Day 3: Finally, FLORIDA!

We woke up on day 3, totally ready to go. The sketch hotel had a really terrible breakfast so we decided we would eat at the quintessential breakfast place of the south: Waffle House.

It was as great as I remembered. (Which, admittedly, doesn't say much because I don't remember but I do remember that this was a place we went to when I was younger so it was on the list of must do's for this trip.)

We drove for a little while and then we saw signs for Florida, the kids got immediately excited. I told Matt we would stop at the visitor center, I would get brochures and stuff, see if I could get coupons or something, and let the kids go to the bathroom. Turns out they have a photo op spot so we got in line, much to Matt's annoyance but he went along with it. And some really nice lady took our picture.

Which didn't turn out great, but we don't have many family pictures and it's hard to get four kids to look in the same direction at the same time, so we take what we can get.

The big kids' excitement wore off a bit when they realized how much further we still had to go. Our destination was Indian Shores, Florida which is smack dab between Clearwater and Madeira Beach, minutes away from St. Petersburg, which is where I was born and lived for awhile. And every time I go back I always felt home. Matt and I honeymooned on Madeira Beach but my grandpa drove us to St. Pete Beach, which is where we spent so many days as a little kid. I don't remember the visit but I have a picture of me standing there looking out into the water and I wrote next to it that I felt at home.

Which, I'm going to be honest with you. We financially, could not afford to go on this trip at all. But I had a lot of reasons for going. First and foremost dying does something to you as a person, it changes who you are, and I have had this feeling in me that I needed to see my family. You know how when something happens you just need a hug? Well I just wanted a hug from my grandma and grandpa. I also had to get away from home. I feel like I've been a prisoner in this house for a year and despite my trip to Vegas with my friend Tammy, I feel like I never get to leave except for doctor appointments. I used to be adventurous. I used to do things, be social, I used to live life. I was just desperate to LEAVE. And I have a third reason for wanting to go, but I'll save that for my book. (I know, I'm just so mean.)

But we drove. Once we got closer to our destination I saw the pillar for St. Pete and I expected to feel something...

... and I didn't feel anything. It was strange.

I figured I was just exhausted, and I most certainly was because by this point it was a little after 6, we were all hungry and tired. Finally, we reached our hotel for the week which ended up being a two bedroom condo. I had no idea that's what I booked but apparently when I did this way back in March I had some kind of rationale, or maybe that's all that was left, I have no idea but let's all just appreciate the fact that my post AFE brain actually worked in our favor for once. The place was called Barefoot Beach Resorts and I would absolutely, hands down, highly recommend it.  The place is gorgeous and it comes with a kitchen (with dishes!) and the closets had beach chairs and umbrellas.. and the ladies in the office were so kind. Truly. This was such a great place, I would absolutely stay there again and recommend it. It had beach access right across the street and that's pretty much what we did all week.

We sent Matt off to go get us pizza dinner, which ended up being super delicious AND cheap (and just down the street), and I busted out the wooden blocks I bought before our trip that I had hidden in the van for the sole purpose of entertaining them in Florida.

It turned out to be genius and it worked super well.

Lucy was more excited about dragging items across the tile floor, but once she realized she could kick blocks far on this floor, she was all about that.

The kids doled out room assignments, but we learned that Penelope, Olivia, and Jackson cannot share a bed together because it ends in laughing and someone crying. So the week was spent with Matt and Jackson sharing a bed with Lucy in a pack and play in the corner, and then me, Olivia, and Penelope sharing a full size bed in the smaller room (with the beach view, so I'm not complaining). I don't think I need to tell you that I got next to no sleep all week except for the nap I took one day because I was so tired my body couldn't go any longer.

After dinner, and by this time it was close to 8:30, but I told the kids we could go to the beach for just a little while. I didn't bother with swimsuits because we weren't going to swim, but I brought our new sand toys and I wanted to watch the sun set.

Olivia and Jackson have been to the beach a few times so their visit wasn't documented as much. But Penelope and Lucy had never seen the Gulf of Mexico but they LOVED IT.

