Our First Family Camping Trip!!!!--NOT

The plan was for Stephen to work extra hard (he always does) and take Friday of Spring Break off so that we could go to DINOSAUR VALLEY STATE PARK, see the sights and camp overnight in a tent.

We were all excited, the stars aligned for Stephen at work and he WAS able to take off Friday. This was the plan.....

THURSDAY NIGHT.
LATE.
10:30.
We've just finished some cheesecake, Stephen and I are about to go to bed when my stomach starts hurting, and gets worse and worse.

Then I start throwing up, only to have the pain return worse. I've got the chills, I'm sweating, I keep throwing up. Nothing makes me feel better. 45 minutes pass, I've thrown up 5 or 6 times and now my arms are tingling and my hands are curving in and they're limp. My feet are starting to tingle. Everything is fuzzy. The cold of the toilet and tile floor feels good against my skin...

I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO DIE.

I'm praying to feel better, to have the strength to endure this, to let me live.

I'm able to get one or two word commands out: Blessing, Hospital, Ambulance, Please Help

Poor Stephen didn't know what to do. He called our neighbors, the Huangs and Brother Huang and he prepared to give me a blessing. We'd decided to try and get me to the ER. I somehow make it downstairs but the car is locked, I bang on it and yell, "door" but Stephen can't hear me. I slump over to the bench and wait. There Brother Huang and Stephen give me a blessing--(I am so thankful for the priesthood! watch a video here)

Sister Huang is going to come watch our kids, we just leave Brother Huang at our house assuming she'll be over shortly. Our children are asleep. She and one of her sons sleep the whole night on our couches. (I am so grateful for Visiting Teachers!)

I'm wheeled into the ER, Stephen signs the minimum required forms and knocks on the door where the doctors and nurses are working, and humbly asks for them to help me.

My hands are curved in, my head slumped to one side, my body is limp. I keep whispering a cry for help, and say "hurt".

Bless those nurses, they take one look at me and whisk me into a room. I hear them call for Doug who was apparently the guy who does the IV's and he's in very quickly running a line in my arm with some IV's. They've drawn blood.
I still hurt.
In a few minutes they've got Morphine going. After some time, I'm still in pain so they add something to it. Because of the narcotics I've got oxygen.

This is where I start to feel better, but I start dozing off too. They did a thorough ultrasound and a CT scan. I remember waking up to have them give me some potassium pills, and from that point on I vacillate between sleep and watching the TV, and feeling sorry for my poor husband who can't get comfortable in those hard chairs.

The diagnosis: I have a high white blood cell count which means there's and infection somewhere, and my small intestine is inflamed. I'm sent home with 4 prescriptions to fill.

We roll into bed at 5:00am.

At 6:00 our first child wakes up, by 6:30 they're all awake, we tell them what happened overnight and call my mother to come take over so we can sleep for a few hours.

Needless to say, Dinosaur Valley will always be there, but we're not in a position to go this time.


But thankfully the weekend wasn't wasted, want to see what we did instead?we mulched the flower beds
Notice the new gear Stephen's wearing? He partially tore is MCL playing soccer, and he gets to wear this bad boy for 8 weeks. He's THRILLED!

For dinner we got pizza, because neither of us were feeling like cooking and it was a "treat" as compensation for not going camping.

And because my husband was campaigning for "Dad of the year" he pitched the tent in the DINING ROOM and let the kids camp out still.
They thought that was fun.