The Plan

Someone had a plan for me today. I called the doctor around noon to schedule an appointment for my arm/shoulder since the pain was constant and unbearable. As I was speaking to the receptionist, I took a few minutes to discuss options for changing who my primary doctor was within the practice (note to anyone: If your main doctor constantly treats you like you're a waste of time and space, find someone else). After deciding on a doctor, we started looking at scheduling again. The receptionist says, "We JUST got a cancellation for 3pm. Do you want it?". YES! If I hadn't taken a few minutes to decide on a new doctor, I would have already gotten scheduled for sometime next week and missed this last minute opening.

So off I went with kids in tow (the downside of a last minute appointment is that last minute babysitters are almost non-existent). However. Aiden was excited to see what the doctor was going to do with my arm. The doctor looked, and felt, and discussed, and put in a request for insurance approval for an MRI. That will hopefully be scheduled for Monday so we can find out if there's a tear or not. Once she did that, she said she wanted me to do six weeks of physical therapy, starting out with just pain management. I was sent downstairs to the physical therapy and rehabilitation office to get scheduled. They were booked out for two weeks. Not ideal, but what can you do? As we were scheduling me for two weeks out, someone called and canceled their appointment that was scheduled to start in 15 minutes. Guess who got a surprise hour-long physical therapy session?

Yes, I had the boys in with me but the therapist dug up some crayons and coloring pages so they were occupied. It was nice to get massaged a little around my shoulder, but we soon figured out that those muscles are massively irritated from my injury. Plus, she had to test my range of motion, which is around 35% right now. My shoulder is not pleased. I know it will help in the long run, but I did not expect to be in so much pain   from a pain management appointment. As I was leaving, the receptionist was printing out a copy of my scheduled appointments. There was going a two week gap since they had been booked, but can you guess what happened? Someone called and canceled for an evening appointment for the following week. Everything was perfectly lined up!

What a strange day. Hopefully things will work out just as quickly with getting the MRI scheduled. I'm ready to know what's going on with my shoulder and work on getting it healed. And here's hoping that the next pain management therapy appointment isn't quite so.....painful.

Cuffed

UPDATE 3/1: I am headed to the doctor at 3pm because they had a surprise cancellation today and wanted me to take it so I didn't have to wait until tomorrow. Hopefully some imaging will be done and I can get some answers.
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I am three and a half weeks into a rotator cuff injury, which I've been told usually takes around six weeks to heal. It was actually going very well and I was feeling good after the first week of nearly debilitating pain. I was even able to stop wearing my sling. Then, on Monday night, I woke up in the middle of the night with sharp tearing pain shooting through my shoulder and down my entire arm. Ever since then, I am unable to move my arm even the slightest bit without horrible pain. I am back in my sling and plan on giving it another day to hopefully start feeling better before calling the doctor. Obviously I'd prefer that it just heals like it's supposed to, but if this kind of pain keeps up, we need to make sure that it hasn't turned into a severe tear. I'd really appreciate some prayer and good thoughts for healing.

Meow

If you happen to be following along with me at my Simplicity blog, you know that we're slowly but surely working on changing our way of life. Eliminating/modifying the things that cause us stress and learning to have less in order to live full lives with as little distraction as possible.

Well, part of eliminating stresses in our life was changing our pet situation. We started small and passed on the guinea pigs to a family with four girls who really wanted to add more guinea pigs to their family. Sometimes we miss hearing the little "wheet!" sounds whenever we walk into the garage, but we eliminated a $30 per month cost and I don't have to worry about having a cage cleaning on my weekly housecleaning schedule. Aiden was too small to clean out the cage and I was losing my desire to tend to the pigs. When it came down to it, they were causing more stress than joy. Per an agreement that we had made with Aiden months ago, we did get a betta fish after getting rid of the guinea pigs. The cost is almost non-existent and Aiden is able to clean out the fish tank with a little help from me. We have a story about our fish, but I'll put that in another post.

The next step was to address the stress that the cats were causing. No matter how often we cleaned, our laundry room was being coated with cat litter, Izzy knocked over the water bowl at least once per day, the carpet was being ripped to pieces, one of the cats (we never figured out which one) was urinating all over bath mats and under the boys' bunk beds. I was being awoken at least six times per night by the cats attempting to tear up the carpet. Obviously, things were NOT ok. However, we love our cats (although I was beginning to hate them), so we didn't want to just get rid of them. We decided to transition them outside. After a couple of successful days of putting them out on the back deck for a few hours, we decided it was time to make the big move. We moved all of their cat belongings to a corner of the garage and set up a bed area for them. We took a tip from our cat lady neighbor and left our garage door open a bit at the bottom so the cats could go in and out when they needed. (I might add that I attempted to put the cats out by myself earlier in the week and had my torso ripped to shreds by Izzy - I am healing nicely and it doesn't appear that anything will scar)

So this weekend was the weekend it was going to happen! And it did happen. Izzy attempted to bite one of John's fingers off in the process. I'm not joking - you should have heard the sound she made and then she purposely went for his hand. She bit down to the bone and John's finger is swollen, but we don't think it needs medical attention. After about eight hours, all three cats were outside. Unfortunately for the cats, John and I neglected to check the weather report and it was 26 degrees last night. We hoped that they would cuddle up together in their bed area in the garage and slowly get over their anger at us. It's been a little over twelve hours now and all three cats seem to be missing. I put some cat food outside for them and I'm hoping that they're just mad and will come around when they get hungry. I highly doubt they would have went wandering off on their first night, so they're probably just hiding in a bush. Needless to say, we'll all be very sad if all three of them disappear forever. We didn't want them gone; we just needed space. But we knew this was a risk and we've been debating the risk since last September. It wasn't an easy decision, but we felt that we made the right one.

Hopefully I'll have good news to report regarding the cats in a few days.

Tidbits

There's been so much going on around here, it's just nuts. We've had cold after cold, a long bout with pink eye, and I'm nursing an injured rotator cuff. The rotator cuff is slowly getting better, but I'm doing a terrible job at being consistent with wearing my sling, so it's taking a little longer than expected and really limiting what I can do.  Aiden brought pink eye home from school and that sucker did NOT want to go away. We all had it, although the boys had really bad cases. It is not fun to have to put warm washcloths on your kids eyes multiple times per night because their eyes are glued shut.

I'm just over halfway done with my first term and today I registered for the spring term, which includes taking my first library course! I'm so very excited and had to refrain myself from signing up for two library courses. That would have made three classes for the term (I'm also registered for my next math course) and I just don't think I'm able to make more than two classes work quite yet. It also looks like I'll be attempting a ballet class once per week after spring break, provided my shoulder can heal and I don't screw up any other part of my body in the meantime.

Aiden completed five weeks of karate and has decided that he'd like to try something else. We're fine with that. As long as he's doing some extracurricular activity, we don't mind signing him up for different things every few weeks. It looks like he'll be taking a recreational bowling class next! He's also registered for a week-long science and invention camp in June through the US Patent Office.

Nathan finished his dance class and did regularly participate despite just standing in one spot for his first class. He has requested to take piano lessons next.

There's much more to say, but I'll cover it all in separate posts.