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Sunday, June 15, 2008

More sharing, A Blast From the Past

As you know I've been working on my family tree. (Who decided it should be called a tree anyway?) and in so doing I've been going through some old pictures. Since I've finally figured out how to get the scanner to work on my printer, I've been scanning some in. Here are a few i found. This is me when i was but a sprout and the last one is me with my parents.

KatherineSuzannePowell1980s

KatherineSuzannePowell1978

PatriciaJoeyand SuzannePowell1978

Sunday, June 8, 2008

Sharing my experiences

Generally speaking I'm a private person. I don't share my sorrows with those outside a small group of confidants, and frankly I don't share half the stuff with half of them :P So I haven't posted anything about Boo's recent problems. I'm trying to grow and make changes though, so here goes.

First, Boo lost his job. He worked for a Bank's investment division and since they didn't do so well last year they let many of the people go. He did get a nice severance package but it still sucks.

He began to complain of leg pain. He's had leg pain for awhile because of a pinched nerve but this was in a different part of his leg and much more intense. It was a blood clot, but we didn't know it at the time.

He woke up on the morning of May 12th saying it was hurting more than usual. He ended up trying to nap on the couch until the time he needed to get ready for a job interview he had that afternoon. He left for the interview, which was an hour away, at about noon. At around 2PM the phone rang. Caller ID said it was his cell phone so I answered expecting to hear a report on how the interview went. Instead, it was Boo, speaking in a very distracted and incoherent manner, breathing heavily and telling me he felt dizzy and that the interview people were calling a doctor for him. He said he'd call back when he knew something more.

We only have one car and the place he was interviewing is an hour away or I would've been on my way right then, as it was, I had to wait. In the meantime I went to webmd and put his symptoms into their tracker. That site said if your were experiencing those symptoms to see a Doctor immediately. That did not help my nerves.

An hour passed. I called his cell, only to find out that he was in the emergency room. I told him I was on my way, called my mom to ask if she'd drive me there, grabbed the Sprout , took a dose of Rescue Remedy (which I don't think I would've made it through without) and headed out the door. When I got to the hospital he was still in the emergency room, They gave me a pass and directions to get to him. When I got to his bed, it was empty. Imagine. Fortunately he was only in the bathroom up the hall.

I'll spare you the story of the next several days worth of worry, crying at random times, not sleeping, worrying, feeling guilty because the Sprout was having to spend so much time with Grandma, not eating properly, oh and did I mention the worrying and crying at the drop of a hat?

Turns out he had a blood clot in his right leg, part of the clot broke away and traveled up his vein (or is it artery?) through his heart and into his lung, where the piece of clot broke up again and got stuck. It's called a deep vein thromboses, a DVT and it caused a pulmonary embolism, a PE. They put him on anti coagulates and put a filter in to catch any other parts of the clot that might break off. The next day they went into the actual vein in his leg and tried to get the clot out. They told me it would take a little more or a little less than an hour, it took 3 and a half. That was a big spike in the worry/crying fits :) But they got 90 percent of the clot out and were positive about the rest of it dissolving overnight.

You can read all about it, the technical names for things and such, as well as some of his feelings about it on his SparkPeople page . He's home now. He's doing well with his recovery, he's able to do some light exercise on it now. I'm so glad he's mending and he's home. That experiences was one of the hardest of my life!

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Is this my culture and heritage?

The title is a line from O Brother, Where Art Thou? I love that movie! But anyway. . . .


I've recently decided to make a family tree. Why you ask? I dunno. Boo says I doing it because I'm insatiably curious, works for me.

It started off so simply. I know when and where the sprout was born and me and my parents and then it gets a bit hairy. You don't realize how much you don't know until you start doing this. So far I've just been wracking my brain and bugging my mom (Hi Mom!) but I guess I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and talk to some relatives. Le sigh.

I want to add the usual things, dates of birth, marriage, death and other important dates. Middle and maiden names, where people lived. But I'd also like to add what they looked like, interesting things about them, what was their favorite color? Things like that. Trouble is that stuff is harder to find.

The detective in me is loving the search. I adore adding new things to the tree and hearing interesting stories and stirring my own memories. For instance this morning, I got an email from my mom with some information about her aunts and uncles (Do you know how many kids people had back then?!) and she mentioned three of the aunts who never married and lived together until death with no electricity or modern conveniences. She lamented that I'd never met these interesting and unique aunts. The thing is, that I had met them. My grandfather took me to visit them but I didn't remember it until she mentioned them this morning. I love things like that.

Things that may seem uneventful and boring to us, hardly worth mentioning, will be an interesting bit of our lives for future generations. My great grandmother, who I can only envision as a frail 88 year old woman, played basketball in her Converse sneakers in school.

I'm slightly comforted by the idea that what ever I chronicle about the generations closest to me will make it easier for any future descendants to make their family trees. That these future people may be terribly interested in what great great great grandma's favorite color was back in the old days of 2008.

Write stuff down, keep a diary, one of your future grandchildren will treasure it.