Left or Right?

Seriously, it's the greatest time of the year, right? How can I sit here feeling so blue when I'm supposed to be overjoyed that Christmas is 5 days away. I swore as a child that I'd never get tired of Christmas I just knew I'd be the one person who never grew up. Always knew I'd be in a family of my own celebrating through my children. In some ways I am and in some I'm not. This year more than ever I've felt like I'm really more connected with Zach. I feel like we're a real family. The fact that he wasn't born into the Peek household doesn't matter as much anymore. So how can feeling so blessed morph into feeling so incomplete at times? I'm so happy that we have him but I feel like there is just this big hole in my heart and in my life. I need somebody else. Sure we've been trying to have a baby for 3 years and we've had Zach for over 2 but it's different now. I feel that even though we have him our lives are incomplete. I feel like until we add another little family member we're just sitting in a standstill. I'm left with this big question of what to do. Financially medical treatments are out for a while and financially so is adoption and since we're still unsure as to whether fostering is right for us where do we go? How do we move forward? I'm tired of the game. I've been back and forth and back and forth and back and forth for too long I just want to pick a direction and stick with it. I feel like I'm stuck at a road and while it's not quite a crossroads you know that eventually you're going to have to pick a left or a right but for the mean time you keep walking down the middle. The middle never goes anywhere but you're still moving. I want to pick a left or a right. I want to know what's coming. I want something, ANYTHING to happen. At this point I know that I've just stopped. I'm not even going ahead. Sure I might pick up and move forward again eventually like has happened so many times but right now it's like forward is blocked. I'm stuck and seeing endless pictures all over the internet and watching families who are SO happy right now gets harder by the day. I pray and pray and pray for a loving heart. Being bitter is what got me to give up the last time. I want a baby more than anything but I want a kind, loving, caring and nurturing heart. I don't want to be a bitter person and even if that means giving up on the baby game for a while then that's what I'll do. I know this entire post is just one big circle around the same topic but that's how I feel my brain is at the moment. I'm just going around in one big circle trying to figure out whether to go left, right or forward.

10 weeks

I have exactly 10 weeks 3 days til bridesmaid day. I've already ordered my dress but I really don't mind having to pay for some awesome alterations.

I haven't brought up my weightloss journey in the blog yet, though I've been meaning too. Around this time last year I decided that I was tired of being crazy overweight. Time to woman up and slim down! I went to my doctor as I had heard she had a weightloss program. They give me Phentermine(which is awesome) and we talked over some stuff I already knew and away I went. I lost about 25 pounds over the next 3 months. Unfortunately thats when my father in law went into the hospital and it was put to a sudden halt. Hospital food, munchies from the gift shop and lots of snacking went into the next few months. By the time he passed in June I had gained it all back and then some.

August of last year I decided it was time to get back on track. Since I have PCOS weight is a huge factor with my ovulation. When I lost weight I got 2-3 back to back normal cycles but stopped with all the stress and weight gain the summer brought on. So with no cycles there is obviously no chance at fertility. Anywho, I set up an appointment and begin this process all over again. I was frustrated at myself for putting it back on. I weighed in at a rocking 287. That's right, almost 300 pounds. That number is scary, and awful and I hate admitting it. But maybe somebody else who has an awful high number won't feel as bad knowing somebody else is there too. I am 5'11" so at least I hide a lot of my weight well. Over the next few months I struggled with vacations, trips, holidays and etc. Every number I lost didn't feel worthwhile since I had already hit it in the past. Finally, I hit 262. That's the number I had gotten too when father-in-law got sick. Pretty quickly I surpassed it and found myself at 259 and then at 257. And now, the holidays. I made it through Thanksgiving okay, but about 2 weeks before Christmas I kinda gave up.

This brings me to now! I'm about 261 depending on the day and water weight but I'll weigh again tomorrow for my real re-starting point. I'm actually pretty excited to get going again. Today I started the 30 day shred and I feel awful about myself doing it but I know there must be something to it. I couldn't even do the entire video, had to take lots of small breaks. It may take me longer to move from level to level but if I successfully finish this and seriously get to the point where level 3 isn't making me want to die anymore, I'll have accomplished something I've never done before. I'll be more in shape than I've been since high school. I look forward to that day. Hopefully, I can just keep looking up.

Hopefully, in about 30 days I'll be showing you before/after pictures of me. It'll still be hard to show the before but hopefully the after will make that much better. I still won't look perfect, far from, but it's about progress, right?

And now...

My father-in-law passing was really hard on me. It still is. I took a complete break from wanting to have a baby. For a while I even thought I'd never want one. Between Zach going through a phase of fits and being depressed it just wasn't something I thought I wanted. Or at least I told myself that.

