Thursday, June 10, 2010

A day in the life

I often get emails that thank me for this blog. That makes me feel super duper great, actually, because it makes me feel like 1) people are reading (wooHOO!) and 2)there is something in my story that resonates with others. I think that's pretty cool.

When I was first diagnosed, I didn't find any other blog out there about PKD, or at least I didn't know anybody who knew about any other blogs. I have since found a few, and they are great, but at the time, the only thing that was available was the patient support group, which was run through a list-serv.

This list-serv freaked me out.

Every day I would get emails about one bad thing, or another bad thing, or how something else awful happened to yet another person with PKD. Seriously, after a month or so, I unsubscribed, because I couldn't simultaneously deal with my own emotional adjustment and everybody's else's grief too. And so I started my blog.

An email I got a while ago thanked me for being so normal. I don't often get thanked for being normal, so while it was an odd thing to say, I actually took it as a compliment. And it's true that in so many ways, I lead a completely normal life. Let me tell you about it. And if you want to skip this post, I'll understand. A normal life is pretty boring.

Today, I woke up at 6:00, but turned off the alarm to snuggle with my husband. I usually run at six on MWF and Saturday mornings, but Tues and Thurs are my day off to sleep in. Plus, my husband and I had gotten into a big fight last night, so some snuggling was in order. He left the house at 7 for work, right before the kids got up. My 8 year old crawled into my bed around 7:15, and he and I snuggled until around 7:30, when he got up to get dressed and do his homework. I dragged out of bed at 8, helped him with breakfast and getting packed up for school, and hugged him out the door at 8:45 to the bus stop.

My 3 year old daughter and I spent the morning sort of puttering around the house. She and I watched Dora (or, rather, she watched it wrapped up in my lap while I dozed. Yes, I was tired--didn't I tell you Thursday is my day to sleep?). I put in a load of laundry, cleaned up breakfast dishes, chatted with a friend and my sister, and then around noon, I packed up my daughter and headed to the Y.

I dropped her off in daycare while I did laps in prep for my open ocean swim next month. It was a short work out--I only got to do 700m before they closed the day care (a hazard when you leave your house after noon, and the day care closes at 1:00). I then played in the kiddie pool with Little Sister for another 45 minutes or so, then gave her a hot shower and headed to Chick-fil-A. (I don't know about you, but swimming laps gives me a hankering for chocolate shakes.)

After Chick-Fil-A (I chose the char-grilled chicken sandwich--it's only 300 calories, and compared to other items, it has a lower sodium count), I went grocery shopping. I came home, fixed dinner, ran another errand, then picked up my son from the bus stop. He and his sister are currently wrestling on the playroom floor while we wait for my husband to get home. Then we can have dinner before one of us takes the boy to swim practice and the other one puts the girl to bed. Dinner is a rotisserie chicken I picked up at the store with ceasar salad and cantalope--again with the chicken, I know, but again, low (ish) sodium all the way around. I have a caffeine free Diet Coke sweating on a napkin on the computer desk while I type, the same Diet Coke I used to wash down my meds I took just a few minutes ago.

I'll admit, I'm not very good at taking meds. I take them when I remember, which means I never take them at the same time every day, and there are often days I forget altogether. I'm told this is bad, that the best way to make meds most effective is to take them daily, and at the same time. 4 years into this, I'm still getting used to that. Maybe someday I'll get the hang of it.

So that's the life of a mom with PKD. Tomorrow will probably be much of the same, with some variations because we have family in town.

See? Painfully normal. And boring. But I've said this before-- I've learned to never, EVER underestimate the power of boring.

2 comments:

Rob Monroe said...

Indeed - the power of boring is how most of us live our lives - and that's a good thing.

I'm glad that I'm not the only one bad with meds. I am really good in the morning where I have routine, but I often conk out on the couch in the evening, and there is no routine in that!

narciso tapia said...

It's nice to read blogs of fellow PKD patients. I hope there would be more of us in the blogosphere. In our country (Philippines), PKD awareness is still low. Let's share experiences and learn from each other.