Just when you think . . .

. . . that things are getting better, the bottom drops out of your bucket.  My mom used to tell me it is because you are not supposed to count your chickens before they hatch.  Kim’s divorce is final, Joshua has graduated with honors from elementary school, Tabitha is coming to visit, I have a shop in which to sell my designs, and most of all: Kim’s health has been really good for the past 8 months (relatively speaking).  Well that is what we thought.  She went to Wake Forest on Monday to participate in the gasteoparesis study and they had her drink too many carbs and she wound up in the hospital and went through ten hours of diarrhea, nausea, and out of whack blood sugar counts. While she was there they ran some routine tests of her blood and urine which showed some cause for alarm because her creatin level in the blood was too high, and they wanted her to see a specialist about her kidneys immediately.  It just so happened that she already had an appointment for today with a specialist because when she had to have that blood transfusion a couple of weeks ago her primary doctor didn’t like her lab results either.  Kim just called with the results of her specialist appointment.  On a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the worst and dialysis is needed, Kim’s creatin levels in the blood and urine put her at a 3. She is anemic (thus the transfusion) because the kidneys are not doing their job of supplying whatever it is you need to make blood in your bone marrow.  What they are going to do for the present is put her on high blood pressure meds (she is already on low blood pressure meds) and hormone therapy to try and combat the kidney failure.  She first has to do one of those 24 hour collection cycles and get them to the lab and the specialist will take it from there and figure out what type of meds and how much she should be taking. Then we will pray even harder (if that’s possible) that things will get better or at least not get worse.

I know that I am a pessimist, always have been because every time I start to feel comfortable and maybe even happy about something, things go bad.  That’s my experience with everything from husbands and lovers, to home purchases, to missing a sale at the grocery store, to picking the wrong line at MacDonald’s, and my children’s’ health; every single time, things go bad.  I pray, I plead my case(s) to whomever is in charge, I try and be optimistic but I end up divorced, then finding and losing the love of my life, living in a house that wasn’t built correctly and causes all kinds of problems and expenses, and having my children suffer ill health to the point of it wrecking their lives and the lives of those who care about them.  And I know I am whining, but damn, does everything have to go bad for Kim?  Can she not have some peace for a little while?  She was just told this week, by her ex-husband, that he’s not going to pay for Joshua’s meds for the summer; he needs to have some spending money so he can ‘have a life.’  Enough! Do you see why I periodically feel like not living anymore?  It is just so hard to face the day sometimes and the nights are a bitch.  I have friends to talk this over with but they cannot solve the problems or even make me or Kim feel better. What’s the use?