Life with Chris — You are in My World Now

I smooshed my hand

June 18, 2012 by Tricia

You’ll have to excuse me for not writing much lately. Earlier this month I had an accident that resulted in me damaging my left hand – badly. Oh and unfortunately my left hand is my writing hand so that makes typing on the computer or doing pretty much anything a whole lot more difficult!

We’ve been doing some renovations on our home and my husband “stupidly” left an extension ladder – you know one of those huge metal ladders – out in our living room. It was lying on it’s side up against a table that we have our turtle tank on but that table happens to be right in the hallway that leads from the dining room to the kitchen. Well … Early in the morning of June 7th I was wandering into the kitchen to get a drink of water and as I came back through that hallway in the semi-dark my foot caught on the ladder – or something – I really don’t know what happened and the next thing I knew I was falling literally on top of the ladder and almost under the side table.

Skip forward to a very swollen left hand, a huge bruise on my lower left thigh a trip to the local emergency room that took 6 hours – with xrays of my hand and a follow up visit with a plastic surgeon that specializes in hands and I’m in a special hand splint because it looks like I have a torn ligament in my left thumb, and possibly a torn ligament in my outer left wrist or maybe a break in the bones there. Next week I have a follow up visit with the surgeon to see how my hand is doing. It’s still swollen and bruised but less than it was to begin with so that’s good. Then if it’s not healing well enough or if she thinks it might be a complete tear of a ligament I guess she’s going to send me for an MRI and then depending on the results I might have to have surgery.

So … thanks for leaving the ladder out Chris! Whatever happens it looks like I’m going to be in this splint for at least another four weeks so there goes half the summer. Do you know how hard it is to type on fingered and how hard it is to do just about everything else with your non-dominant hand? I take a lot of medicines and I can’t even open my pill bottles properly! I have to leave most of them open with the caps sitting on top and I’m really messed up if I close one! Oh and I can’t even use the plastic twist thing on a loaf of bread to open or close the bag. It’s hard to do with your non dominant hand and since my left hand is all splinted up so that I can’t use my thumb it’s almost impossible and very painful to do with my left hand. So my bread is put in a Ziploc bag for now.

The huge lump in my thigh is slowly going down. It’s been 11 days since the accident. What was once one huge lump is now several smaller ones. I don’t know if that’s good or bad? Smaller is good I suppose but it was HUGE to begin with. I was told not to be too active.

I know I’ll figure more things out as time goes by, but I’m not a happy camper.

I don’t recommend the stress diet

March 10, 2012 by Tricia

I’ve been on a “stress diet” the last four months. I really don’t recommend it to anyone. Not at all, because what I’ve been going through stress wise is highly unpleasant, but there’s been one benefit that I don’t mind. I’ve managed to lose weight because of the stress that I’ve been under. Actually I’ve probably lost too much weight because of the stress that I’ve been under.

I’ve lost something like 35 pounds. I don’t even know anymore how much weight I’ve lost. I stopped weighing myself about a month ago when I’d lost about 30 pounds. My pants and tops have gotten a bit loser in that time but not dramatically so, so I don’t think I’ve lost anymore than an additional five pounds or so. Hopefully not more than that.

My hair dresser when I saw her last week could see the difference in my weight before I even took off my heavy winter coat .. so I guess it’s a fairly dramatic weight loss. However you’d never know it at home … my oblivious husband hasn’t said a word. I actually had to point out how much I’d lost … of course he’s lost quite a bit as well .. needless to say the stress that I’m going through has to do with my marriage. Sigh.

My hairdresser warned me not to lose anymore weight … but at the same time she was trying to learn how she can lose some weight of her own. LOL .. she kept asking me things about weight lose products like how does 7-dfbx work? and so on … maybe because I’m a nurse she thought I’d know about weight lose products too?

Anyway … since I have so much stress in my life and since my life is going through so many changes she decided to cheer me up and she offered to give me free highlights so I accepted her offer. So I went home that evening with blondish highlights in my short auburn hair and it looked great. Still does!

