital, and at 10am they started pitocin. I took less than a third of the bag, I was laboring on my own. Dr. B broke my water at 11:30 and at noon I got my fantastic epidural.

At 10 minutes after 5pm on Thursday, September 8th, 2016, I gave birth to a perfect, healthy, beautiful baby girl that we named Candis Anne. Candis is my mother's middle name, she was named after her grandmother. And Anne is my mother in law's middle name and the name of my favorite literary heroine from my childhood, "Anne of Green Gables." Because of my epidural, I had a completely pain free labor and delivery experience, unless you could the few contractions I actually felt in the time between my water being broken and my epidural.

It was after the delivery that my Doctor told me why she had bumped my appointment time up. She sat down on the edge of the bed. "I had a dream about you." I was surprised. "I never dream about patients, but I dreamed about you. I didn't get a good feeling in the dream," she wouldn't elaborate further, "and I knew I needed to get you in sooner." She smiled. "It's a good thing we did. When we broke your waters, there was a great deal of meconium in the fluid." Meconium is where your baby has it's first bowel movement, while still in the womb. If they swallow the fluid, there are dire repercussions that result in a very very sick baby. She explained if they had waited even an hour later to see me, or if she saw me and sent me home again, that my baby would have been very sick, possibly could have even died, at delivery. I was shaken, and hugged her, and thanked her, and then thanked God for watching over me and my baby girl. They decided not to tell me, because they just don't know if baby swallowed the fluid until they're delivered, and they didn't want to upset me if it turned out she hadn't. But when I delivered, an emergency team from the NICU was in the room with me, waiting to take Candis, should she have been in any distress. And because of that she wasn't immediately placed on my chest at birth. Dr. B suctioned her mouth and nose out extra extra carefully, making sure Candis would give us a good breathy cry, before handing her to me.

I was a Mama. Candis is the first granddaughter on my husband's side of the family in nearly 20 years. There are three boys ranging in ages (at this writing) 18 to 4 in between the oldest grandchild, my niece, who is turning 20 this year, and Candis, who just celebrated her first birthday. She is our miracle, and the most desired child on earth. We didn't realize then that Candis Anne was exactly what we needed to help us push through the hardest time in our lives.


My Mom's health started going downhill literally IMMEDIATELY following Candis's birth. The day we were scheduled to bring her home, September 10th, Mama called me and said she couldn't come help us. She had a sinus infection, was running a fever, and had been advised to stay away from Candis for 24 hours after her fever broke. I was devestated. And with the hormones rushing through my system, I melted into a puddle in my hospital bed. I felt alone. Abandoned. But then I looked at Candis and realized I couldn't melt, I had to stay together for her. She needed me. And so I did what I had to do, pulled myself together and faked it till I made it. My father in law met us in the driveway when we got home (he lived next door to us), clapping his hands and laughing. He was so excited to have a new grand to spoil. My mother in law came right over and helped us get over the hump of the first night at home.

Mom's fever broke shortly after she called me in the hospital and so by 2 the next afternoon, she was at our house. She came religiously every single day for 3 weeks, helping me become accustomed to being a mother, showing me the things I needed to know, helping me keep my house clean and running so that I could focus intensely on my new tiny human.


At the end of the third week she said "youre on your own" and left us to it. So there we were, the three of us, a family. Our OWN family. We were blissful.

We had three weeks of normality. Three weeks where we felt like things were just as perfect as they could be. At my 6 week checkup my doctor suggested that we all get our flu shots. I was due to have the chickenpox booster and so when I went to get my shots they couldn't give me the flu shot. But my Mom went ahead and took her flu shot at CVS later that afternoon. And we just assumed everything was fine.

It was the morning of October 24th, 2016 that my world changed entirely.

It was 7am, on the dot. I was awake, laying in the bed, nursing the baby, and my phone rang. When I saw it was my Mom, my heart jumped up in my throat. We have an unspoken rule between us. Unless its an emergency, we text. A call means an emergency. "Oh god." I said to Aaron. He instantly sat up in the bed and listened.

"I need you all to come take me to the hospital." She'd been dealing with some strange symptoms over the weekend that were only getting worse. She had been reading online about what her symptoms could possibly be, and she was afraid that she might have Guillain Barre Syndrome (pronunciation: Ghee-On Bar-aye). I knew nothing about the syndrome, but I knew that I'd heard it mentioned on TV as something that requires immediate medical attention. Aaron took the day off work so that he could come with me to help take care of the baby, because in the midst of the "I need to go to the hospital" conversation we had the "who's going to watch the baby" argument. My Father in Law was out of town, my sisters in law were working and my mother in law works third shift and wasn't even home yet. I told her to just zip it, that there was no one to watch her, that I'd put her in the stroller, cover her up and she'd be fine.


After hours and hours in the emergency room, my Mom was admitted to the hospital with Guillain Barre Syndrome. GBS is a very tricky disease that is hard to diagnose. It is an elimination diagnosis, meaning they test for everything else before they can say, yep, it's Guillain Barre. I'll link to some pages regarding GBS so that you can read at your own leisure, but the jist of it is it causes the nerves to attack themselves and shut down, paralyzing the patient, stopping their breathing and their heart if not treated right away. Catching it early is imperative to a good recovery. Everyone assured us that we had found it early and applauded my Mama for knowing her body well enough to know that something wasn't right.


I'll continue with the story in my next post. This one has been long enough. I hope everyone is having a good day today, and remembering that in the deepest of the valley days, you can still CHOOSE JOY!