I haven’t published anything since April of this year. April? April. Which, basically means, I haven’t been writing. What have I been doing? Well…really, running after two toddlers. 🙂 It’s a fun life. It’s a mom life. It’s my life as it is right now.

It’s been a weird year. A weird, weird year. And it isn’t over yet, so who knows what’s coming down the line in the next couple of months. 2025, are we done yet?

I told my husband, and some friends, that I feel like right now I’m living a nightmare of random arbitrary dates that don’t mean anything. Let me recap.

January of this year I went to get a colonoscopy. A routine colonoscopy screening because I turned 45 last year and that’s what you do. So I booked it for January 27th. I wasn’t looking forward to it and I had had a colonoscopy in 2014, so I knew what to expect, but I just wanted to get it over with and move on with life. There I am, in the hospital bed, ready to be wheeled into the procedure room when the doctor comes in a tells me that my (Required) pregnancy test came back positive. Uh, what??

Uh, what?? So they did a blood test just to confirm. Yep, it also came back positive. Uh, what? I’m pregnant? Come again? After being married for 8 years and having struggled with infertility all of those years, having adopted our twin boys ten months earlier…I’m now pregnant…at 45?

So, no colonoscopy that day. My husband and I went home in a daze and later that day I booked an ultrasound for about six weeks out.

Long story, and more than enough doctors appointments later, I had a miscarriage on March 19th. I did it naturally, starting at home, but ended up going to the Women’s Evaluation Unit at the hospital because I was in so much pain and needed medical intervention.

I found out I was pregnant staring at a hospital ceiling and lost my baby staring at a hospital ceiling.

The miscarriage started a round of weekly blood draws for about six weeks just to make sure my HCG levels were going down appropriately. This took me until about the beginning of May.

Towards the beginning of May we had a virtual ‘case management’ meeting with our adoption attorney, the judge on our adoption case and the two attorneys for the birth father. Our adoption of the twins has had some hiccups and we’ve been in a very long process of trying to bring things to finalization. During the meeting we decided on a date of Sept. 5th as an all-day trial and hearing for our case. I wasn’t too happy about having to wait all summer, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.

At the end of May (May 27th, to be exact) my husband, I and our two babies were taking a walk one evening, which is our normal and routine thing to do in the evening and on weekends. We were walking in our urban neighborhood and were about six blocks away from our house. My husband was pushing the twins in their stroller and were a little bit ahead of me. All of a sudden we heard dogs barking from inside a house and before we knew what was happening three big dogs came rushing out of said house, broke through their front gate and came running at us full speed, barking the whole time. One of the dogs charged me and as I put up my arm to protect my face the dog bit my arm (Read: Clamped down on my forearm with his very strong jaws). I was on the sidewalk, backed up against a parked car. Thankfully the dog just bit and let go (Rather than biting and dragging, or biting and holding on or biting and tearing) and by that time one of the owners had come out of the house and was able to corral the dogs and get them back inside.

I was in a state of shock. I stood there, holding my arm up, almost hypervenilating. I couldn’t talk. I saw blood trickle down the back of my forearm, felt my arm start to swell. The owner of the dogs came out of the house, grabbed my good arm, and propelled me across the street to her neighbor’s house, where she yelled for her to bring some iodine and a bandage. The neighbor did and doused my arm with the idoine and they wrapped a make shift bandage around my arm. I still couldn’t talk. Adam and the babies had followed me across the street. I sat on the neighbor’s front steps, holding my arm up, watching it swell, and gritting my teeth against the pain. The babies were in the stroller with me in the yard while Adam ran home, calling Urgent Care and our own neighbors, on the way. While we waited for Adam to come back with our car, the dog owner kept apologizing profusely to me and ended up giving me her name and number and told me that she would pay all my medical bills.

Adam came back with our car to get me and the babies, we dropped the babies off at our neighbor’s and he drove me to Urgent Care, where I was treated. How many times this year have I stared at the ceiling of a medical facility? The medical technicians washed the bite, gave me morphine (Pointless), gave me a tetnus shot and put me on a 10 day round of 875 mg of amoxicillin with 25 mg of clavulanic acid.

Thankfully, the dog bite was just two, fairly clean, pucture wounds, one on the top of my left forearm, the other on the bottom of the same forearm. They were deep, but didn’t get the muscle. The one on bottom took about two weeks to heal, and still, even now, my arm will be sore if it’s pushed on the wrong way (Which happens more often than you think; I have toddlers). It took me about five full days after the dog bite for my brain to realize that I survived being attacked by dogs and that I was still alive. I told Adam that and he said, ‘That’s the trauma part’. And it’s true. Even now, four months later, I have residual trauma when I go for walks in our neighborhood and see dogs (Even with owners, even on a leash).

With a surprise pregnancy, subsequent miscarriage and a traumatizing dog bite on the record for this year, come Summer I felt a little on edge and also flat out exhaused — emotionally, physically and mentally. Adam and I were able to go on a short trip to Cancun for four days (While my in-laws watched the twins), to try and relax. It was a nice trip; I didn’t have to cook or listen to fussy toddlers for three whole days (I love you, D & B). I literally just laid on a beach and did Absolutely Nothing.

