New Pup

Well, the blog format changed. Joan and I are apart for one Summer and the blog ends up with a purple background and cute quotes down at the bottom. Although I enjoyed my previous set-up that was very sterile and clean cut, I believe Joan's set up is a little more aesthetically pleasing. Moving on...

On Sept. 17th (last Saturday) our little family went from 2 to 3. Just like that. No morning sickness, no stretch marks, no weight gain, no doctor's visits or prenatal stuff, no messy delivery...just a puppy. It was fun to pick her out. As we walked down the row of puppies, it was pretty easy to pick her out. The first set of puppies had poop all over them and they were climbing all over each other. Cute, in a mud-wrestling sort of way....but no. The second set had a CRAZY puppy that was dragging his bottom teeth up and down the glass. Cute in a hey-lets-give-him-a-chalkboard-that-he-can-scratch-his-nails-down sort of way. Definitely no. The next one was full of wiener dogs and chihuahuas. Both cute, but the wiener dogs (dachshund) remind me of, well, hot dogs; and if I wanted a chihuahua I'd probably just get a rat--much cheaper. Then, there they were. Two sibling Maltipoos (Maltese Poodle Mix). Sunny's brother had a head that looked like an orange on a toothpick. He was wrestling with Sunny. We knew she was the one. We wanted to make sure that we weren't just rushing into the decision though. We put her on hold and slept on it (not actually on the puppy....). The next morning we went to all the local rescue centers and pounds. We saw some cute dogs, really cute. But either they were too big or too crazy. Finally, after much deliberation we went and got our pup.

She's a great dog. Training her is tough and takes a lot of patience. Its worth it though. For the times when she curls up on our feet in the kitchen while we're making dinner (and literally moves and resettles herself on our feet every time we move). Or when all my rough housing with her pays off when she catches a cricket! I was so proud! The many times she falls asleep on her back with her feet in the air or with her upside down. The funniest is probably when she goes to eat from her bowl and her back legs lift off the ground because her head is too heavy....haha.
Anyway, she's a good pup. We're happy to have her.

The Summer of Fortune Cookies!

Oh, what do I say about this summer?

It has been the longest, hottest, driest, most lonely summers of all time.  

 

Here is a short run-down:

1,000,000 fortune cookies brought home by my brother from Panda Express.  Okay, maybe not a million BUT we have a whole drawer full of fortune cookies and fortune papers littering the front room.

2 ½ months with only one night of rainfall.   Instead of reading road billboards saying that there is an accident on 9000 South, we have signs reading extreme wildfire danger and extreme drought conditions.

67 days living in Texas without my baby.

39 consecutive days of enduring the blistering heat of temperatures over 100 degrees.

2 visits from Adam to Texas to keep me company.

1 trip to Utah for the 4^th of July for an AWESOME weekend!

1 new big girl job.

BUT all of this doesn’t compare to

1 day away from Adam moving down to Texas to stay forever!

I can't believe it, it is finally the home stretch! I can’t wait for Friday! Adam and Cole (his brother) will be arriving from their cross country road trip.  Adam took 2 finals Wednesday morning, packed up the car, went and visited family, and then started their drive from Salt Lake City, UT, then venting down to St. George, UT, then moseying through Arizona, then flying on through to the home-stretch to end destination of our apartment in Texas! 

He will be arriving in just the right amount of time.  Our one year anniversary is already this Sunday! I can’t believe it, time has flown.  We have been through some highs and lows but everything has made us just that much stronger!  I am so happy and grateful to have a man like Adam by my side forever and always.  Thank you for always being patient and understanding with me.  Adam, you really are my best friend.  I love you so much and I can’t wait for you to get here and keep me company!! :)

Ode to BYU

**Disclaimer: This is just as much for my own journal as it is for you. So if you aren't in the mood to go down memory lane here, don't read on.**

