Sucked It Up

I had to suck it up and get off my butt and go to the kids’ new school open houses.  I didn’t want to go because frankly right now I feel like I look like Freddy Kruger at the moment.  I looked in the mirror, brushed my hair, which I have not done for like a week, and put some half decent clothes on.  Makeup over this mess on my face would just a) look bad and b) hurt like hell after about 5 minutes.

I am NOT impressed with the school.  I left my area because of the character of people invading the districts due to schools of choice, and what do I get? Ghetto all over again except worse.  This has nothing to do with race because I’m not racist by any means, this has to do with the way people present themselves.  I figured because their school is down the street from the country club I would come across a higher class of people.  I feel like I’m living in Lincoln Park or River Rouge and using their school district.  Right now all I hope is that the education is good and doesn’t set back Chris & Andrew’s achievements, which have been great since they both just graduated from the speech & language program.  Here their education at the 1st and 3rd grade levels are slightly more advanced from the get-go.  I was kind of shocked to hear that 3rd graders are going to spend their opening weeks preparing for the meap.  Good thing Chris is at least at grade level and can read pretty advanced.  Andrew, I’m not so sure about.  He can’t read yet and doesn’t even attempt to sound out letters.  Of course last year apparently he was hiding all this stuff from us and was performing well at school, despite him making us think otherwise.  I warned Andrew’s teachers that he is quite the story teller.  The two best stories is him having pet alligator’s in the basement that he told his teacher and one he recited to me in the van with Julie there, he said something like, “Julie drown-ded me in the bath tub” and we just busted out laughing because he was like 3 years old and Julie had never even been around him probably even in a pool setting ever at that point!!  We had to warn his kindergarten teacher about the story telling and his imagination just to make sure we don’t get any crazy stories that would send CPS to our house or something!  It’s funny because he’s going on 7 years old and he can still come out and tell a good story.  If we have quiet time and he’s playing in his bedroom he can have a full WWII battle all by himself.  The whole house rattles, the sound effects are going, and it’s just crazy.  He’s our little booger.  We had to pull the Xbox out of the bedroom because on 2 occasions we caught both him and Andrew watching South Park on it, and I am not about to have that.  It was only after a couple months that I had realized they were watching Family Guy on Netflix and my god, I had no idea how vulgar and adult that show is.  It is funny, but definitely not appropriate for their age. Here I thought they were watching documentaries and cartoon and kids movies.  Well we straightened that out in a heart beat.  Anyway, I’m considering a catholic education for the kids, private anyway.  Schools of choice is destroying the integrity of all schools, and I know a religious backed education is really good.

I took away the Xbox completely this week in preparation for the school.year.  They are only allowed an hour per day only after some chores are done, but we are working on a schedule now, so it’s school, homework, dinner, xbox, bed.  Matt likes to give them Xbox time in the morning but I don’t… but I’m usually not up to get them ready for school because I don’t go to bed until really late.

I feel horrible.  Nobody can even imagine what i’ve been through, it’s like a fricken horror story from hell and I feel like my mind is being messed with my the hospital.  It’s really not fair and I want closure on what happened.  I went and had an EGD scope done at St. John just to make sure they didn’t damage my new stomach.  It is slightly swollen and tender but that’s it, nothing permanent.  I can’t believe Mercy did that to me, let alone not check for damages after it happened.  Oh god and the whole rest of the story I’m too embarrassed to even share on here. 

