Oh the Wonders of Anesthesia!

My husband, who shall remain nameless, but whose initials are Rick Crosby, had surgery on his old, decrepit knee on Tuesday this week. He’s been wearing a knee brace to play hockey for eight or nine years, ever since a catastrophic skiing day with our family in Canada. Finally two weeks ago, he completely tore his ACL and limped even with the brace on until this week.  Now he snores on the couch while his polar pack keeps his elevated knee nice and chilly.

The night after surgery is ALWAYS entertaining with this man. I should know. This is surgery #5 for us. Our children found his erratic comments highly entertaining and I scribbled them down as fast as I could so we could read them to him in the morning…. AND for your reading pleasure today. Here you go!

(He is wearing a full-leg support stocking on the non-hurt leg.) “Why is my white leotard dirty? Lin, how come it’s dirty?” I explained that he kneeled on the floor in the van to get his heavily medicated self into the vehicle for the ride home. “Well that carpet in the van is FILTHY!” (Not really.) I told him that we have another one that is clean for him to put on later. “Oh! I have two pair. Is it two pair or two pairs? Two pair. Two pairs. Do you know, Lin?” (He only has one pair.)

(To our two teenage boys) “What did you guys do today? … I had surgery!” (No duh!)

I asked Rick if he needed some pillows to prop himself up. “Yeah, some pillows or a hockey bag.” (How comfortable!)

“Lin, are you getting my pain pills at CSV?” (It’s called CVS.)

“Can I have some more pizza?” I explained that he couldn’t because he was supposed to take eating slowly after surgery. “I am going slow! It took me forever to eat those two pieces!”

(While I’m at the store….) “Nora, just bring me a piece of pizza and I will pay you a dollar. Your mom’s gone. She won’t know.” (Nice!)

(We were having a party dinner for Nora because it was her Gotcha Day, four years since she joined our family.) “How come everything is purple?”

(Nora started opening her gifts.) “What is taking her so long?” (It had been eight seconds.) “Someone help her!… Keeve, help your sister!… Is she almost done opening her birthday presents?”

(Nora opened a purple headband.) “Is that a halter top?” (Oh my!)

I wanted to take a picture of Nora and her Daddy for Gotcha Day. When I finished, Rick asked, “Who else wants to get their picture taken with me?” Both boys said, “No, I’m good!” Rick yelled, “Keeve get over here!” So we have pictures of the boys both laughing so hard as they get their pictures taken with him.

“I’m really hungry. I haven’t eaten for 20 hours.” I reminded him of the two pieces of pizza he just ate and told him to drink his water. “I will! Holy smokes, this straw is HUGE!”

“Hey…. um… are the Oilers playing tonight?” (Edmonton Oilers, his favorite hockey team.) Austin replied sarcastically, “Yes, and the score is two to three and Gretzky just scored!” (Gretzky hasn’t played on the Oilers since the early 90s.) “The Oilers SUCK this year!” (He would NEVER say this, even though it’s true.)

I suggested that Nora go share a purple Tic-Tac with her father. “Yeah, I won’t choke. I’m good!” (Sure you are, honey!)

“What day is it?” Tuesday. “It’s cheap night at the theaters!” (You’re not going anywhere, Superman.)

“What year is it?” Austin, again, sarcastically answers, 1987. “Hey, that’s the year I got married.” Then he looked around at the three kids with this confused look on his face and said, “I must have had insta-kids!”

Our daughter called from Oklahoma to enjoy the festivities surrounding anesthesia. Her father explained all about Lady Mary Crawley from Downton Abbey and how she is the tall one with dark hair who is grieving because her husband died. (WOW!)

Then our daughter’s boyfriend got on the phone and Rick asked when he is coming to visit. He replied December 26th. “Oh! Boxing Day! That’s the day before wrestling day, but you’re not supposed to do that until you’re married!” (What in the world???? I apologize on his behalf, John.)

And the entire night he kept asking, “WHAT is so funny?”  You are, dear. You just can’t make this stuff up!