I spent 16 hours on campus today. Ridiculous eh? It was 11:30pm, I was sitting on the 4th floor of the library (you know, just over by the children's literature mural? the one with the lion and dinosaurs and the kid with a walking stick poking a skull on the ground?) rapidly finishing up my online mastering chemistry assignment that was due by midnight. I got it done just in time for the usual wake-up-and-get-your-butt-out-of-the-library music to come on at 11:45pm. For four of the last seven years I have heard everything from Duel of the Fates from Star Wars to If I Had a $1,000,000 by Barenaked Ladies as I walked out of the HBLL. Tonight I'm walking home in some sort of weird existential state. As I walk past the beautifully terraced square in front of the monstrous JFSB I can't help but recant my many desires to "get out of here as fast as I can". I slow my pace a little and take it all in. I don't care who you are or what color you bleed, you can't refute the fact that BYU campus is pretty. Very pretty. I can see the "Tree of Wisdom" statue glowing in the moonlight as I walk toward what is known as the "Fishbowl" of the Benson Chemistry building (another favorite study place of mine). Now i'm walking down the South Campus stairs. I can hear the peaceful stream behind me as I descend to the newly-renovated duck pond. I can barely make out the figures of those notoriously mischievous ducks enjoying the quiet of the night. Finally, I reach my car. Its the only one in the parking lot. Thats a good feeling. Many of you know the feeling. Its the feeling that you know you just outlasted all the other peeps who parked there that day. Its the feeling of getting into your car and knowing that you just studied your brains out and are that much better for it. Yeah, thats a good feeling. As i'm driving away from BYU, it hits me in the stomach....i'm hungry. I might as well stop by Wendy's on the way home. Dang, I think i've eaten more today than I did this whole past weekend. Thats a good feeling too, though. It means your brain is using up massive amounts of glucose. It means that tonight you are the Ironman of Academia.

Today, I finished my chemistry midterm, I walked down the stairs of the largest college testing center in the nation, opened the door and looked for my number on that screen. I've done it probably at least 100 times now. You know what i'm talking about. That moment of intense anxiety as you check and double check to make sure that the score next to your ID number is correct. Yes, it took a long time, but I can say that my score has had an "Awesome!" next to it. Its a far cry from my 13% on one of my tests from freshman year. (Let's just say that if you took my GPA now and divided it by my freshman GPA you would get a number a lot closer to 2 than 1)

A week from today I will take my last exam ever at BYU. The time is ripe. I don't quite belong here anymore. I'm the last of the Mohicans. All my friends have moved on. I've had my fun. You ask anyone close to me and they will tell you that I definitely have had my fair share of fun. :)

I walk into what will be my last course of my BYU education, Music 101(a GE I postponed til the very end). As I sit there I watch the band-spanking-new freshmen walk in. This one kid is wearing gym shorts with a button up shirt and last year's EFY lanyard, his face is peppered with acne, he has a lost look on his face although its the end of the term and he's been doing this for 7 weeks already. I watch as he scopes out where exactly he's going to sit, who is having the best conversation, which girl can he sit next to that will wait for him while he goes on his mission.... They are so fresh. I'm not. I've been where they are. I've done everything they are going to do. Its my time to peace out. It feels right. I feel good.

So here is my Ode to the school that took in a punk teenager when it probably shouldn't have. Here's to the school that beat me into academic submission, nurtured my maturity (because we all knew it was only going to happen by a miracle from God), helped me grow spiritually (even though i'd still rather watch paint dry than go to a group FHE), and introduced me to a group of friends i'll never forget. Here's to golfing off of Heritage Halls, saran-wrapping a Canadian, eating frosties with pickles, watching Jimmer make 3-point shots from past half court, Mona, road-trips to Vegas, staying up all night and then winning our basketball game by pounding monster drinks (not recommended), playing bball against Aaron (its always an adventure), Lodge 29, arguing with towing companies, doughnuts in the parking lot with Dusty....when there is no snow on the ground, hot springs in Midway, bubbles! (Ken), sneaking in to play basketball in the MTC gym, sleeping over in front of the Wilk doors for textbook buyback, throwing TVs and monitors off the balcony, baking bacon naked (definitely not recommended!), sledding without shirts, restraining Joan from trying to touch Abouo's butt, true blue football, hiking the Y, nutty putty caves, Walmart (in EVERY sense of the word), All-American Rejects and second-hand high, eating Bertie Bott's every flavor beans and almost throwing up (Dave, i'm gonna drop a soap one in your food next time i see you), NCMO (everyone had to try it once...right?), rolling golf carts, Halo parties, riding Emily as hard as she likes to be ridden (that one's for you Dusty), dry ice bombs, every possible intramural sport, turf-burn, barbecue sauce, bowling in the Wilky, Imagine Dragons, turning on all the water in the apartment when your roommate wants to conserve water (poor Glen), roommates with green socks....that were originally white, and most importantly here's to meeting my best friend and eternal companion (love ya YLT).

Yes, tonight I'm proud to be a cougar. Tonight and forever I'll bleed True Blue.

  Esse quam videri.

You lost a third of your colon? Can you even go to the bathroom anymore?!!!!

 So, it went like this. Joan and i were out shooting with Dusty. A bear came down from the close-by mountain and charged after me. You see, bears only really go after the alpha male in a group of mammals. Naturally, the bear gravitated towards me....Anyway, i secure Joan behind me and wait to see what the bear's next move is going to be. As it bounds toward me, i dig my feet in and prepare for the impact (Alpha males don't run, they challenge!). The bear is bounding closer and closer and just when it is about 5 feet away, i hear a loud BANG!!! I look up just as the bear goes lifeless in mid-air due to the impact of the shotgun Joan just shot the bear with. The bear falls onto me and his lifeless claw splits open my stomach as we collapse to the ground.  The adrenaline is pumping through my veins, my stomach feels warm as my shirt sticks to my torn flesh. I'm being crushed by the massive weight of this Grizzly Bear. Dusty picks up the bear (literally, he picked it up) and throws it in the back of the 4runner. (Naturally, we're going to want to show the bear off later. If anything, Joan and i could cut it up and live off the meat for a year and donate the brain to the BYU anatomy lab...) He then picks me up, puts me in the 4runner. Joan speeds across the countryside to the nearest hospital as i slip into an unconscious state. Finally, just before my body begins to shut down, the surgeons contain the bleeding. I stabilize.

Yeah......so, maybe it didn't quite go like that. Here's the story in a nutshell. End of January i had started feeling sick in the stomach. I thought it was the usual stomach flu. This goes on for the weekend. Finally, Sunday night rolls around and i am having bring-you-to-your-knees pain in my stomach, specifically in my right side. Naturally, we thought it was appendicitis. ER admits me. An intravenous ct scan, rectal contrast ct scan, 6 vials of blood, and a few pushes of morphine and i'm sitting on the 6th floor at 4am. It wasn't appendicitis, but they could see air trapped in the wall of my colon. Something called pneumatosis intestinalis.

Okay, we're going to pause here for a second and clear some things up. For some odd reason, people think that your colon somehow means your anus or your butt or some other inappropriate body part. For the record, the colon= large intestine. I told someone at school the other day that i had a third of my colon taken out and he was like,"Dude! That sucks! Can you even go to the bathroom anymore?!!?! That must suck to sit down!" No, actually, when they took out my colon they took out my digestive system. I don't eat anymore, so i don't have to go to the bathroom....Of course i can still go to the... You know what, nevermind. Moving on.

Anyway, they take me off food altogether in the hospital. They gave me a "pick line". Which is like an IV but its a catheter that goes in through a vein in your inner bicep and they feed the catheter through the vein all the way to the heart. I could feel them pushing it through....and a good portion of the way to my heart. It was trippy. Actually, i enjoyed seeing them do all the different tests and stuff. It was fascinating! So, this catheter is what pumps my food straight to my heart. I was on this for about a week. To the right here, you can see three of the usual four bags of liquid going into my heart. The yellow stuff is the food. The small one is my antibiotic. The back one is just your usual saline solution. I usually had a white bag which was giving me my lipids and fats. Anyway, i could go off about all the cool things i liked...but i'll spare you the time.

