Christmas surprises

So the big surprise is that I bought Tim a brand new 2010 four-door Ford
pick-up truck with all the bells and whistles. At around 11:00 yesterday morning, after
my family had arrived for our Christmas brunch, I brought everyone outside and called
one of my brothers-in-law on his cell phone and down the street he came with my niece
and nephew in the truck with a bow on the grill and balloons flying. It was magic. I turned
to Tim and said "Merry Christmas, nobody deserves this more than you." He actually
teared up for a few seconds. He was blown away. He was so stunned that he was speechless.
I had his parents there to see this too and everyone was so happy for him. After some cold
sweats I had in the last 2 and a half weeks hoping I would get everything right and that he
would not be disappointed that he didn't pick it out himself, I am very relieved now because
he LOVES it. Unfortunately it is raining and downright nasty today and he so wanted to
go out and play with it. We plan to go spend a few days up in the Berkshires in Massachusetts
now so it will be great fun to drive our new rig there tomorrow. I hate to even include this with this happy post but right out of the "there's one in every crowd" file, his sister-in-law showed
up with his brother and their kids last night for dessert at his parents' house, where we have
dinner every year. She was in a nasty mood and out of her incredible selfishness and jealousy
decided to walk in the door and level a personal insult right at us(namely me) about the truck. I guess the little wench just could not stand the fact that Tim and I have no problem affording a new rig(not that it does not require some careful thought) and have supported ourselves our whole lives without help while she has had to rely on several sets of parents and grandparents to put a roof over her head, support them and even put diapers on her kids butts for years while she was getting manicures, hairdos, and spending everything her husband made and more on jewelry, clothes, new cars and decorating the house she could not afford. Her poor mother had to move into their moldy basement and pay them rent to live there so they didn't lose their house. After the callous remark, I shot a comment
and a look to her and had to walk into the other room to keep from knocking her unconscious
and if you think I am exaggerating there, you'd be wrong. We already could not stand this
jerk but now after crapping on our special day, she is dead to us. I want nothing to do with
this witch as long as I live. The fact that she could not let us have this little bit of happiness
after all that we have been through is just unforgiveable. It's a darn shame that her children
have grown up immersed in their mother's selfishness, narcissism and two-faced, back-stabbing
personality. I truly feel bad for them. We do not have room in our lives anymore for someone like that. Once again, she was the "turd in the punchbowl" of our family celebration yesterday. To end
on a happy note(well kinda), there are lessons to be learned in all our hard times. Somehow, something good will come
of this I'm sure. However, just to be sure there is some justice in this harsh world we live in, I must now find a bumper sticker for my husband's new truck that says, "Warning: we don't brake for selfish, immature b------ who don't know when to keep their obnoxious pie-holes shut." So here's to you Lee Ann, hope Santa's sending you that coal enema for Christmas next year!!! Nobody deserves it more than you. I probably should point out again that I have never
given this blog site info to more than a few of my friends and though I wouldn't mind for my EX sister-in-law to read this, I have told her before in no uncertain terms what I think of her anyway.
ON TO NEW YEAR'S!!!! Yahooo!!! KEEP ON TRUCKIN' !

Curse of the snowblower

If there is one person in the world I DO NOT want to be tomorrow, it is the first person
my husband encounters at the small engine repair shop in the morning. 2 years ago, not long after Tim's
transplant, he took our $1200.00 snow blower out to clean our large driveway in a storm
and after 15 feet, we heard a loud bang and she seized up. Apparently, she threw a rod right through the block. Tim just shook his head and put
it back in the garage where it leaked oil all over the floor and a-shovelling we did go both
at our house as well as the extra large driveway at our rental around the block. I begged him
that summer to fix it before the next winter because he tends to procrastinate. True to form,
he did not listen to me and a-shovelling we did go all last winter when it snowed. This year he took
it in and the guy talked him into a rebuilt motor instead of new. He picked it up and even though something runs OK when you start it, you never know how it will do with snow. We woke
up to about 8 inches of the white stuff today and the blower would not stay running and then the
motor blew up. Unbelievable. So tomorrow Tim is going back to the shop and telling the dude
he wants his 300 clams back and despite this stupid machine being(or supposed to be) the best
you can buy, we are buying a brandy new one in a different brand. I love snow but with our bad
backs and all this darn driveway space, I really dread the big storms. 2 or 3 inches would have been fine. More later on why it just CAN'T snow this Christmas. It's already showing a possibility on the weather channel and I may lose a lot of sleep this week over that. Major thanks to brother-in-law #1 today for coming over with his monster plow and helping us out.