Three Years Ago Tonight…

We were a family of six, yet the sixth little wonder was 12 hours away from being in our arms!  We landed late at night to the cool, dark skies of Cali, Colombia and met our “already” friend and our translator.  What a blessed relief her welcome hug was to me that night when we got off our third airplane and stepped onto our daughter’s homeland soil.

We broke a few rules with our adoption.  I presume the three year statute of limitations is up and I can freely discuss a few happenstances from our adoption journey that have remained semi-covert until now.

We weren’t supposed to have any contact with our interpreter until we got “in country”, but we needed questions answered ASAP.  It was a Friday night when we accepted the referral and we were to fly out the following Wednesday, so the flights needed to be booked pronto.  I also had 27 million questions.  No one at the agency was available to answer our “last weekend” questions, so I called a gal across the country who had returned from Cali with her little angel a few months earlier.  She put me in contact via facebook with the lady who would be our interpreter.  She was a godsend, for sure!  She helped us with flights. She booked our hotel/apartment for our first few days.  She gave us a list of what to take/what not to take.  And then her smiling face met us at the airport near midnight.

We weren’t supposed to go visit the village where Nora was born.  We were told that this could cause bad memories or frighten the child.  As far as we could tell from the gargantuan paperwork pile, Nora had not lived in that village since she was a baby.  We had the name of the hospital and thanks to adoption blogs, I learned that we could take our final adoption papers to the hospital and ask for records.  So we did.  LaCumbre was an hour away up in the misty Andes Mountains.  The hospital was clean and shiny and had an open air courtyard in the center of the building.  Hanging plants and freshly painted blue trim did my heart good.  We requested a copy of the record from the day Nora was born and were blessed beyond measure to get information about her birth mama (health history, height, weight, medical history, etc.) AND we discovered that Nora’s birth weight was incorrect on our paperwork!  We also found out what time Nora was born and how long she was.  I couldn’t be more grateful for those little tidbits of information that are worth their weight in GOLD to an adopted child.

We were supposed to stay in one of the adoption hotels recommended by the agency.  We contacted three of them and the going rate for a family of six was $330 per night… and we were staying for three weeks. ($6930!) Now we are thrift-loving souls and frankly didn’t have that much to spend on accommodations/food.  The night before we left, my husband found a vacation villa a few miles out of town in the country in a gated community with a pool and a line of shops to meet all of our needs…. for $1,000 for the three weeks!  Thank you, God!  There were four bedrooms, two full baths, air-conditioning, a washing machine and beautiful surroundings.  We hired a wonderful woman to cook and clean for us every other day…. she also went shopping with me and picked lice out of our hair.  She was a saint!

We weren’t supposed to have any contact with the foster family who took care of Nora. We were told they might try to take advantage of us and our situation in the USA.  Unbeknownst to us, Nora came bearing a little heart-shaped notebook minus all the pages that used to be inside. I thought it a bit strange until she pulled out the back lining and revealed all the contact info for the foster family.  We had Nora call them and say one last goodbye the night before we left for Bogota.  We have since been in contact and they sent pictures of their home, Nora’s bed, the family, her friends, the school, the church and the neighborhood where she lived.  Another blessing to an adopted child!  We send them current pictures of Nora and have chatted with them online a few times.  They are very thankful for this contact as she is the only child they have fostered who they have heard from.

Usually I stick to rules like a fly to flypaper, but sometimes there are very good reasons to break a few rules.

16 Years Ago Tonight…

Sixteen years and two days ago, I went to the hospital to have a baby.  But the baby, despite his gargantuan size, was feeling quite cozy and decided not to come out yet.  So, with the IV still in my hand, I was sent home for a “good night’s sleep”…. whatever.  I felt like I had swallowed a watermelon… I was measuring 43 cm across the giant mound.  It was TIME!  It was actually nine days PAST the due date, but my four children NEVER paid attention to due dates.

