Hospital Visit

You know my jean shorts? Come on, you do. They're pretty much all I wear in the summertime. Well, today I need to pack 'em away because they officially don't fit me anymore! I mean, I haven't attempted to wear them in a good three weeks, but now it's confirmed! I need to go shopping for some bigger clothes!
I think my belly has gotten smaller.  I think it might be because when I could finally eat something again, I would get super bloated I looked ultra pregnant, but now my body has figured out that it'll be receiving food on a regular basis and doesn't bloat like it did at the beginning. So, I look like a normal pregnant person for 15 weeks! Horray! Also, I'm not so uncomfortable!
PS the baby is the size of an apple this week! And it's going to DOUBLE in size in the next 2 weeks! woooah, baby!

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Yesterday was a majorly busy day. Ryan and Janice (Ryan was the pastor at the church we went to when Stuart was doing his internship and Janice is his wife and also was the worship pastor) were good friends of ours when Stuart was doing his internship.  The church that we went to at that time was all but dead.  It had about 30 regular attendees who were... what's the nice word they use to describe weird people? .. ah yes, colorful. Ryan and Janice were amazing. He was the best pastor I'd ever heard and she was an amazing worship leader.  It was so odd to me that they were leading such a ghost town of a church.  We guessed (and I think we were right) that they weren't receiving much encouragement, so we would have them and their (then 15 year old) daughter over for dinner a few times, they came over for a thanksgiving turkey, and we treated them to a Stanford football game. We even watched the presidential reelection with them for hours the day we moved back to Vancouver when we should have been packing!

We got pretty close with them. We'd skype from Vancouver on occasion and I went back and stayed with their family for a few days and went to a women's retreat with some of the girls from the old church. I spent time with their whole family including out of town family, and lots of time with their daughter, Olivia. Looking back, they really were like family!

Before we moved back, a huge church hired Ryan as a welcome pastor and decided to keep the existing church that they were running and pour a bunch of money into it to make it really nice (it was super run down when we were there. I remember that painting the bathrooms was their big project haha).  So now, Ryan doesn't preach anymore. And Janice occasionally is in the background vocals up front. And it's really sad to me because they're both so talented and no one at this humongous church we goes to knows it.

They got busy with tasks and needs at the huge new church (we also attend this church), and we got busy with having babies.  Janice threw me a baby shower when we moved here, and they babysat Joey when he was two months old, but after that, things got busy for both of us and we stopped spending much time together at all. We'd hug at church and talk for two minutes, but since Ryan is the welcome pastor and Janice is his wife, they were busy with all the people needing their attention after church.

Two years ago, around this time, Olivia (their daughter) got really sick.  The doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with her. She's had the most extreme case of Chrone's Disease for her whole life, which majorly suppresses her immune system.  But when she got sick the way she did, it wasn't Chrone's related and doctors couldn't figure out what was causing it and therefore couldn't treat it other than with an ng (feeding) tube and pain medication. She couldn't eat, threw up buckets of bile, and was in constant pain for over a month.  She lost so much weight. She looked like a ghost. It got so bad that they thought she might not make it. She was too weak to even walk and her body was rejecting even the food that was slowly getting pumped into her stomach.  She received a 'Make A Wish'.  It was during this time that Janice and I really reconnected. We would text and call a lot and I spent time (with Joey) at the hospital with Olivia and her and delivered a meal for their family.

 Eventually, Olivia got better and has only had small slides in her health since that time, It was her last year of high school and she had to finish it out with home schooling. We attended her graduation ceremony and a small dinner at their house. (I was very pregnant with Frankie).

Again, as life got busy, we've drifted apart with the occasional 'we sure do miss you!' text, or a quick hug at church and an offer to babysit or a general invitation to see their new house.  About a month ago, once again, Olivia has gone downhill. Really downhill. She's been living in the hospital and the pain medication she takes every two hours, which is stronger than morphine, is having almost no effect on her.

I went with the kids yesterday morning to visit and we stayed for two hours. I wasn't sure how the kids would react because they know Olivia and Joey is scared of her at the best of times, let alone with her lying in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of her.  I had been talking to him about Olivia and how she has 'an owie in her tummy that's making her so sick that she has to live in the hospital' and that we have to be 'extra kind and loving to her' for days. I think it really helped, because he was standing by her and even talking to her and didn't freak out once for the whole two hours that we visited! And he even told her that he loves her!

Janice looked so tired. I have never seen her look so spent. At the end of our visit, she said she had to go because she had to organize a Christmas event at the church and hadn't picked up any of the food and Olivia cried when they were hugging and kept saying "Don't leave me here alone" IT. WAS. THE. SADDEST. THING. IN. THE. WHOLE. WORLD.  It was already an hour past the kids nap time, but I said it would be no problem for me to run all of her errands for her.  She said 'No, no. It's okay. I'm sure your kids need a nap.' and I assured her it was no problem.  For the next two hours, I shlepped my half dead, verging on nervous breakdown kids to run errands and they barely survived! haha. I was sooooo exhausted.  It definitely screwed with their sleep big time, but if it meant Olivia not needing to be alone and depressed for another couple of hours, then it was definitely worth it.

WOW. That was an incredibly long winded way of saying what I did yesterday.