He started smoking again? Bad

February 25, 2012 by Tricia

My husband and I quite smoking in October 2010 – or at least I thought we had both quit. I know for sure that I haven’t had a cigarette for 18 months … but it seems that my husband started smoking again and he’s been trying to hide that fact from me.

Unfortunately for him (and pretty much everyone around me) I’m a super smeller – which means I can smell everything – fresh sweat, cigarette scent on your clothes or hair, bad breath from across the room, fruit rotting before it even looks bad and forget about putting a banana peel or apple core in the kitchen garbage because the stink is too much for me within a half hour or so. So .. how could my husband think that he could pull off starting to smoke again and get it past me without me noticing? He might as well be smoking a Cohiba in the same room as me some days.

Luckily none of the smoke smell is tempting me to start again. In fact it might be helping me to stay quit as it smells disgusting to me. I just wish my husband (soon to be EX) would stop lying to me. I mean, if he wants to ruin his health -fine – just don’t do it around me – and stop lying about all the other stuff that he’s lying about too while he’s at it.

Still figuring out what to do for Christmas

December 20, 2011 by Tricia

I’m still not sure what I’m doing for Christmas this year. My husband might be working Christmas eve and Christmas evening so I might be pretty much on my own. I’ve been on my own a lot lately so I guess I’m getting used to that – but still – on such a major holiday – not so nice.

If my husband ends up working I might end up going over to my sisters. She going to have her boyfriend, daughter and son over Christmas eve and I’m sure some of them will be around Christmas day as well. I need to see all of them at some point anyway as I have to get their gifts to them. I found some great stuff for each of them, but I think my nephew might like his gift best. He’s quite sport and I found a speedglas helmet for him that he’s going to love or that I think he’ll love. We’ll see.

What are your plans for the holidays – are you on your own, doing something at your home or going to a friends or a member of your families for the holidays?

The Huge Branch that Fell on Our House and Car

September 17, 2011 by Tricia

Back in August – August 21st to be exact, there was a sudden violent summer storm in our area of Toronto and while it only lasted about ten minutes it sure caused a lot of damage to not only our house and property, but to many other peoples homes in our area as well.

As I said the storm came on suddenly – it had been looking like rain for a while, but all of a sudden the sky had that dark almost greenish look that to me means impending tornado and there was in fact a storm and tornado watch at that time. Then, just as I stepped out on to our enclosed front porch to see if my husband was home yet from getting the groceries the storm started with a violent rush of rain.

I was trying to close the windows on the enclosed porch when I saw our car pull into the driveway. I moved towards the door, thinking that maybe I’d run outside to help my husband bring the groceries inside but then the rain really started shooting in the window that I hadn’t managed to close yet … and then there was a huge bang on the roof and all of a sudden there were branches all over our lawn and the car that my husband was still inside of … or at least I was hoping my husband was still inside … because if he’d started to get out of the car he could have been hit by the huge branch!

As it turned out … my husband was still in the car being tossed and turned like he was in a car wash. He was trying to call the house but of course I was on the porch and wouldn’t have heard the phone … plus little did we know but the power went out and would be out for the better part of 7 hours!

When the rain finally slowed my husband crawled out of the car and we both counted our blessings that neither of us had been hit by the huge tree branch. It had fallen off the big maple tree on the other side of our neighbors house. It’s a city tree … but of course as it turns out because of it was storm conditions we can’t make a claim for the damaged that the huge maybe 500 pound branch did to our house evestroughs and car … we tried and were turned down. Nice eh?

Here’s a couple of pictures of what the tree branch looked like covering our small lawn and car. I figure the branch was over 20 feet in length and weighed more than 500 pounds. Most of our neighbors were stunned by what happened – one seemed to care less but that seems to be typical behavior for them. Sigh.

Now that the city has turned down our claim for damage we’re going to have to either get a quote from our insurance companies or just pay out of pocket for the damage that the big branch caused … either way we have to get the evestroughs fixed as a couple of them have dents in them that look like the lip of a measuring cup and rain water pours out of that area just like it does out of a measuring cup … so yes we have to fix it.