GONE noroVIRAL!

We've had an unexpected visitor who has ripped havoc through our family this week. It's only now that I am able to talk about it. Never before have I felt so drained and exhausted. J has been blown over too. The big man was floored on Saturday and is still reeling today. It all started a week last Friday......

The little un has been fast approaching his first birthday and all plans were set in motion weeks ago for the party on Sunday 17th April. Cake duties were split between myself (defaulted from J due to all day bike ride on Saturday 16th in wop wops. Gawd!) and grandad H (chief icer). 5 loaves pre-ordered from bakery to be sliced by the baker (learnt that trick from the christening! Still have the callouses from the knife!) for ham and tomato sandwiches. Presents wrapped (including DIY monkey - see previous post) and cards written. Fifty million small plastic balls bought for DIY junglerama in the paddling pool. All set for Sunday's party. 

So, a week ago last Friday, the little un has a bit of a barf in his push chair after a busy morning chasing balls in the official Junglerama. Teething perhaps? Yeah. Cheeks are a bit flared. Goes to bed that night and mum is woken by a gurgling sound and there's little un covered in spew in his cot. Poor wee mite. He's all out of sorts next day and just before bedtime mum is up hurling too. On the hour every hour she's up spewing through out the night. This is Saturday night. Night before the party. So next morning she's absolutely exhausted. Cancels the party (very sensible) and reschedules for the 30th. Thank goodness for the power of Facebook! She's back to bed and dad's taking over the little un. So he's next in line. Hits him Monday night. Ugh. On the hour every hour. Has to try to get it together though to attend a funeral on Tuesday! Passes the baby baton back to mum who's still gotta get herself in order to go with him. Meanwhile me and great-nanny Ann step up to baby sit for a few hours on the Tuesday. Thinking little-un is well over his barfing so it's just a couple of nappy changes and some feeds. No signs of any spewing. All good. Baby goes home. We go to bed. I'm up the next day to get flappy checked, hit the Sweet Vanilla Cafe for a cheese scone and a latte, meet a friend in town, pick up some craft tools, visit the new Bunnings in Petone, take a wrong turn and am heading back to Welly, running out of petrol, gas-up, on my way again! Having a great day. head home to mamma to watch a bit of Tipping Point. Perfick. 

Until 4 o'clock.

Searing pain in my belly button. Argh. Need toilet. The big "D" in vomiting and diarrhea hits me. Ugh! Then the big "V" shows itself. Dramatically. Epically. Projectiled. I can't lift my head off the toilet bowl. Holy Fuck! What is this? Ugh. Bed. Half hour later I'm up again. V. I hate it. 5 hours I managed of this trotting to chuck. It's inhumane. It was like gastric plus flu. Gastric flu. Pains in the bones and fever. My head was on fire but my feet and hands were freezing. Whatever was in my system it was having an all night rave. After each hurl I lay in bed like I had main lined Rohypnol. I couldn't even move my lips. Boot camp for bugs. That's what I was doing.

By 9pm I was able to move from the bed to the sofa but still lay horizontally, moaning. I felt like I'd been run over. Now, you know, avid readers that I can confidently state that I do have a high threshold for pain. I have visited my happy place to relieve anxiety and pain on many occasions. But this battle with this particular bug was like Sigournet Weaver in Aliens (the one with all those British actors in it don't know which Alien movie it was darn it). "It will pass. It will take its course. It will be over. Soon. Ish". It did stop. The "V". And my first solid passed reminded me of my time in hospital and made me smile. How good it feels to move yer shit after you've been on a holiday in hell. 

So it's now Thrusday morning and I am totally wiped out like a rag doll. Stomach muscles, check. Flappy, check. Throat, errrrrrr, nah, sore throat!!!!! Argh! No way. Stripped and bare my poor throat is on fire. FFS! It's like those first few days after surgery. You know when you think they've let off a thousand ants in your mouth. There's nothing like being starving, not "V"ing and not being able to swallow - to bring you right down. I was sooo sooo over it. AND it was little-uns birthday, the actual one, and I wouldn't be able to go and eat the freakin cake!!! Right that's it I headed straight for the Watties tinned cream of tomato soup and sank right into its velvety creaminess, like a cat, swimming backstroke I was. Yummmmy yum yum. I wouldn't look at it normally, the tinned soup section. Oh no, it's all Go-Nakeds all the way (that's a brand of soup not Tuesday nights in New World Supermarket Thorndon!).

But there's more to the week that was from hell. J and great nanny ann set off to see the little un on Thursday night. J is out to work as usual Friday. We're all set to head to the beach for the long ANZAC weekend. We have our usual Friday night take out. Go to bed. And at 5am J is up "V" and "D" ing. "I've got the bug". What The Actual Fuck? This thing is flying through us like, er, flies? OMG. I seriously think the bug was twice as bad for J. Maybe it mutated? J still has it. It's funny, well not funny, But it's cute that we both share the same language while we're hurling. "THis is a fuc*ing Bast*rd" was one I remember. 

I headed to the t'internet, as you do, to get to the bottom of what we were all experiencing. A couple of other family members affected reckon it was worse than campylobacter and well that is saying something eh. I reckon we had Norovirus come to stay. Ripped right through all of us........ Except for great nanny ann, fingers crossed. Shes been with me all week while I've been ill and she's been around the baby and now J. 

Must be the fags. It's the only difference between us!!!!!! 

Long may she remain symptom less. Here's a link to Norovirus with all the symptoms we had.... Norovirus info click here

3 month milestone

Celebrating my 3 month milestone with a mini bottle of bubbles. Three months ago was D-day. January 14th. Wow. I am so grateful in so many ways for being alive and well today. So grateful for the love and support from my family and friends. All those positive vibes helped me heal. I am still healing. There are ups and downs. But everyday I am grateful for being here. Loving and cherishing every day as best I can. Hoping my guardian angels can take a vacation now. Cheers everyone! 