A few months ago I decided I was gonna get back on the weightloss train and see if I could at least get some cycles going. I started to lose weight but still didn't get a period. Finally after some more provera I got AF. So now I'm CD24 and I think I'm 4DPO. I ovulated!! Wahoo! So now I'm just forever waiting to get to start peeing on a stick...

Also, I've lost 25 pounds. Go me!

The "C" word....

Cancer. Something I had grown up quite familiar with. My dad is a cancer survivor and both of his parents lost their lives to cancer. I thought it was something I had seen enough of in my lifetime but once again, I was wrong.

About a week after we moved home my father in law went to the doctor because he had lumps in his armpits. He had already been about these lumps a few times but the doctor didn't seem worried and put them on antibiotics. This time they decided they would biopsy them and see what was going on. We had convinced ourselves it wasn't cancer so we weren't too worried. Unfortunately, we found out that it was cancer. Non Hodgkins Lymphoma. Somewhere between stage 3-4 to be exact. Even with it being that progressed the outlook was great and he would start chemo immediately and be done in 6 months. The outlook was bright and Lane could make it through anything, he was a superhero afterall. He had survived major quadruple bypass, having multiple stints put in, heart attacks and much more. It was almost like you name it, he survived it. He was confident he was going to survive this too.

Things continued to go well, we made it past the holidays(he was diagnosed almost a year ago exactly) and in March of this year we were told that the cancer was almost completely gone and he would only need 1-2 more chemo treatments! Praise God, we thought, he was going to beat this. In early April of this year Lane got very confused one day and had to call an ambulance because his legs had given out on him(he thought we were out of town). He went to the hospital and spent about 4 days and seemed to be feeling a lot better. His brother and sister were in from out of town for a surprise birthday of an elderly relative and he wanted to get out and spend time with them. They visited him on a Friday and left on Saturday. He seemed great and we couldn't understand why they weren't releasing him.

On Monday we noticed that he was sleeping a lot and he seemed kinda confused. He acted very "drugged up" but when talking to his nurses they said he wasn't on anything stronger than Lortab. We went in early every morning trying to catch his doctor but we couldn't catch him early enough and when the doctors came in he was always sleeping so they didn't know about his behavior and the nurses assumed it was normal even when we said it wasn't. Because of the grace of one nurse who had him multiple days we were finally able to convince her this wasn't normal. The doctor ordered a CT scan and I went up that day while Adam was at work and waited for him to get done and get his results. The doctors really didn't think anything would show up on the scan but they basically did it to appease us. As I waited in his room I got a phone call from a doctor. He asked who I was and I told him, he then told me he'd be up in a minute to talk to me. I panicked immediately. They do NOT come talk to you when everything is normal. Those were the worst few minutes of my entire life and I just sat there and waited. When the doctor came in it felt like a scene from a movie. I tried to absorb everything he said so that I could relay it as well as possible to Adam. At the moment we didn't know much but we knew there was a mass in his brain. They kept reiterating that it was nothing good. In the coming weeks we talked to more and more doctors who ran lots of tests and in the end we found out that it was cancer in his brain. The lymphoma had spread to his brain and had created multiple lesions. Lymphoma in general is a very treatable disease, lymphoma in the brain, is not. By that time Lane had worsened a lot. He barely spoke and when he did it came out all jumbled. Every once in a while he would do something very Laneish and for those moments I am extremely grateful for. He slept most of the day and communication was done mostly with nods and maybe an occasional answer. We were told that if we did pursue treatment that we would need to transfer to a different hospital and that it would probably only extend his life but he would never improve past where he was now. Lane had made it very apparent that he was okay with dying in fact in some ways he was ready to go to heaven. We made the extremely hard decision not to pursue treatment and had decided to bring him home on Hospice. My being a stay at home mom was a huge blessing at this point as we only had to hire somebody to be with him when Adam was working and I had to be somewhere else. It was the hardest thing I've ever done but I'm so glad he was at home with us. On June 5th 2011 I had my very first Willow House party because my sister talked me into selling it with her. It went okay. Later on Adam and I were just kinda hanging out and he went to check on his dad. He told me he didn't think he would make it through the night. It really didn't hit me what he had said. I wish more than anything I would have gone in there immediately and sat with him, but I didn't. At this point though Lane didn't even wake up anymore or move at all. About 30 minutes later I went in to check on him, and I found him, laying there, pale and lifeless. I still have flashbacks of that exact moment. I screamed for Adam and started crying. I told him that I thought he was gone and Adam went to check and he was. Hospice came out and really helped us with everything that night. They worked with the funeral home and we didn't have to do anything. My parents both came over and my dad swooped in to get Zach and take him out of there and my mom sat with me. Our pastor came over and sat too. I still can remember this moment like it was yesterday and it was the hardest night of my entire life. We had lost this amazing man and nothing could prepare us for it. I still miss him every day. I regret not taking my time with him more seriously and I can only hope and pray that he knew how much I really did love him. I hate that I was never able to give him a grandchild, but I was able to give him Zach and they had the most special bond I've ever seen an adult and child have. For that I am thankful. I am thankful that I married into this family. I have met some amazing people and I love them all. I do miss Lane though, I don't quite understand why he left us or why cancer had to hit him, but it did and he's gone. At least he isn't in pain anymore...

