blogger absence

I heart you Banana

It's funny all growing up I was afraid of getting hurt. I was afraid of physical pain, now I couldn't care less about it, really it doesn't even bother me. There are so many things in life worse than pain and usually I think of pain as a good thing. If you can feel it, you can probably fix it, it's your body's way of telling you something is a little off. It is like the rain in the Pacific Northwest, when you live here long enough, you start to not notice it. There are other things that I do fear now. The biggest one is a STROKE.

Lately I have been struggling with some bloody stuff. I hate to blog about health stuff but here is just one reason for my absence. I have been worried about my blood. My blood has to be the perfect level of thick and thin, if it is too thick it forms a clot in my metal heart valve and the clot can either go to my brain and cause a stroke or to my lungs and cause a pulmonary embolism (a clot to the lungs) which stops my breathing.

If my blood is too thin than I can have internal bleeding somewhere and I am actually not sure how they find it besides cut me open. Do you see why pain doesn't really scare me now?

For the past year I have been managing my own blood thinness with a home tester and I would occasionally check in with my Cardiologist office. I was feeling pretty confident, like "I got this, I know my body, I'm awesome, don't call me cardiologist", but lately my blood is like PUDDING! Sorry I hope that doesn't ruin pudding for any of you. I have been taking a lot of my blood thinners and my blood still won't thin-out! Today I had to humble myself and call my cardiologist and ask them to help me. Every day I pray that I won't have a stroke, and that my valve won't form a clot and that if it does please let it not happen in the car in front of the kids. Every night I listen to the ticking of my valve and listen very closely to see if I can hear anything like it slowing down or it getting stuck, I wake up in the night and make sure I can move both sides of my body. This gets really fun when I have a migraine headache, because migraine headaches mimic stroke symptoms, confusion, numbness, blind spots, pounding headaches. Again, I pray for the ability to discern the difference between the two. So that is the fun stuff that is going on with me. Just one of the reasons for my blog hiatis, I hate talking about it because it sounds so melodramatic and I am sure that in a week or so I'll have my blood all thinned out with the help of the good people at Columbia Cardiology.

But, on a much lighter note, I got a new pair of jeans online at Banana Republic.com and I LOVE them! They don't ride too low, they are not too short, they retail for $140 and I got them for $40. Yea ME! Yea Internet shopping at 1am when you can't sleep.