the answer from memory lane monday

they were all true!

1. really with this many kids and being low budget for the last 7 years, not having to worry about Christmas and the expectations sounds fabulous to me. and don't get me wrong i love to give gifts, and love the reason for the season but alot of it, is crap. and the multiple visits to family, and toys i would never buy for ourselves, given just to give because toys are fun at Christmas. ,when we really could use a pair of new shoes for every kid or some winter basics. giving a certain amount to family members that make way more money than you. oh and one year we were super low income. so Peyton was in head start preschool, he actually received a toy from toys for tots! I was HORRIFIED. it is part of the program, and we were poor, Lance was in school and we had 4 kids back then, living on what was left of our student loans in December, and you know welfare , food stamps rock! But i could do without the stress, the pressure, the requests to donate to the less fortunate when we are less fortunate ourselves( but don't get assistance, because i am too proud. and we were lucky enough to live with my mom), asked by people that should know our real life situation(not naming names). which if i was J.W. it would be so easy to avoid all of it. all the stress, and the lack of funds wouldn't be so apparent.
so yeah I'd still go shopping on black Friday for the bargains but I'd just give the stuff away then for no reason , and not wait a month. i couldn't really be Jehovah's Witness but the whole elimination of holiday stress is super tempting.and i think it every year. part of my denial and avoidance issue.

2. true. he worked for Home Depot, we even sold our house and moved to Yuma to open the Yuma store. and when we found out he no longer had any opportunity for raises(since they'd stepped down from his position and moved back to Mesa) and they changed the policy that you had to have a degree to be management. AND WE WENT THERE TO BE MANAGEMENT. so he quit just days before Christmas. which made time off easy but seriously stressed me out for the long haul.

3. true. yeah bad. we got an Atlas from him,the card confessed how happy he was now and had never been before. there was a ceremony for Valentines day after that. and it really was the day my cat got run over,but i think i have mentioned this one before. and i identified it by a bony thing at the end of it's tail, it had been broken and you could feel it. i was more bummed about my cat, it was a outside one. but it was super friendly and nice to kids and it thought it was a dog.

4. absolutely true. last year. i was ready for my cancer testing (whole body thyroid scan, and biopsy on some abnormal neck lymph nodes), to be ready i had to go off of my thyroid meds for 6 weeks,my TSH levels were sky high. i had every bad symptom you can have being Hypo thyroid ( including headache, palpitations, chest pain, joint pain, body aches, exhaustion, depression, nausea, eye pain, high blood pressure, slow thoughts, delayed reaction, there are more but these are what i remember) . and was super sick, weak and depressed. Lance had just Graduated from ASU, finished an internship at Honeywell on a Friday and started at Freescale semiconductor the next Monday. he was gone, had no time off, and couldn't help at all. and i had the 6 kids home. a couple days before Christmas, i went in for my Biopsy, and they seemed all sorts of incompetent, and i reamed the DR.s, then they couldn't get me in for my whole body scan,I found out on the way home from the biopsy it was going to be after Christmas because the Dr. office couldn't get my referral right. that day i had an anxiety attack after the biopsy brought , on by stress and my other hypothyroid symptoms, so i went in to a different hospital than my biopsy was at , and they thought with the chest pain and stuff it could be a pulmonary embolism (blood clot in your lung), and did a chest X-ray and CT scan with contrast, but you have to realize ct contrast has tons of iodine, and my body was ready to uptake a dose of radioactive iodine, for my whole body thyroid scan they couldn't get me in for, so it absorbed all the CT contrast screwing over my radioactive iodine whole body scan. I made sure before to ask if it would effect it and the people giving the CT with contrast told me it would clear in 24 hours. that is a bunch of crap and they had no clue, because it can take 3 months to a year to clear enough for a whole body scan. so the CT found no pulmonary embolism , it did find something else (probably scar tissue in my lung from an old infection but it showed up and thyroid cancer can spread to your lung so that was an added bonus to worry about and the biopsy came back suspicious) So i never got my Thyroid whole body scan(i had to have a PET with CT fusion instead, but will have a thyroid scan in FEB ) . it has been almost a year since i was ready for my scan off my meds and i couldn't get it. so that Christmas vacation was Hell for everyone in our house. and the kids who had been asking/doubting if there was a Santa all season and acting naughty and fighting , and asking for crap they knew they were never gonna get, but holding out hope to get it from Santa, yeah i told them the truth. i felt like hell, and had no help. people were busy, and we lived far away from my family. it was the worst Christmas ever. and I never decorated the tree, finally the kids did it themselves with candy canes all around. and when his dad and his wife came to visit, with 2 hours notice, and the house looked like severe and total crap, and i got out of bed to visit, and straight back to bed afterward, she actually had the gall to talk smack about how messy my house was and that CPS should/could be called, she went and told his sister this. and it got back to me in January through my mother in law so it made the rounds first. yeah, i had cancer, my tests got f-ed up by an uninformed tech, and i was home alone with 6 kids 8 and under all day on Christmas vacation , and she chose to judge me harshly and gossip about me about how dirty my house was. we never decorated the tree, and i told the kids there was no Santa. low point in my life. and the memory of it still makes me cry.

So here a tricky 3 truths and a lie, they were all true , i couldn't think up a lie. I am just hoping writing about this might help me release the bad memories and leave it in the past. instead of just ignoring it, and feeling bad about stuff every time i remember. the memories keep coming back and putting a damper on my holiday every year. so now i think every year will definitely be better than last year. because if you read # 4, it doesn't get worse. i have lots to be thankful for. and this year i am just avoiding cancer thoughts starting with my DR. appointment i canceled for tomorrow, i can deal with it next year, it'll still be around.

now i really gotta get my house in order, and freaking decorate so i can stop feeling inadequate every time i see someone else's cute decorations. and lights.and cards. it'll never happen if i don't get started. one thing at a time. gotta keep moving forward.