I am sure that every citizen of Indian Shores, at least anyone with a hotel room there, heard their happy squeals because these girls were all about it. And immediately got drenched from head to toe. I should have brought the swimsuits. Rookie move.

Lucy was totally enthralled with sand, and the water coming up to her. Penelope tried to conquer the waves, it was hilarious.

After a little while, Lucy crawled back up to me and started digging through the sand toys, which she doesn't get to do at home because the sandbox is a standing one and she's a little too little still.

I just sat and watched and her and thought about what a freaking year we've had. How she'll never know the mom I used to be. How she will always have this watered down version of the mom I wanted to be because that's all that I have left in me. Her birth did a number on me and so many times I've been asked if I knew then what I know now, would I have had her? And I have always said, she wasn't planned. She was 100% an accident baby, a baby who came to be despite Plan B (two of them!) and four was never in the plan for us. I don't regret her, I would always choose her because I think there's a reason this little nugget is here. This special little girl is here, and she is such a sweet, lovable little soul. She's meant to do something in this world, I just don't know what it is yet. So I would always choose her. I just don't know that I would choose me to have survived. That has been my crux in therapy this year. It's always been me. 

But this girl... I feel like she gets me. And she doesn't expect more from me. She knows that all I can give is what I've got and she's OK with that. She loves me anyways.

Then there's this guy. Who drives me fully crazy sometimes, but he loves me too. In his own way. Which isn't the way I always need, or want, but I have to learn that sometimes as people we can only give what we've got and give it in the way we know how. So I have to really give him props because this year has been tough on him, too and we're living the whole "in sickness and health" bit. It really sucks but we're doing it. Some days aren't so bad and some days are really awful. But we go to bed each nice with a kiss and we know that tomorrow... it's a toss up. We don't know what it's going to be. But we're doing it together.

So while I was reflecting on the beach, quietly crying to myself, these two clowns were drenching themselves.

Penelope was having the time of her life.

So much so that we would end up having to physically carry her off the beach. In fact, we had to do that every time we left the beach- she's definitely a sunshine and beach gal. She was never meant to be cooped up in the harsh winters of Wisconsin.

Matt took pictures with his phone to prove that I also was on vacation. I don't have many pictures of me from this year because I hate what's happened to me physically. I have gained so much weight because of the steroids I take to stay alive, and I hurt everywhere so any type of exercise leaves me bedridden the next day. Needless to say, I feel terrible about myself, but that's for another day.

But I'm glad he took them because I also feel like I have hardly been a mom this year. I've been a mom, obviously, but I'm just going through the motions. It shows me being a mom.

It also shows that Lucy, indeed, ate her weight in sand this week.

Sigh.

Oh!! The super cool thing the kids loved? We saw two turtle's nest areas on our beach!

The kids were so hoping we'd get to see them hatch or see evidence that the turtles made it to the water during our week but no, we never got to see that. But it was very cool for them to see a turtle's nest and they would check it out every day for progress.

At the end of a VERY long day, we watched the sun set into the water.

I thought about the week to come. The year I've had. And how lucky I was that I made it. I made it through the hardest year of my life.

Day 2: More Illinois, but also Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia!

I underestimated how long of a state Illinois is. I also had no idea what a shit show of driving this day was going to be. I decided I was going to drive all of this day as well and I assumed that it was going to be fairly uneventful because it was going to be straight highway, nothing to see here.

I would be completely wrong.

First of all, this is the day that the kids started to lose it in the car. And by lose it, I mean the younger two. The older two have done road trips plenty of times with us and frankly, at ages 12 and 9, if I tell you to shut the hell up and entertain yourself, that's mom speak for take a nap and be quiet.

Everybody knows that.

The younger two haven't learned that yet so this was the day that Penelope decided to test the full strength of my medication that I was weaning off of by screaming at the top of her lungs for no reason. 

Lucy, for her part, screamed in unison because that's just what you do with your sister apparently. This is a fun thing she does even still and it's a real treat.