So, they did 3 X-rays, 3 ct scans, 2 EKGs, an echocardiogram, and i was usually wearing a heart monitor stuck to my chest. It was fantastic. In this picture you can see the falls risk sign on my door. Yeah, so the first night i was there, they had taken all this blood and i was on morphine, and they weren't letting me eat anything (i'm hypoglycemic...bad idea) so i get up to go to the john at like 3 am. As i head back to bed i just plain passed out. I was out before i hit my head on the door frame and then collapsed to the ground. Joan freaked and ran out to get the nurses. Anyway, about 20 seconds later i wake up to the nurses and Joan pulling me up off the ground. So, for the next two weeks i got to deal with nurses thinking i was an eighty-year -old "Falls Risk".




After a week of not knowing exactly what was causing so much pain, the doctor decided to just take out the inflamed portion of my colon. Its the ascending colon. So, they gave me an epidural (not too comfy...) to paralyze me. Next thing i knew, i was being wheeled back up to my floor. The next day i tried to sit up and instantly a massive headache hit me. Turns out, the epidural punctured my spinal column and i was leaking cerebral spinal fluid. They thought it would go away with a day or so. It didn't. So they did a blood patch to fix it. That was equally comfortable to the epidural. Within 30 minutes i was feeling good! Basically what they did was cut down around my belly button. The doctor reached in, cut off my ascending colon and took it out. He then reattached the rest of my large intestine to my small intestine. As they were putting the cut-out portion of my large intestine in the biohazard bin a large parasite crawled out of it. The doctor tried to grab it, but then it knocked him over. The nurses had to pile on to the parasite. Unfortunately the doctor got bit by it and lost a finger......


Turns out, when they finally pulled out the bad part of my intestine they were really glad they took it out. The intestinal wall was inflamed and weakened. The doctor said my intestine had flipped and was cutting off its own circulation. If they hadn't have taken it out, the intestine most likely would have burst....which would have been horrible. Overall, it was 13 days in the hospital. Joan slept the night in that wretched chair almost every night. I have to give her credit for always being there for me. She's such a sweetheart. I appreciate every one who came to visit, called, sent messages, and helped out with meals. It really meant so much! A special shout-out goes to my family for making the effort to come down (especially my brothers and Dusty for the blessing), for Devin in supplying me with endless movies, and for Dusty in making me smell his amazing burger as he ate it right next to me as i soaked in my IV.... (just kidding, Dusty was there every single day, thanks Dusty)






They stapled my stomach shut. It looked like a caterpillar!

This was the day they took the staples out. Awesome!

 And the final product. They kept my mole intact. For this, i am grateful.

On a different topic. Blog followers meet Xenia. She went mudding a little while ago and was just loving it. She actually had surgery today! They fixed her control arm, exhaust, replaced some lights, and got her re-registered!

Alright peeps, thats it for now. Have a good night!

6 Months....time flies!

 Yes yes, i know. Its almost midnight. I have so many other things i could be doing, but somehow i am just not finding the motivation. Joan has been gone since Wednesday morning and doesn't get back til tomorrow. So, i'm blogging. Its a little overdue anyway. I would tell you all about the wedding and the honeymoon which is actually more exciting than this post, but this will have to do for now.

For Christmas we headed down to good old Katy, TX (where Joan is from) and spent the break with her family. It was SO nice to relax and get away from the depressing, cold Utah winter. We went with the family to Fiesta Texas Six Flags in San Antonio. It was awesome! I have a weak stomach though...so i watched as the rest of the siblings and Joan went on all the "throw up" rides. Bleh. I kicked back with my Sour Patch kids and enjoyed watching them get sick while i wasn't getting sick....

For Christmas Eve, we did one of the most fulfilling things i have ever done during Christmas time: SERVICE! Man, what a novel concept. It was pretty cool. We went into downtown Houston and served food to the homeless. I swear, i have never seen that many homeless people in my life. (And that's saying something...I thought i saw a lot in Hungary) They just poured into the Toyota Center (where the Houston Rockets play) for hours and hours. I was in charge of green beans, Joan was in charge of corn. Turns out that homeless people like green beans more.

 You're driving on the freeway in Texas. Suddenly you see a billboard with a huge chipmunk on it that says something like" PEACE   LOVE   BUCEES" If you have never been to Bucees, you have no idea what you are missing. Picture a 7/11 gas station on steroids, made classy, with a whole personal merchandise section. Oh, and they have grills. They have a whole 30 ft. wall of beef jerky. You walk into the bathroom and seriously, its like you've walked into a palace.
So picture this, i'm looking at the anti-nausea drugs (in preparation for Six Flags). As i'm standing there i hear a thick Texan accent behind me say in a half growl," Son, would you look at that! That is bad-ass!". I turn around to see a middle-aged Texan man in a wide brimmed cowboy hat nudging his 3 year old son to look at the stand-up burger grill against the wall. hahahaha. Gotta love this place. Just so you can know about this gloriousness, check out their website: Bucees.com

 This was cool. We got to go to the Houston Museum of Natural Science. I loved it! We got to see the Titanic Exhibit in the planetarium. It was interesting to me that one of the exhibits was all about oil. I wouldn't have been surprised if George Dubbya walked in and gave a personal presentation on it himself. Haha. It was pretty interesting though. In the picture Joan and I are standing next to William and Kat, Joan's younger siblings.

Over the break i had my first real experience with the great Texas vs. Texas A&M rivalry. Joan's twin John is getting a chemical engineering degree at the University of Texas, Joan's sister Becca and her husband Jared are living in College Station, the home of A&M. Jared is working on his PhD in History there. We spent a night at their place over the break. Jared and Bec gave us a tour of the Aggie campus and i was loving it! I used to think BYU had some cool traditions until i was given a brief history lesson via Jared at A&M. Whether it be the unbelievable 12th Man stadium, the century tree, or the bonfire memorial, i was enthralled with the place. The campus is HUGE. Plus, it was kinda cool to see what a REAL college experience might be like. (You know what i mean, BYU is real, but its a private school, which excludes a lot of stuff....good and bad.)
Jared and Becca took us to the Dixie Chicken, also known as "The Chicken". This place is a big deal. Supposedly, this bar serves the most beer per square foot than any other in the U.S. Wow. It helps that College Station is the beer capital of the nation. We played some pool there and enjoyed just hanging out.
Ha, funny story. So i went to go to the bathroom in The Chicken. I looked around trying to find the washroom. Finally i found this little room that seemed to be the bathroom. I walked in and found myself surrounded by a feeding trough full of ice. I looked to my left and saw a stall, but it was occupied. So, i timidly looked around wondering if this trough was the urinal or the ice bin for the beer. Confused i went out to ask Jared who just laughed and said it was the urinal. So i ventured back and had a blast melting ice, but i tell you what, its a good thing i double checked. It would have been real awkward if it wasn't the urinal...

Finally, we topped off the break with some fireworks on New Year's. We had a blast down in Tejas. Can't wait to go back!

Lastly, just want to give a quick update on Joan and I right now. Joan is interviewing with Lockheed Martin down in Dallas for a purchasing job with them. They flew her down there for a couple days. It would be awesome if she got that. But, we'll see. Joan graduated in December with her Supply Chain management B.S.  She currently works for Sun Products Corp. up in SLC. She is a logistics planner for them right now.
Me, i'm almost done with undergrad. It looks like August or December will be my graduation date. I'm taking the MCAT in April and applying to medschool in June. We're excited to be spending the summer here in Utah.
Recently i had my ascending colon taken out...thats a fun story. You'll have to wait til next post for the gruesome and awesome details!