Rain or sun life goes on

Have you ever had a sick feeling in your stomach that eventually caused you pain. It caused you physical pain even though the sick feeling was only that a feeling, not from an actual illness. That is pain that I have had for the last 16months. Some days I seem to be able to cope and move on better than others although I know that I will have this feeling for the rest of my life but the past few weeks have been worse than most, feeling emotionally drained and exhausted, crying at the doctors office and breaking in medical students, that was a hilarious I must say.
We did all of the shots and as much as we wanted it to work it didn’t so we are on to cycle 2 more shots at a higher dosage. It is hard to “keep your head up” so to speak over and over again. But we know that it will happen in Gods time not ours. But being patient and listening is not one of my strong suits, just another lesson to learn. When I went to the doctor today she asked me if I would mind explaining my history to the 3 medical students in the room, this was after having them all in the room for the exam, by then all sense of modesty was gone so I moved ahead and told them my “history”. When the tears started to fall the kids as I refer to them looked as if they wanted to crawl under the table. Although my doctor has a point to all of it apparently she wanted them to see how it is when things do not go as planned, reality. Poor kids I think all they got was a crazy woman crying but a learning experience none the less. We were blessed when Zach was in the NICU to have basically 3 doctors that we knew we could depend on, one here Dr Morales and then 2 in Augusta Bhatia and Buckler. Although we know that most are not as lucky and neonatologists are trained to help the babies they really are not the best at dealing with mom and dad. I hope one day that I will have the chance to help the doctors learn to help the families.
I had a friend at bible study the other night mention during the course of our discussion that she cant wait to see one day in heaven all of the lives that Zach has touched and continues to touch. In that same line I too want to see who else he has touched but I also know of hundreds of people who touched us along with Zach with their prayers and simple gestures that still continue today. We miss him so much and over the course of the last few months I have for some reason convinced myself that it was not ok for me to cry or get upset, and holding things in until an “appropriate” time makes things much harder. But I am not doing that anymore after today, it hurts too much and frankly I think it does more harm than good. So if you see me crying sorry, I will do my best to try and keep it to a minimum. Things always seem to be a little worse this time of year, with his birthday just around the corner, I can’t believe he would be 2, I see pictures of our precious NICU friends that are just now beginning to walk and are making great strides it makes me smile to think that Zach might be doing that to. Maddie Grace is always quick to remind me if I get upset in front of her that Zachy is a big boy in heaven running around, although she is currently concerned about what he is wearing in heaven, to which I have no good answer so of this we are just having to come up with as we go along.
Maddie Grace is still doing really well in school and loves going. She has continued to ride the bus much to my dismay, but she really loves it and I do not have the heart to take it from her although the first dirty word she comes home with will be her last bus ride. She is still practicing soccer and doing well but I think we are starting to realize Maddie Grace is just too timid for soccer and we may need to move to something else, she does love it though. Her teacher told me this week that Maddie Grace told her that her mom had to go to the dr. to get shots. When she asked what the shots were for she said they were giving mom a baby, I thought this was hilarious I can see that we will have to have a serious conversation about where babies come from, when she is MUCH older. So things are not going as we planned but they never do in life, just have to keep rolling with the punches. At least we will have a distraction this weekend when the bulldogs play, GO DAWGS!!!! Keep us in your prayers as we continue this journey in hopes that we may at some point see a light at the end of the tunnel.
We did have some fun things over the past few weeks, since Maddie Grace is playing soccer again we went to a UGA soccer game to show her how big girls play soccer, which was a blast with friends. We also had my friend Mary's surprise birthday party at Shokitini in Athens, which was so much fun and a wonderful distraction with friends, Kyle and Jacks performance was the highlight of the evening or low light maybe depends on how you see it. Shokitini is a restaurant that is downtown Athens, a sushi bar that has rooms upstairs for about 20 people each and have a huge karaoke screen with 100's of songs to choose from, lots of fun. We also made it to a concert on the lawn at Ashford Manor on Monday, it is always lots of fun you take a picnic and tons of familys sit around eat, talk and listen to great music, this week was a swing/beach music oldies band, it was great.
So not everything has been bad, there are good days too they just seemed harder to find this week.