There were so many times on day two that I thought I was going to legitimately lose it. At this point, it was dinner time and I think we were firmly out of Kentucky and we had entered Tennessee, decided to stop at a Sonic for dinner. Treated the kids to slushies and we all wondered why everyone raves about Sonic because it was over priced and pretty gross. But we had also been trying out milk with Lucy because it's easier to do than formula in a moving vehicle and at this particular moment we had to air the van out because the smell of her poop was so incredibly bad not one of us, except her, could stand to be in the damn van. Honestly, the van still has a faint odor of Lucy poop.

After our lame dinner we got back on the road and that's when it was basically all winding down to shit show proportions. First, we discovered a few things about Tennessee drivers that set them apart from everyone else: they drive with their hazards on when it rains and they brake for no reason on the highway. I'm talking, come to a complete stop. This wasn't just a weird one time thing because it happened on the way home too, which I'll tell you about later. But we'd be driving along and BAM! Everyone is coming to a full stop, no reason. And of course, you have people who aren't paying attention so they are so close to rear ending others (accidents everywhere in Tennessee) so to avoid that, they veer off into the ditch at full speed.

It was terrifying. 

I also have to say, I am really disappointed that the two things I wanted to see as road side attractions (Ruby Falls and Rock City)? I didn't get to see because they were either closed because we got there too late or Matt didn't stop (on the way back). I was bummed. But props to Tennessee because Ruby Falls is basically their Wall Drug as far as road side marketing goes.

But it got really dicey once we got into Georgia for me because it started to rain. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal but I'm driving in an unfamiliar area and by the time I recognized that I was struggling, I wasn't in an area that I could pull over and switch with Matt. We were in a construction zone, it was torrential rain- you literally couldn't see anything at all, and all of the cars were doing 40 in the 70 mph area. I was terrified. Combine this with two screaming kids in the back and I was on the verge of tears myself, if we're being honest. It was like this for almost two hours and by the time we drove out of the storm my blood pressure was such a mess I am so surprised I didn't stroke out or something.

At this point, we were just outside of Atlanta and our goal was to get to Macon, Georgia for the night. As soon as we were driving through Atlanta, it was pretty clear we weren't going to get to Macon. We'd get close, but not all the way there.

You know that part in every classic Chevy Chase movie where he starts losing it and he starts laughing like a maniac? That was me as we struggled to find a hotel that night.

That night we ended up in a really sketchy motel under a highway overpass in between Atlanta and Macon. It was literally the only option and this place was dirty. Keep in mind, we're a group of six people, we smell, we look like hell. We've got two crying kids who absolutely need baths because they reek of poop, and two older kids who look road weary, me with my diaper rash boobs and toilet paper now shoved under my boob because the cream wasn't doing it, and Matt- who was trying to keep it all together. He asks the lady if they have a pack and play, and this lady says to him, "People usually travel with those."

I don't know WHY, but it maybe has something to do with being punch drunk, the smell of the van, being deliriously tired, or the fact that we had been listening to crying for hours at this point, but I started laughing. And when I say laughing, I mean, I lost it.  I almost peed my pants. The look on Matt's face, it was absolutely blank like he wasn't playing around, he didn't care if she was joking but it was clear to this lady that he was absolutely no mood for jokes or attitude, he just wanted the freaking pack and play. But it was hilarious.

What was not hilarious was the fact that six people got to share two full size beds. It's bad enough to share a bed with your kid, and it's pretty awful when you have to share a bed with two kids, but when you have to share a full size bed with two kids? You cannot apologize to your organs enough. Matt got to sleep with Jackson and I had to sleep with Olivia and Penelope, which wouldn't have been awful if I didn't have a pee diaper in my face for half the night and then when she rolled over, she decided she needed to use my hair to rub in her ear. But we can snuggle up to me, oh no. She has to pull my hair. I swear, my scalp is still sore because I endured having my hair pulled the entire trip because that was the only way I could get her to go to sleep.

Day 2 was rough. But we knew the next day we would be getting to our destination: Florida.

Day 1: Wisconsin and Illinois. Illinois never ends.

When we planned this trip I didn't really know what I was doing. Old Sara would have planned this entire trip out so much better, she would have had activity bags, planned stops, fun car games to play, and I would have had hotel ideas planned all along the way.