This made me smile today

I went to our MM support group meeting today. Afterward, I spent an hour talking to a man that I met
some months ago not long after his diagnosis. I have not seen him since then. He had an auto
transplant in the interim. Our lives are on very similar paths. Our daughters are the same age.
Both his wife and myself bought a real estate investment right before our husbands were diagnosed. He was diagnosed during a bout with sepsis, I think, as was Tim though this man's was a much more frightening experience. But what made me smile was that after telling him
about my X-mas surprise for my husband and talking about living for today, he held up
his car keys which were on a fob and though my eyesight is going, I recognized the Porsche
emblem on the fob. He went out and bought a gorgeous yellow Carrera a few months ago.
A convertable no less.
He bought it used from someone in Seattle I think and did a cross country trek to get it
home with some friends bopping in here and there to do legs of the trip with him.
HOW COOL IS THAT??!!! As we left and I heard that thing purr in the underground garage
of the building, I could not stop thinking about the whole Carpe Diem deal(and missing my old turbo Mustang with the "4 on the floor") It made me sure that
I did the right thing for Tim this Christmas. (If you don't hear from me on this blog again, it means he killed me) Don't worry, I have lined up a lot of witnesses. Not sure that would worry
him at all though. So I'm gonna keep trying to live for today. I worry too much about the future.
Normal I guess and necessary sometimes but ya can't get lost in it. I'm much better at it now than I was 2 years ago. A work in progress. Note to self: buy the sports car.

"I just wanna live while I'm alive" Jon Bon Jovi

misc. ramblings

My thanks for the supportive comments on my last post from my fellow MM wives. We all have those days. Sometimes it's those little losses that get to you. I'm feeling better about it now.

On Tiger Woods: Elin- DO NOT GO BACK TO THAT CREEP GIRL. I can't say I'm surprised
about this news.
This kinda thing is the "dirty little secret" of most sports. I know a woman who was married
to a major league relief pitcher and he walked away from her and their two kids to marry
a stripper he met. There's no salvaging this Woods marriage. How could you ever trust that man again?
I guess she was just a brood mare to him. Make pretty babies and get your lovin' elsewhere.
The same old "Charles and Diana" story. Take the pre-nup deal and kick him to the curb. With
your looks, you could have 50 kids hanging on your legs and men would still be lining up around the block for a date with ya.

On Christmas- I cannot wait till Christmas day. I have done something that is gonna blow Tim's
mind completely!!!!! Will post about it later but gotta keep it on the "down low" till then to try
to pull off the surprise. Nothing like a little craziness to get your spirits up!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS Y'ALL!!!!!!!!!!

Can we talk?

I have spoken several times about personal things in our lives. I guess the great news is that life doesn't stop when you have myeloma and we still deal with a lot of the same issues every other family deals with... plus a whole lot more. On Friday though I had one of those moments that shows you the range of emotions you go through when dealing with MM. This tearjerker moment had to do with fertility. Now, somewhere between the 24 hour nausea and vertigo and the chronic post nasal drip cough induced broken rib of my pregnancy, I decided I would adopt before I ever got pregnant again. Most people told me I would forget how
miserable I was pregnant. They were WRONG. When Tim went for transplant, no one ever mentioned anything about banking sperm, at least I don't recall it. We probably would not have anyway but I don't think we were even told straight out that Tim might become sterile. The most I remember is our transplant coordinator telling us not to rely on his having had a transplant as a birth control method as this is NOT a good idea. Cut to today and I was a week
and a half late for "Aunt Flo". I am NEVER late. Maybe 3 or 4 times in over 30 years. But peri-menopause being what it is, I tried not to panic. I actually started to panic Friday and sent an
e-mail to Tim's doc's head nurse asking about getting Tim tested. If this being late thing is gonna be a habit, I don't want to be panicked every month or spend a fortune on pregnancy tests. She spoke to the doc and then e-mailed back to say that in his opinion,
Tim was almost certainly sterile but we would have to go to an urologist first to have him tested before we could rely on that for birth control. Now here's the thing. For one tenth of a second,
I felt relief that the chances were pretty good that I was not pregnant. For the next two tenths of a second, I was depressed that the chances were that I was not pregnant and then I just broke down
crying as I read the words(crap, I'm crying again now) that my gorgeous hunk of man most
likely cannot father children anymore. I know it sounds crazy but to think that what he went
through was so toxic and drastic that it has rendered him sterile just got to me and I lost it
just a little. As anyone in a similar position will tell you, it's one thing to say or think you do not
want any more kids, it's quite another to be told you CAN'T have any more kids. I talked to Tim
about it and tried to joke a bit and keep it light but the truth is that I'm not sure if it is better to
get the test and be able to stop worrying about birth control or if knowing for certain that he is
sterile will bother him or break my heart even more. And as I kid Tim sometimes, I may not
want to be pregnant again but who knows if his next wife will want to have kids with him.
Tim took the news much better than I did. His first question was if he had to give a semen
sample, was I allowed to come in the room with him? The man's a trooper. Now I guess we both
have to figure out if we really want to know or not. Cancer SUCKS!