Ironically, it was the Canada Cup hockey game that night….. and it was playing on the TV in the hospital.  And my husband was enthralled in watching the grown men on thin blades of steel, balancing on slippery ice, using weapons to hit a rubber puck at the net. Thankfully, my friend Barbie had come to visit me on the supposed night of my birthing… and gave me a ride home…. with the IV still in my hand…. for my “good night’s sleep.”

We went back to the hospital on September 13th, in hopes of delivering a child.  We never found out the sex of our children until we could see proof with our own eyeballs.  So, we were unaware that it was our first SON…. and unaware that he had the largest head ever to travel through a birthing canal.  The memory still makes me wince and sit delicately on my chair.  After much pushing and pulling and prodding and probing, Austin was born at the stroke of midnight.  The doctor asked us if we wanted his birthday to be Friday the 13th, or Sept. 14th…. that is how I heard it anyway… and we chose the 14th.  For 16 years, September 13th has held a special place in my heart as the day I almost had a son.

He looked like a hockey player who had recently lost a fight at the blue line, due to some of the prodding and probing… but we loved  him anyway.  Looking back, this was the first of four or five times the skin would be missing on his face.  It should have been a red flag for me as his mother, but no.

Tomorrow Austin turns 16…. but it could have been today.  Oh, the power in the hands of a mother on the birthing table.

Happy Birthday, son.  You have shown yourself worthy of being a fighter to overcome insurmountable odds… from the very beginning.  I’m so proud of the man you are becoming.  My buttons are bursting, almost as badly as September 13th, sixteen years ago!

With Friends like this…..

 

In times of trouble, who could ask for better friends than these?  As far as tough times go, these photos are from one of the toughest times in our marriage…. when my hubby separated his Achilles Tendon and had 3 or 4 surgeries (see, I’ve already blocked the details…)  The picture on the left is of our friends, Andrew Edwin and Jill Rene, who loving brought my convalescing husband his favorite dessert (black forest cake), a stack of movies for his week of confinement on the couch and they fully bandaged and wrapped themselves in sympathy.  Yes, Andy’s eye is taped shut and Jill is sporting a wrist brace.  Such thoughtful people.  As if Rick’s wound sucking machine attached to his leg would be less noticeable with these two around.

And Darla.  Little did she know the detour her day would take with one simple phone call to my house.  I’ll give you the brief rundown of the morning.  I awoke to find that the washing machine had died.  Kaput. Do not resuscitate.  DEAD. The kids slept over and Grandma and Grandpa’s house because Rick had surgery #3 early that morning.  Surgery went reasonably well, except for the entertaining hallucinations Rick experienced coming out of the anesthesia.  He insisted that someone stole his shoes, his wallet and his clothes.  He repeatedly asked in a LOUD voice for beer in the wake-up room (he doesn’t drink beer!?!) I was WAY too uncomfortable to bring him home in that state, so we hung out for a while until my real husband partially returned.  We did make it home, but only to discover that Grandma had nearly passed out at her house and my kids had to call 911 to get the paramedics.  They were in the emergency waiting room by themselves.  I couldn’t leave my newly discovered boozer alone, so I called my brother to gather my children from the hospital. 

Then the downstairs toilet, which my drugged husband would require, backed up all over my tile floors.  Disgusting.  Called the plumber.  Called the home builder.  Called the plumber again.  THEN, my Dad, who was at the hospital with mom, decided to walk across the street to grab a bite to eat and GOT HIT BY A CAR.  Good grief.  He was banged-up but ok.  He had Mom’s emergency room doctor check him out since it was so handy.

Enter: Darla’s phone call to see how surgery went.  I lost it.  I’m not sure which incident was the straw that broke the camel’s back…. the washer…. the start of a week of nursing my husband who had a gaping leg wound…. my mother needing an ambulance ride…. my children having to take care of their passing-out Grandma… the toilet… the kids being left unattended in the hospital…. my dad getting hit by a car….   So within the hour Darla arrived to clean my stinky tile floors wearing this attractive outfit.  “It sounded like you needed comic relief,” she professed. So true.

I love these friends.  Everyone needs friends like these.  Thanks guys.