By me saying this you can safely assume that I had none of this and that we winged it. And it's true. We absolutely winged it. We survived, but it was trying and maybe not the smartest thing a person weaning off of an anti-depressant medication to do. 

What? Oh yes, as it turns out we think the culprit for my tingly and numbness could very well be the Topomax that I've been on, my psychiatrist thinks it's actually messing with my nervous system in a bad way so the plan was for me to start weaning myself off of that but increase my Strattera to help with my tiredness and cognition. But when we left on Friday, I felt good. 

 Penelope was clearly ready to go.

Olivia and Jackson were ready to go. Lucy was happy and ready.

We got kind of a later start than I wanted but that was because we ate breakfast at out usual time and packed the van, got everyone loaded up and we hit the road!

By the time we got to southern Wisconsin people were starting to already getting antsy which isn't a good sign considering how far we had to go. So we got out at a rest stop, and let the two little ones burn some energy.

Which, shout out to Wisconsin for having play structures at some of the rest stops because this is a BIG deal. You don't realize this unless you're in a car with a couple of kids who are in desperate need of burning some energy. They went down the slide, climbed a little bit, and we played in the well maintained grassy picnic area.

It was one of the nicest rest stops we stopped at, aside from the one in Florida, and that's saying something because we stopped at quite a few.

You can tell that by the time we got to Illinois, which was around dinner time, we were all kind of tired of driving.

Except me. I was doing a really good job. Yup, I was actually driving the first leg. I decided that I would drive highway portions and when it came to us driving in a city I would leave that to Matt because that would be really difficult for me. So I wanted to do as much as I could to feel normal and do what Old Sara would do. Old Sara would have powered through this road trip, no problem. 

We drove and we drove. We drove until about 10:00 p.m. until finally I looked at Matt and said I couldn't go any further. He agreed and we decided we would try our hand at winging it with a hotel. As it turns out, we were in the middle of nowhere Illinois so we stopped off at the first exit because wherever we were was remote and there didn't appear to be anything anywhere sooner. The exit ended up only having one hotel option with a room price under $200 (our goal out of necessity was to not pay over $100 for a room because when I say this trip was on a budget, I'm not joking). It ends up being a Holiday Inn Express and at first sight, not bad. Smells a little odd, but the front desk person was very kind, gave us a "corporate rate" and wheeled up a crib before we got the suitcase out of the van and it was great.

We all crashed. In the morning, my plan was to take a shower because I felt so gross. 

Then we saw the shower head, which hadn't been cleaned in weeks and no thanks. Absolutely not. We just packed our stuff and left. In fact, I didn't even change my clothes because I realized I didn't plan well and didn't pack enough of anything so I realized that driving days? I would be wearing the same clothes.

Oh! And after a quick check by Matt we discovered I had the worst diaper rash under my left boob. Odd, right? That's what I thought. Apparently between my new bra and the seat belt pushing my boob down, plus the heat/humidity it was the right environment to bread a nasty rash. To the point where I was in desperate need of diaper rash cream and it had to be a priority stop before we got going on the road.

But little Penelope proved to be a professional traveler. Hauling her own things in and out of hotels with ease. I learned on this trip to just ignore her because she is going to have a full melt down no matter what you do so you need to just go with it and hope that other people don't stare too much.

So that was our first day. Lots of driving and diaper rash. 

We're back! But first.. Matt gets to sleep with Darth Vader.

I know I promised you pictures and stories of our trip to Florida and those are coming! I'm still sorting through them and I want to get the ones from Matt's phone because he actually took some, you guys! I know, and he took some candids of me and though I look terrible, I'm going to share them because that's where I'm at in life.

I look terrible, but I'm living life anyways.

But before I do that I want to give you an update because someone asked me the other day how my sleep study went, and I didn't have any information because I didn't have a follow up yet. Well, that follow up appointment happened today so I have stuff to share so let's chat before I forget about it because if I don't get this information down somewhere, it's gone. It's literally gone and here is as good a place as anywhere.