I need to get back to normal.  Life dwelling on what happened has sucks.  My kids are getting neglected because I’m thinking about this too much.  I sit in the corner of my couch and stare into nothing (or my laptop) and try to justify every mistake made.  The house is neglected and that’s just not me.  I’m recovering physically from all the bruises and stuff, but I’m mentally exhausted from not just this, but everything.  This just ices the cake.  Not necessarily in a way that makes me go insane or become depressed, but more ashamed and embarrassed and now I have to live the rest of my life with what they did until they fix it.  They claim they are doing their investigation, their “own” investigation. Come on now, they are going to talk to the people involved and they are going to say what they remember happening, and it becomes a he said / she said and I have no defense because they blocked my family from seeing me and my physician from being contacted.  I wish I had my attorney on hand too.  Now i’ve spent all this mental energy on figuring all this out and the decided to not honor my request to have all my medical records.  I need these records for my own doctors office to have on hand and I just want it all… more importantly the things that affected me most, ALL ICU notes and the incident with the blind nasogastric tube.  There are certain details that this should have reported like size of tube and all that.  There are procedures to follow for gastric bypass patients and they completely disregarded this and caused me oh my god extreme pain, and my stomach is still tender and swollen and it sucks because I can’t eat very well.  I’m emaciated and i’ve lost 10lbs in the last week alone.  Food doesn’t go down well due to swelling.

So anyway, I’m trying to temporarily block this all out.  I am completely expecting a response of them having no wrongdoing which would be typical, and that is where it’s important that I have their own ER doctor admitting wrongdoing, and I need another doctor to review this stuff to also come to that determination.  We have some serious flaws in paperwork that I have reviewed.  Just not fair.

Not much new going on right now though.  Dogs are behaving as expected, I have a loud cricket that likes to hang out near my window next to me that’s driving me batty in the middle of the night, family is doing good, well I assume.  My mom had a fundraiser the other night somehow I never knew about, probably because she knew I was bad off, and raised a thousand dollars or so.  She has also just been downgraded to stage 2 cancer I found out so that makes me a little more happy.

I need a vacation.  A Disney cruise would be nice right now, but I don’t have time.  We definitely have to get back to England sometime as Matt’s relatives are dying off at a faster pace these days and we need to get there. We haven’t been since 2007, but I only had 2 kids then.  I can’t imagine 4 kids.  That will only cost $4500 in airfare alone.  I can’t believe they charge like $200 for lap space for a baby.  So just because they get air space you have to pay.  The next challenge in Europe is finding a rental vehicle that accomodates a family because for some reason, Europeans are family challenged or something.  No hotels have like family rooms, except for a place called Travel Inn.  It makes life difficult planning a trip.  Thank god they don’t live near London.  I’m very careful where I book because if you pick your hotel too cheap you end up sharing a bathroo
m with an entire floor of people.  We seem to always do vacations with vacations like the last time.  We flew to London, drive to Birmingham where Matt is from and then we went and spent a week in Wales on the water and spent another week at his parents’ home.  We love to travel and explore, so it’s been a long time and we need too.  I could go to Florida but I can’t sit for the drive and don’t know when that will ever be possible. At least a flight to London is only 7 hours instead of 19 hours of driving to Florida.

I hate France because of the way they treated us back in 2000.  We didn’t know back then you had to pay to use the bathroom so my best friend Julie was with us and some rude woman kept slamming her in the bathroom door… and of course we don’t understand french so we had no idea.  And by the way, getting of Gar Du Nord train station in Paris is like stepping into the ghetto of Detroit.  You would never think such a thing of France.  Nobody wanted to help us find the Eiffel tower, which by the way is not easy to find.  Finally some nice student helped us find a bus.  My other friend made matters worse by in loud english stating that everyone smelled bad, and of course, most french known English… ha ha.  I’d like to go back and re-try that all over again, but certainly not the way we tried it the first time.

I need to get to Egypt but I don’t know about taking the kids there.  I’d do it, but my kids have no respect for anything remotely out of the norm so it would probably not be a good idea.

Tonight i’m going to sit here and relax and try not to think about things, study my photography stuff and attempt to return to normal — well despite the flesh eating bacteria eating my face.  I feel like crap but oh well, it’ll get better like everything else does.  What really sucks?  I know now that I can never go to Applebees and indulge in anything like a Mudslide or Pina Colada again because god knows i’d probably pass out and die. Not fair either.  Oh well, being int he 150’s for weight outweighs that anyday I suppose!

St. John was shocked the other day when I told them I don’t see the weight loss still.  It’s amazing considering this is what I looked like before: