I feel like there hasn't been much to say since my radiation. My next scans aren't on the schedule yet. I was expecting the end of March but Dr. Buys wants to wait a week or two after that so she can see how well the radiation worked. I see her and have another chemo at the end of the month. I'll know more then.
My days and weeks run together predictably. Saturday, Sunday, Monday after chemo I'm fatigued and sleep a lot, but after that I feel pretty decent. I'm trying to work on "Legacy Projects", get a few things done for my family before I go. The most daunting is scanning and editing 10 years of "pre-digital" pictures. I want to have a digital scrapbook for every year of our marriage, so everyone can have copies. I have some other ideas floating around here on scraps of paper. I need to go through my room and put that all in one place! I'm starting a legacy writing class with the Writer-in-Residence at Huntsman on Wednesday. I've already added about 15 stories to the Memories section on FamilySearch, snippets of my life. That's my #2 daunting project.
I'm having conflicting feelings about how to write "everything" about my life. The biggest trial of my life has been estrangement from a sibling. Yep, even harder than terminal cancer!!! We did have a handful of short meetings last year, but ultimately I can't give her what she wants and keep myself sane and healthy at the same time. My conflicted feelings are, do I acknowledge all that in a FamilySearch story? Do I document in a vague way how all of this affected me for almost half my life? Mental illness runs through our family, through my dad's side is my best guess. There are some interesting / unbelievable stories about his ancestors . Good people, I'm sure - interspersed with dysfunction, abuse and neglect. I read all about it in histories written generations ago by my people.
I realized not too long ago that I lived my whole life without realizing I myself have anxiety and ADHD. It wasn't really a thing we talked about when I was a kid, to assume someone as young as I was could struggle through life and not know why. I learned to manage and get through it just fine now (medication). Isaac and McKinley both have anxiety and ADD (inattentive type), which makes certain things harder for them than the average Joe.
We woke up Sunday morning to find this huge limb broke out of our tree and had broken through our fence. We were SO lucky that it didn't fall 6 inches to the west. That would have meant ruining the corner post and 2 panels of fence. I went out and started hand sawing the branches I could. Then a neighbor stopped and cut through the biggest part of the branch for me. When Mat got home from church, we moved all the wood into the backyard, found the panels on the ground under snow, slid them into place and put the top rail (albeit broken) back in place.
This morning the fence people came to put panels in the posts on the other side of the yard, so they replaced the broken piece and added the cap. In a matter of 24 hours, everything was fixed and finished, and our yard is now the place our dogs can't see out. 😂 I'm OK with that! I don't think we can wait any longer to take that tree down. It's a 50 year old silver maple, very weak-wooded and prone to problems. This isn't the first huge limb to break out of the tree. We (I) knew it would be a problem when we bought the house.