So way back on my anniversary (June 12) I had my first ever sleep study done. It's no secret that I am exhausted all of the time. And when I say exhausted, I am not kidding.

And yes, this is when everyone then says, "Oh I here you, I'm SOOOO tired too! Ugh!" and I roll my eyes and want to punch you in the face. Sorry, not sorry. I know I sound like a broken record when I go on and on about my stupid pituitary gland, but the super fun thing about having panhypopituitarism is that nothing works. I have no cortisol and that's a big deal. Normal people still feel groggy when they wake up but eventually you get going in the morning because your pituitary gland is like, "Oh hey, it's morning! Lemme help you out there, buddy!" and gives you a boost of cortisol and that's what gets your entire body moving. You get a couple of these boosts a day, it's like when you get a second wind- it's your body giving you little shots of cortisol. I will never have that. The only thing I have is the steroid I take, which is what keeps me alive, and it's not nearly as good as the real thing because I am DRAGGING.

Which brings me to the sleep study. The whole point was to figure out if my excessive fatigue is because of my adrenal insufficiency and panhypopituitarism or if I also have sleep apnea on top of it making me even more tired.

The night of the the sleep study was kind of awful because it took them a really long time to get me hooked up to everything correctly. Most everything went on OK except for the things that go in your hair. My hair is very thick and wavy so they couldn't get the correct readings and it took almost two hours of tinkering and moving things around before they could let me go to sleep. Needless to say, by midnight (when I was allowed to finally fall asleep) I was dead tired. So tired, in fact, that I didn't roll over at all in my sleep. Not once in seven hours, which I can tell you right now is not normal for me. I left there absolutely exhausted. The whole day I was tired.

Today I learned that while I didn't register on their computer enough to wake me during the night to try the CPAP machine during the test, I probably should have one at home to try for the next ten weeks. I have mild sleep apnea, but the fact that I am so excessively tired despite taking my medications and taking a daytime stimulant already (which hasn't helped me, even at an increased dose, in fact I haven't noticed any difference at all), he's recommending that I get the machine and try it. So that's what I'm going to do. At this point I'm so desperate for some solid sleep I'll try anything. I can't even tell you when the last time I woke up in the morning feeling like I could actually take on the day. Well over a year. Possibly two. It's been so long.

So that's how my appointment went. Wednesday I go to Neurology for an EMG and I am very nervous about it. I made the critical mistake of looking it up online and pretty much everything I have read tells me this is a painful procedure so yay! I can hardly wait. But I have had the tingly and numbness in my arms and hands, but also my feet and we have to figure out if it's medication related or if it is a form of neuropathy. I have reduced the dosage of the medication that we think may be the problem and that has been absolutely awful (more on that later) and I still have the sensations, not nearly as bad but it's still there. So I don't know. Part of me wants to just cancel the procedure and say it's the medication, crisis diverted but then I think, what if? What if it really isn't and I'll just need the test anyways? I may as well get it done now while my deductible is met because god knows what's going to happen next year with health insurance, right? I don't know.

What I do know is that I am 100% sick and tired of feeling like a lab rat, like nobody knows what's wrong with me. I am tired of feeling like absolute crud. Everything on my hurts, all of the time, I feel like death is warming over and it's tiresome. To be told this is the best it's going to get is really awful and I can't imagine this being any kind of quality of life, to be honest.

On the road again....

I am exhausted. I know I'm forgetting something crucial. I'm scared I can't do this. I'm scared I'm going to regret this mid way there. I'm scared something awful will happen and I'll panic. I have zero desire to be trapped inside of a mini van with four kids and a husband who is always crabby and doesn't enjoy adventure or life in general for two days there and two days back, plus winging it in the middle.

My "packing" for six people consisted of throwing a bunch of random things into bags and hoping it's what we need because New Sara is no longer capable of organizing and making decisions, putting things in order, thinking ahead, processing, everything that's needed in planning a vacation let alone a road trip with four children. Old Sara would have been able to whip this up in an hour and have had destinations, back up ideas, activities in bags, back up activities, boredom busters, and fun facts to learn along the way.