Vaya con dios - farewell

Today has been a long, hard day for many of us, for one reason or another the sky seems darker this evening. This song keeps turning in my head this evening. 'Vaya con dios' is a farewell song. Translates as 'Go with God'. The aunts were singing it in an earlier blog post. That was a great night of reminiscing about who sang what song at the family parties years ago, "what was your party piece?" Great to have captured a few songs that night on video. Precious times. Golden moments. Memories we will treasure long after the heartache and loss we feel when someone we love is taken too soon. 

We make memories everyday. Here's one of mine from today. I had just finished putting together some folders of lyrics of songs the family used to sing. Ready to give to the aunts as keepsakes. I have a cd of 27 songs that my uncle GJ put together so I put this on and mom picks up one of the folders, finds the song and gets right into it! An hour and a half later and she's still going... Check out the video above. 

This was my stop and smell the roses moment today, it had the music, the memories, the mamma and the poignancy in the lyrics. Goodnight and God Bless. 

Relishing a new skill

I've been dying to try my hand at bottling, preserving, chutney making, whatever you wanna call it for ages now. So our one and only crop of veggies this season has been the cherry tomatoes. With all the hoo-ha around my unexpected surgery and all the flapping around with flappy post surgery has meant we weren't really paying much attention to the veggie patches. We'd planted the tomatoes and lettuces and had high hopes of replenishing the coriander and maybe chucking in a couple of courgette plants but nah it was all a bit too much under the circumstances. The lettuces grew into conifers and the dwindling coriander went to seed. Ah well there's always the tomatoes. Slow to start they didn't really kick in until after Christmas and then they bloomed and bloomed and kept on giving until we harvested 2kg of the little gems:

I surfed the net for instructions on sterilizing the pots and picked Jamie's easy tomato relish recipe to try. It's been a bit of a team effort with J tending the little treasures in the garden, me and himself cooking up the relish and me potting them up into the final product. We only have 2 small jars of the stuff. Limited edition I'm calling it! Sooooo precious. I only used half a kg of tomatoes just in case the relish was awful or I screwed up the bottling. Haha! Bit of a clinical trial going on here! I won't know if it's safe for human use until one of us tries it out. "Hey mom....."

So now I've got 1.5kg of cherry tomatoes left to play with I'm going to try Annabel Langbeins relish which has mustard powder and curry powder in it. I reckon I'll then buy a jar from the shop and do a blind randomized placebo trial and see whether it really is worth all the freakin effort to make your own preserves!

Meanwhile at the craft table today.....

Woody was keeping my seat warm

A blank canvas

Today's activity was clearing out the garage to make space for my craft table. Me and mom got stuck into it this afternoon. I've got the whiteboard - ideas board - in place too. Looks completely barren of creativity doesn't it! That's cos all the ideas are in my head spinning around! Excellent! A fresh start. It's amazing how many treats and treasures lay buried in my boxes of craft gear. I reckon I've got everything except glass blowing tools in our garage! Mmmmmm sniffs of jack of all trades and master of none I hear you cry! Well maybe I get bored easily? I found an unfinished mosaic mirror amongst the loot so that will be one project that will get me back in the creative groove and recharge the batteries. I rediscovered my charcoals, watercolor paints, colored pencils, felt tips, mosaic tiles, mirrored glass, pottery tools and an endless supply of paper clips! All is well in my world. 

Monkeying around town

I can't believe that it hasn't even been 3 months since D-day, surgery. A week Thursday will be 3 months to the day that I went in for the do or die session with the surgeons. April 14th is a Thursday and it will be 3 months to the day. It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas, I have to say. What I mean is I am beginning to feel that each day is less of a milestone and more of a normal, what shall we do today day. Which is nice.

I've also had a couple of trips into Wellington for dinner with family and mooching with J. It's like I am resocialising. Getting used to being around people. Only now that I have been enjoying the company of others can I look back and realize that there were times when being in a group of people was difficult for me. It's like your nerve endings are super sensitive and any loud laughter or talking feels amplified to the point that you wanna scream and tell everyone to feck off out of there. But it's not their problem. It's mine. The only other time I felt this way was after my dad died and we were out in Moseley at Kavanaghs and the place was packed, the usual Friday night crowd, but every screech of laughter was like a needle being poked in my ear. That was grief. This was like grief but there's no name for it except post traumatic stress disorder. Do you know you can get post surgical depression six months after surgery? I had no idea. My GP told me. I went to see her last week to ask her to check my thyroxine levels cos I was feeling up and down and my sleeping was crooked. Nah she said all was within normal range and if anything she would increase my dose. It was my first check in with her since before D day so we took some time to go through what had been happening to me and the various milestones and knock backs along the way. At the end of it she said I'm actually more concerned that you may develop post-operative depression. It's common even in patients who have had successful surgery apparently. So I'm going to be on the look out for the black dog but if any of you see it hanging around me please let me know so I can do something about it. 

On the creativity front, checkout "monkey boy" that I made today. He's a cutey and he's for another cutey monkey boy that I know who will be turning one soon! He's kind of current, it being the Chinese year of the monkey. I'm a monkey too. And so is J. Years ago me and J were walking through Birmingham city centre, down by the old Hippodrome when it was closed down and there were only a few dodgy nightclubs down that end of town. It was broad daylight and we had just been to the markets. We were heading home and this old boy shouts out of nowhere, "Hey you", there's no one else around, "you, ya have the head of a monkey!". "He must be talking to you John, your 3 inch quiff must be freaking that old guy out!".