Less than a week after coming back from our vacation I woke up not feeling the greatest. I pushed through the day. My tummy hurt. About 5 o’clock on July 16th I had the babies in the kitchen in their little booster seats eating dinner and I took a pillow and a blanket and laid on the kitchen floor, curled up, watching them eat. I had told Adam I didn’t feel the greatest and he came home early and when he did I went to bed, until getting sick, sick, sick that night. The next day I laid in bed all day. I thought it was just a 24 hour stomach bug, but I had a Really Hard Time recovering. Five days later my stomach still felt nauseous. I could eat hardly anything, just tried to drink lots of fluids. I pushed through several more days of not feeling quite right and finally went to urgent care (Again?!). They diagnosed me with traveler’s diarrhea and gave me a three day round of antibiotic.

Whether I actually had traveler’s diarrhea from being on vacation or not I don’t know, but the antibiotic seemed to help and was the turning point in feeling better. I had eaten almost nothing for two weeks and even when I started to recover it took me another two or so weeks for my tummy to regulate back to digesting food properly. I had rescheduled my routine colonoscopy for mid-August (Because that still needed to happen) and when the nurse weighed me before the procedure I was 120 lbs. I thought their scale was off. Normally I’m about 130 – 135 lbs, so I knew their scale wasn’t correct. The next day realized that I probably was 120 lbs because I hadn’t eaten anything in almost a month, not to mention colonoscopy prep work. *face palm* Oh.

Over the summer I had scheduled the babies to have a chordee repair and circumscision surgery on August 26th. This was done after their 15 month pediatrician appointment in May and after finding out that the twins Medicaid had been stopped (No one told us this at their pediatrician appointment. Huh?). I was able to get the babies back on Medicaid and then schedule their surgery. We wanted their surgery done with before our Sept 5th court date.

While I was still recovering from my tummy thing the babies got an extremely mild case of Hand, Foot and Mouth. We made a pointless trip to the ER because one of the twins had some shallow, rapid breathing and a low grade fever so the nurse at the pediatrician office told me to go to the ER. They did absolutely nothing for him at the ER other than give him some Tylenol (Which I could have done at home and had, in fact, already done), some Magic Mouthwash for the sores in his mouth and a popsicle. A popsicle?? *eye roll* Of course, the second twin benefitted from a popsicle as well because he was along for the ride.

The ER visit happened about ten days before they were scheduled to have their chordee repair surgery. When I had scheduled the surgery back in July the lady I talked to said I would be getting a lot of phone calls the week before the surgery to tell me what to do to get the twins prepped for their procedure. The week leading up to their surgery I didn’t receive any calls, which I thought was a little odd, but knew someone would definitely be calling me the day before the surgery to tell us when to arrive. The morning before their procedure arrived and no one had called me. SO…around noon that day I called the surgery scheduler to make sure that they were still on the books for the next day. Had I gotten the date wrong?

Oh, no, I hadn’t gotten the date wrong…the surgery had been cancelled…AND NO ONE TOLD ME.

NO ONE TOLD ME.

NO.

ONE.

TOLD.

ME.

I was beyond furious.

Why? Why was it cancelled? Uh…because the babies had Hand, Foot and Mouth and we went to the ER (For literally no reason).

But BECAUSE the nurse at the ER diagnosed both babies with HFM she emailed their surgery scheduler to have their surgery cancelled — WITHOUT SAYING ANYTHING TO ME.

NOTHING. Not a word.

And the surgery scheduler didn’t tell me either. I asked her, ‘Was someone supposed to tell me it was cancelled?’

Her response? ‘Oh, I was. I’m sorry about that’.

That’s it? That’s all the apology I’m going to receive??? She didn’t even sound apologetic. I practically threw my phone and screamed after hanging up.

As you may be able to tell, I’m still a little miffed.

Is it common procedure to NOT tell the parents that their child’s surgery has been cancelled?? (Or to not tell parents that their child’s Medicaid had been cancelled??)

It’s not 2020 anymore, people.

The scheduler was trying to get the babies back on the schedule for the next day, but wasn’t able to get around the ER’s diagnosis. So, we rescheduled for the beginning of October. I put the new date on my calendar with question marks after it.

Around the same time I found out the babies surgery had been cancelled, we got a notice from our adoption attorney saying that the birth father’s lawyer had made a motion to continue the case; to push back our Sept 5th hearing to a later date. We found out the day after Labor Day (Sept 2nd) that the lawyer’s motion had been granted.

We waited all summer for our Sept 5th trial to come…and it didn’t happen.

So now we have a new court date towards the end of November.

I put it on my calendar with a lot of question marks after it.

Maybe I’m learning that dates really don’t mean anything. Maybe there are just moments in life.

Or maybe I just feel like I’m living a nightmare of random, arbitrary dates that don’t mean ANYTHING.

Now, sitting here on the last day of September, I’m thinking: If this year had gone differently I would be thirty-eight weeks pregnant and about to have a baby in two weeks. The twins surgery and our court date would have happened already.

And the dog bite? My sickness? HFM?

Well, some things just happen.