Enjoying Family!

This last weekend I got vertigo (where you are very dizzy and the whole rooms sways).  Usually when I have had this before, there are some easy exercises that you do with your head and it alleviates it.  But this time nothing has helped. We finally realized that maybe it is because I have a head cold and it is messing with my equilibrium or something.  No matter what...it is not fun.

Since I haven't had chemo for the past 3 weeks, it's been like a treat for me.  The more I felt better, the more I wanted to do.  It's been interesting that the things I miss are not speaking or teaching or holding busy church callings, it's not being able to serve my family and friends like I want to.   So this past week I called my two sons and offered to babysit their babies so they could go to the temple.  I haven't been well enough to babysit for a long time and so it was so nice to have some one on one time with these grandbabies.

On Friday I picked up Logan (Daniel's baby) and took him with me to Amy's house to spend the afternoon.  He is 14 months and loves to be around older cousins.  He also likes to play the Harmonica.  It's such a crack up!  I haven't been well enough to help Amy get ready for her baby (her baby boy is coming on March 22).  So we let the kids play and we cleaned out her kitchen pantry.  I was on my feet for 5 hours and my neuropathy in my feel really started to kill me.  I kept going because there was a big mess and I didn't want to leave it for Amy.  I commented that I was feeling exhausted and she said, "Finally!  I've been wanting to complain, but my chemo mom over there keeps going and hasn't complained and so I didn't want to say how sore I was either"  haha - Aren't we all glutton's for punishment?!

That night I was exhausted and woke up the next day with vertigo.  Maybe I over did a bit?  All of Saturday we had Carston (Byron's 8 month old baby).  They came and put him down for his morning nap and then they went to the temple and then to a movie.  I have never been able to babysit him since he was born because of my cancer, and so this was really important to me.  He was so cute and so good.  I laid on the floor with him while he played with his toys and then I started feeling really sick.  I quickly crawled over to a bowl that my hubby had previously brought in and threw up a bunch of times.  Poor little Carston started crying cause he couldn't figure out what the terrible noise coming out of Grandma was, thankfully Grandpa came to his rescue!

That evening I kept feeling sick and so Craig and Byron gave me a blessing.  In the blessing I was told that I would be well enough to go to church and to have the family birthday dinner the next day.  I certainly didn't feel like I could do all that was said in the blessing.  During the night every time I turned my head, I would wake up and feel sick with vertigo.  I didn't think I could make it to church at all.  However, when I woke up in the morning, I felt a little better.  Once again I began to exercise my faith to be healed (just like I talked about in my talk in Stake Conference).  Sure enough the Lord blessed me to go to church.  I thought I could only make it through Sacrament meeting, but I continued to feel better and so I stayed for all 3 meetings.  The rest of the day I also felt good enough to cook a nice meal and have our family over for my granddaughter, Mya's 3rd birthday.  We also had a treat of getting to meet Tauna's (our youngest daughter's) new guy that she has been dating. He was really nice and we all liked him.  Hopefully we didn't scare him off!

Monday I woke up and went over to Amy's house to finish some of the other projects we wanted to get done before the baby came.  I ended up getting sick and she did too.  We both were laying on the couch while her 5 year old daughter fixed lunch.  Talk about pathetic.  I left soon thereafter and cried a little on the way home, because of how helpless I felt in helping my daughter who was sick.  I guess this is the hardest part of having cancer and being sick.  I can't do what I used to do.  Maybe it's both good and bad.  It certainly makes my kids have to learn to get along without me.

The frustrating thing is that I got sick and I wasn't even on chemo!  Amy has a friend who has melanoma and she has a blog which is so inspiring to me. (http://www.joshalisa.blogspot.com/)
Anyway she made a comment that hit the nail on the head for me.  She has been going to treatments and now has 4 weeks off.  The first of her four weeks off she had to get a root canal and a crown, then they had a flat tire, each of the family was sick and she had to go back to the hospital twice.  She said something like, "using up one of my 4 weeks like this when I am supposed to be well is NOT ACCEPTABLE!"  That is exactly how I felt. I so desperately wanted to try and make up for all the time I have been sick that when I was supposed to be well, it upset me so much to develop some non-cancer related illness! (I posted some pictures of when we went to Brianhead. It is a few posts below.)