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!