Cross country in an RV

Many, MANY moons ago, when I was a kid, my parents bought a 22" Tag-a-Long trailer.
They wanted to travel and show us places outside of our "box" so off we went. As a kid, you
don't appreciate learning about historical sites and such and I can remember that all we wanted to know is if the campground had a pool and a game room. I appreciate now what my parents did
and Tim and I are trying to travel with Olivia too. The most amazing thing though is that they
took us across country in 1977. My father's long time job had gotten too stressful and unfulfilling and he was going to open his own business. He figured before he signed on for that,
the time was right to do the big trip. It was amazing. We saw many of the national parks. We went to Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Sequoia redwood forest, the Grand Canyon, Custer's last stand, Death Valley,San Francisco. WAY too many places to list. My sister and I(same birthday) turned 12 and 8 in Las Vegas. We learned alot about the American indians. Drove on route 66. The radio announcer broke in and told of
Elvis' demise when we were pulling up to the "Cadillac ranch" which was ironic since Elvis loved
caddies. My father worked in the Ford business and we had a 1974 brown country squire(yes with the wood grain decaled sides!) that had a 460 engine in it and my dad had put some high performance parts on that car to haul a trailer better and I tell ya, you have not lived till you've
watched the face of some hotshot in a sporty car get into the wrong lane at a light to cut in front of everyone only to get totally smoked by a station wagon. (Dad was a major hot-rodder in the 50's) Actually, way back then before we had traffic , they used to race across towns on a main drag for miles. One cop that could not catch up with my dad but was obviously a car buff finally found him after a race was over. I don't think he ticketed him, but he did ask him to pop the hood and show him what he'd done to the engine. The good old days! But I digress.
We climbed some mountain out west in that car hauling a trailer and the park ranger at the top stopped us and said he had never seen someone do that successfully before. That car was a brute. Pass anything but a gas station. My sisters and I truly think that this trip was the best thing our parents ever did for us. Imagine 4 girls(scary isn't it), my parents and 2 cats on the road for
2 months in a 22" trailer. It was the time of our lives though. I wish I remembered more of it and
have always dreamed of doing it again and bringing my parents. By the time I was 12, I had travelled up and down the eastern states from Maine to Florida more than once and, at the end of this cross country trek, had been in I believe 42 states of our nation and Canada. We have priceless memories from that trip. Besides the places we saw is the funny things that happened during the loooonnnngggg hours in the car where the boredom of driving through hour after hour of corn fields or dessert was mind-numbing at times. We would make up home-made jokes and sing(heaven help us cause their ain't an on-key set of pipes between us I think). I'll never forget driving through
Death Valley with the A/C off at times so the car wouldn't overheat. Yeah it's a dry heat unless
you are sitting and leaning against a dark brown vinyl interior. I was sitting behind my dad with
the window open and hugging my knees up as I sat so I was touching the least amount of vinyl possible. He hawked a loogy out his window which then whipped back into my window landing on my knee. Ah good times. It was gross but we
laughed ourselves silly over that and still do. I vividly remember driving across the salt flats(in the middle of nowhere) and talking about them. As my dad told us things about them, we wondered what those bubbles were on the ground. We drove along and talked about them, on the way to somewhere as we all are at any moment in the day, and finally I said, "why don't we just get out and see what the bubbles are?" My dad, probably realizing how silly it was to wonder when we could just pull over and truly experience the salt flats, did so and we went out walking on them and popping the air bubbles that form on the crusty surface. It was like walking on a different planet. A memorable "stop and smell the roses" moment. I also have a pretty vivid memory of the day I learned the hard way why you should never eat half a bag of your father's dried prunes at one time. DANG! We stopped to tour an old wild west ghost town and my family dropped me off at the restroom on the way in and picked me up there on the way out. The only "rootin' and tootin'" still happening in that town was in that ladies'room. Darn good thing we were towing a trailer with a bathroom that day too. Travelling was always a part of our lives and I am
SOOOOO grateful for it. To this day, I think the reason my sisters and I get along with and can
talk with anyone is that our parents "introduced" us to people from all walks of life in this whole
country. I may have taken this for granted at the time but not for long. When I went back to school, I had a science teacher who was teaching us about the hot springs, mud pots, and geysers of out west. I kept raising my hand to add facts to what he was teaching. What the mud pots smelled like(horrible, like rotten eggs, we held our shirts up over our noses the whole time),
things about the hot springs and such. The teacher stopped and said to me, "how do you know
all this stuff?" and I said, "we just spent the whole summer going across country and we went to all these places." I will never in my life forget his reaction. He literally was speechless. Even at
my young age, I realized that this man who was much older than me was teaching something out
of a book that he had never and probably would never see and here was this scrawny little kid who'd seen it all firsthand. He was so stunned that his reaction told me right then and there what
a lucky(blessed) little girl I was. So THANKYOU Mom and Dad for showing us the world(or at least as much as I will ever need to see in this lifetime). It was magical. Travel with your kids
people. It makes memories that last. I really am not a materialistic person. But that is where I
spend money. Taking my kid to a show in NYC or travelling to see new places is priceless to me.

