This silvery day . . .

One year ago today, I woke up in Beebe Medical Center with a new left knee.  Today, I feel some ache in that knee with the weather and with an unusually busy past week.  I was supposed to have an appointment with the office that did the surgery this morning but decided to not go.  Somewhere I caught a cough/cold/nasty bug, and yesterday I pretty much sat on my chair all day.  I finally made an appointment with my family doctor for this afternoon.  Maybe I can get to feeling better.  I haven’t been feeling quite right for over three weeks, but I kept saying, “I have to get through this:  (Funeral, two trips to Ohio, Rachel’s week at home, Thanksgiving boxes, Thanksgiving, little Christmas, getting everything together so that my family could have as uneventful a weekend together as possible, etc.) and THEN I will think about whether I am really sick or not.”  I’ve been down this road a time or two before, and I wasn’t surprised when I started feeling really bad on Monday, worse yesterday, and now not much better.  I was glad when the doctor’s office had one appointment left today and said I should come in.  I need some other prescriptions as well.  I so hope that I can go to church tonight — We are doing invitations for our Christmas Carol Sing along, and I REALLY, REALLY want to be there! 

Yesterday morning, Youngest Daughter began her long trip to Thailand.  She left Columbus, Ohio, around 10:00 yesterday morning.  They had a brief stop in Chicago and then went on to Tokyo.  Beloved Son in Law is my helper in times of need, and set up my laptop so that I could follow the flight on line.  Last night, I traced the flight across the edge of Korea, and thought about my girlie, and wondered what she was thinking, what she was feeling.  They landed in Tokyo, had another fairly brief stay there, an then it was back to the Friendly Skies for the last leg of the trip.  Around 11:30, Beloved Son in Law got a text from the airline saying that the flight had landed, and was taxi-ing up to the terminal.  It was almost midnight in Bangkok, and I was surprised by the sudden lurch in my gut as I thought about my 20 year old girlie, about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime.  I keep thinking that in the bigger scheme of things, 8-9 months isn’t all that much.  And in light of all the other things she has done, it seems like “just one more thing!”  And to me, as her Momma, I keep reminding myself that the empty place at our table, in our home, in my heart carries NOTHING of the sorrow or long term implications that friends of ours are feeling right now as they face the uncertainties of Traumatic Brain Injury in their college age daughter.  There is just no comparison.  And so, when I am tempted to weep over this far away girlie of mine and for that gut wrenching “Missing Her!” feeling, I am trying to use that as a spring board for a reminder to pray for Kevin, Carla, Karissa, Eric and Kelly.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they would trade their kind of pain for this sort of pain in the blink of an eye.

. . . and I praise HIM in this storm.

edit:  Home from the doctor.  Temp of 100.  Sinus infection, but “you don’t have pneumonia — YET.”  So he prescribed an antibiotic, and Certain Man laid down the law concerning church tonight and Bible Study tomorrow morning.  And I don’t have the energy to argue. 

So there. 

He thinks he won. 

I think I did.