So, now what?

Brand new parents to a 3.5 year old, working at a brand new job, living in a new city, dealing with the courts and social workers. My life became a whirlwind of new stuff and I was having a hard time coping. We prepared up-front to be forever parents to Zach, because even though she could get him back it would be a hard road and with her past it didn't seem likely, also we figured it best to prepare for the long-term ahead. I had to go through a long road of coping with the fact that this new child was in my life and that the child that my heart yearned for would not be my first child anymore. There would never be that full on mommy & me time or being spoiled as the first child. It was a hard road but one that I've come to accept, in fact now I can't wait to make Zach a big brother because even though he has siblings he's never lived with them and as Adam and I both lived as only children(my sisters are half sisters and never lived with us) we know that we want him to grow up with another child.

So our lives have started to normalize a bit but Adam and I both become unhappy with our jobs. I did NOT like the call center life and I was tired of the sales stuff. Adam was unhappy with the way the store he was in was ran and constantly being super busy. Oddly enough the GM at the store in our town had gotten fired and they needed another licensed person in the store so it could function properly without them constantly bringing somebody from another city down. They offered to move him back to his old position but keep his same pay. To us that was amazing! We were still paying our house payment(though we were never able to move back to that house because of it being across state lines) and our rent in Louisville so with his pay raise and the money the state gives us to help take care of Zach it allowed me to become a stay at home mom. It was a really tight budget but because most jobs I qualify for in our town are close to minimum wage it wasn't worth it to work and pay daycare. So back to our hometown we go and once again things work out in the oddest of ways because only a week later we face something that will forever change our lives...

New city brings new surprises...

So we packed up all our stuff and moved 4 hours away, not too far but for people that were born and raised in one city(though I did briefly move to Louisville on my own a year prior) it was a big enough change for us. We found an apartment, left the house that we had only owned a year, I left my job and Adam transferred. I started to look for another job and eventually found one as a sales rep in a call center for AT&T. I was so excited about it and the pay was nothing short of amazing. I was going to start out making more money than Adam did and he had worked for his company for 9 years! What a blessing! About 2 weeks into my new job some things go down with my sister and she loses custody of her youngest son(she had already lost custody of the other 4). This is a child that I hardly knew and had seen maybe 4 times since he was born. He was 3 1/2 and a total stranger. I had basically cut my sister out of my life years prior and forced myself not to connect with him as I had my other nieces and nephew. It was only through the kind-heartedness of my husband that he actually talked me into taking him in. According to him family is family and it wasn't his fault that this happened. I listened and overnight we were transformed into parents and has it ever been a rough journey since...

Baby, Baby, Baby!

As I said before, I knew right away I wanted a baby and I had finally gotten the husband who wanted it just as I did! So this is the easy part, right? You go off the pill, have sex and get pregnant. Just like that, right? Not in my case. First you have to ovulate and I soon discovered that was exactly what I was *not* doing.

After a few months of long cycles that seemed like they would never end in March, 2010 I decided to finally see my OBGYN. She ran some blood tests and easily confirmed it was Polycystic Ovary Syndrome(PCOS). I had already been on the internet site justmommies.com enough to have figured out what that meant and I felt kinda shattered at first. We decided that I would take Provera to end my cycle and induce my period and then we would start Clomid. A plan! I can handle that!

My cycle ends and I go in for my CD(cycle day)3 ultrasound to find that I have a cyst that I did not manage to get rid of with my last period. Great. I can't take the Clomid because it might overstimulate the cyst and cause an ovary to rupture so I am told to wait and see if my period will come on its own.

As I am stuck in the waiting game my husband and I decide that we feel stuck with where he's at in his company at the time. His manager wasn't doing what he should and when the position above my husband was opened up he just left it open and kept giving excuses to why he wasn't promoting him. We decided it was time to make a game changing move. We found an open position for a lab management position in a store in Louisville. We thought if nothing else we wouldn't mind moving there as I have lots of family there and hopefully that would inspire his manager to give him the new position. It did not cure the GM's laziness and off to Louisville we went, which also meant goodbye to my current OBGYN and stuck once again in the waiting game...