The holidays, myeloma style

This year, the holidays pose more of an illness threat than usual. This is a popular time to get
sick for our family as it is what with all the kissing and handshaking at parties and such. The
swine flu has put an extra little wrinkle in things. I did finally manage to get Olivia and Tim the
shots. We actually had to drive into NY state to get Tim's. His doc did not have them and we could not find a place closer that did. Unforunately, I had a reaction to a flu shot 5 years ago
so I cannot get one unless I sit in the doctor's office with epinephrine at the ready and since
our docs don't have them anyway, I can't take the risk of having one done in a CVS and then having a reaction. So I am trying to be careful. I have warned Tim time and again that many MM'ers
do not shake hands and kiss folks when greeting but it's hard to pull back and have to explain
all the time. So I told him that at least with family and close friends, you can explain once and
they'll understand. No dice. The man never listens to me. Heck, I'm his wife and there's times
I avoid kissing him on the lips when there's any chance I've been exposed to something or Olivia
is ill and I may be coming down with it. Our moms and sisters would certainly understand.
It has gotten really hard to entertain now. My Thanksgiving crowd went from 15 to 7 last week. My sis and her
2 year-old were sick and my 18 year old niece was sick too so that made 2 sections of our family
that could not make it. What can ya do? At first I thought it would be great to have all those
left-overs. A step on my bathroom scale this morning has me re-thinking that. Now I have to
decide what to do about this Sat. Our town has a parade and "Home for the Holidays" event
every year and we have a party since our house it at the start of the parade route. I have to
invite folks with the warning that if anyone is sick or has had a live flu vaccine in the past 2
weeks, they can't come. My best friend's 2 girls are having the swine flu mist today and she
either has to postpone or not come. Olivia will be so disappointed. The thought arises too about
whether we should even have this party. Tim hates it when our life is affected by his MM and of
course, if things go smoothly and no one gets sick, we'll be glad we did not cancel it but
I always think to myself, if he gets sick and winds up in the hospital with pneumonia, was it
worth it? Tim has truly been blessed in this area. I read many accounts of MM'ers who get
pneumonia and UTI's repeatedly and it's miserable. We all did get the flu last year and thankfully it did not result in anything too serious but Tim was wiped out for 6 weeks. He
has never had that happen and thank God it was during his slow time at work. I have to make
up my mind soon. Olivia has so many new friends who come from nice families. We have gotten
to know them well and I would love to invite them but between not having a playroom or finished basement for the kids to hang out in and this swine flu deal, I have to refrain from that. I told Liv I would do something at the end of the school year when the weather will be
warm enough for the kids to be in the yard and there will be less illness floating around. Our church has stopped the handshaking and kissing of the "peace be with you" situation as well as the hand holding during the Lord's prayer. I am still in shock that people still drink from the challis though. Others dip their wafers into it. I am not phobic about germs though obviously I am more cautious now but I have to say that I always thought this was nuts. We have a lot of older folks in our church and it amazes me that they would take that kind of risk. I guess they have more faith than I that nothing will happen. I'll stick with my little plastic shot glass. So I
guess that the key is as always, moderation. Have the party but don't go insane with the guest
list. I know that everyone is really careful about not coming around us sick. Nobody wants to be
responsible for passing something to Tim. I always clean and disinfect bathrooms and doorknobs now especially after we have had guests. You know, an "ounce of prevention" and all that. I've already warned Tim that I really don't want a repeat performance of last year's hangover even with the cabinet full of cures we have. It's unbelievable that my hubby could get
through a 4 day drip of CDEP, a stem cell transplant, Velcade and Revlimid without hurling one
single time. Give him just one or two too many brewskis though and he's tossing his cookies
the next morning. This is a VERY rare event around here thank goodness but unpleasant none-the-less. It's not that Tim drinks alot at all. It's that he's not used to it anymore and his tolerance
is WAY down. Well, here's hoping we make it through this next few weeks in good health and with no hurling. It's a short wish list. I'm easy.