New Sara is pretty sure she brought underwear? But maybe not. I know for sure I have my medication and my credit card and that's about it.

We are going on a road trip to Florida to see my family. We haven't seen them in four years and it's really important to me that my grandparents get a chance to meet Penelope and Lucy. This past fall my Great Auntie Barbara passed away and it's really bothered me that I never made the trip to her side of Florida and introduced her to my children. I feel real guilt about that, and my grandparents are getting older, my other grandma that lives up here has cancer and I just... I feel like I have to start making the rounds. It sounds terrible and morbid but something in me is telling me that I need to make it a priority. If I've learned nothing else in this last year, it's that life is fleeting. Any moment it can be taken from you and the right time to make a visit never comes, that time is always now. I can't afford it, but there isn't going to be a better time. The kids are in school in the fall, and then we get busy with life so we decided that while things have kind of slowed down, activities and school are done- we're going. We're going, we're visiting, to hell with bills and money- we're just going to go and worry about it later.

I'll panic about that stuff later.

We're going to wing it on our trip, nothing is planned, we're going to try to visit with as many people as we can, I'm a little worried about how I'm going to feel. I haven't really been in the heat and I've been warned plenty of times that I can and will dehydrate very easily and even if I don't feel thirsty I have to continuously drink water even if it means I am peeing every half hour. So yay, that should make for enjoyable road trip home. I picked up an extra dose of my emergency injection, just in case. And my psychiatrist upped my dose of medicine to help perk me up to hopefully I am not so exhausted the entire trip, knowing that sun is going to be draining anyways. So... I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful this won't be a bust. Now here's hoping my camera cooperates and I remember to use it!

Waterboarding with babies.

When we found out we were going to have Lucy everyone said, "Oh, it's going to be so fun to have two close together! They'll be best friends!". I had no idea if that was going to be true or not or if this was just something people said to be polite to your face but then they really say, "Oh man, they are so screwed!" among themselves when they walk away.

Now that Penelope is two and Lucy is almost one, I suspect it's the latter because they are anything but best friends. Most days it's chaos in here now that Lucy is cruising along furniture, so close to walking on her own. Penelope doesn't want her to play with anything, must less touch it. Lucy has quite the temper and Penelope is twice as bad.

Thankfully it's "summer" in northern Wisconsin which means for one day a week it's nice enough to go outside and, if we're lucky, the girls can go in the play pool. I only have a rather small pool for the girls because when I bought it, I only had Penelope and had no plans for a fourth kid. I'm not buying another one because I know I'm not going to use it beyond the few weeks of summer that we have for Wisconsin so we're just going to make this tiny pool work.

When Olivia and Jackson were little, they played so nicely together in the pool so I just assumed Penelope and Lucy would as well. It ended up not being the case at all. You can see early on Lucy knew it wasn't going to go well for her. 

She knows from bath time that the key is to take a wide stance with her legs and brace her arms on the bottom because then Penelope can't push her all of the way down into the water. Otherwise her sister tries to drown her. You can take your eyes off the girls for even a second. She feels total joy when she's on her own and her sister is busy running through the yard.

Then she comes back and Lucy is looking for a way out.

This was after her sister dumped a large bucket of water over her head (cold water, no less) and Lucy is having none of this, is telling us all about it because we clearly did nothing to stop this. She's demanding answers.

Lucy took the toy away in retaliation and now Penelope is angry and coming to tell me about it. Apparently sitting a foot away isn't enough.

I ended up telling her to go play with Jackson because some days she's just TOO MUCH. She's a mama's girl and she's too clingy. I feel like the problem is I don't leave the house enough. But I also don't really have anywhere to go. I don't have money or anywhere really to go. Anyways.

So we brought the sprinkler out and let her run through that which was freezing cold water and she had no idea what was going on.

But if Jackson was doing it, she was all about it. She thinks he's the coolest kid ever and she's under the delusion that she's a much larger kid than she is (the clear downside to this major age gap) so she is much braver and more fearless than Olivia and Jackson ever were.

Poor Lucy though. She's going to be the toughest baby on the block only because she has Penelope for a sister. Penelope is so rough and tumble. Her latest thing is "hug time" from the movie Trolls (her absolute favorite) and she tackles Lucy in her attempt at hug time. She will tackle and do a choke hold. Lucy, for her part does her best attempt at playing dead in the hopes that hug time stops. Poor Lucy. She's such a trooper. Maybe she'll end up in the Marines or something.

Almost one. Trigger happy.

I had been noticing the last few weeks that my sleeping patterns have been worse than usual, which isn't saying much because I don't sleep well as it is anyways. I have been feeling irritable and on edge, panicky, and nervous. I feel like running and I don't know why. I feel scared, terrified and I couldn't figure out why.

Until last week when Olivia asked me what we were doing for Lucy's birthday. And then it dawned on me. She's going to be one soon. I'm having a PTSD trigger episode. I vaguely remember my counselor telling me I may or may not experience this, not everyone does, but here I am.

The closer I get to Lucy's birthday the more scared I get. I have no reason why, rationally I know I have no reason to be scared, I know I'm not going to die again. I'm home, my medications are managed, my health is managed as well as it can be, the Amniotic Fluid Embolism could not have been predicted nor prevented, I did nothing wrong, all of this I know.

I know it.

Logically, I know it.

Mentally and emotionally?

I'm terrified. I'm nervous. I'm angry. I'm reliving all of the emotions I've spent the last year working on moving past. I'm angry that any of this has happened to me. I feel like I'm being punished. If I hadn't wanted more children, this wouldn't have happened. I should have just been happy with what I had.

I feel guilty for feeling that way. There are millions of people in the world who would give anything to have a baby and look at me, being a hot mess of a mom. They could be doing a better job. They could love them better.

I feel frustrated because this entire year every doctor has told me, "it's only been XX months, wait until it's been a year, you'll be so much better" and now we're approaching that year and surprise... I'm not better. I'm not like I was the day I came home, thankfully, but I'm still not the Sara I was when I went to the hospital on August 1, 2016. Aside from my pituitary issues and my water regulation issues which bore people to death but are life threatening and serious, its my depression and memory issues that scare me the most. I can't remember to feed my baby. You'd think by kid four feeding and and changing a diaper would become muscle memory but it doesn't. I forget I have to feed Lucy. Or change her diaper. Put her in for a nap. Driving? I run red lights. Stop signs. I can't figure out four way stops. I space out if the radio is on so I often drive without it on now because it's distracting for me. I never drive with just the babies in the car because I'm convinced I'll forget them in van. Reading books isn't as easy as it was, it takes me longer because sometimes I don't understand what I'm reading. If I'm tired I can't understand what people are saying. If someone gives me directions I won't remember them. I can't count coins without help. I'll start crying for no reason. Stress makes my ability to remember and do things go right out the window.

I went in as me and I came out as a totally different person and nobody told me how to do that. Nobody told me how to get used to people treating me differently because I'm not the same.

I spent this weekend looking at some of Lucy's pictures thinking I should start her baby book and I realize I don't know how to do that. I don't remember my pregnancy. I don't remember any of it. I don't remember giving birth to her. I get so angry that all of those first moments with her I have no memory of. She is my last baby and it feels so cruel to be punished in such a way that I don't have the memory of holding her the first time. It's bad enough that I don't remember delivering her but to not remember having her handed to me and getting to kiss her? It's awful.

That's what I keep saying to my therapist, that I don't think people truly understand what it's like to have died and then come back from that and then be missing entire chunks of memory. It's not like I'm missing things like what I ate for breakfast today, I'm missing my wedding day. Birth of my children. Major events of my life, those are things I can't recreate. Those are gone. It's not like a vacation and you think, well- I'll just go there again and use my pictures as a road map! Nope, I can't make another Lucy. Or another Jackson. I can't get married again.

Sigh.

So yes. Almost one year. It's hard. I'm getting there. I'm trying. I'm trying so hard. I don't know what I'm going to be like on the actual day, I'm almost scared to think about it to be honest.