The gift of health and he can swim now?!

School starts back in nine days.  No more sleeping in way too late and staying up at night watching Hoarders and Intervention.

I don't know why I find it impossible to pass by those shows when I'm channel surfing.  Behavioral disorders have always been extremely interesting to me.  Maybe they just make me feel extra confident with myself and my own level of sanity. 

Speaking of my sanity, the Dracenator tested it to the best of his ability yesterday afternoon at a pool party for one of his friends from school.  First of all, I thought the kid didn't really know how to swim.  I had planned to take him for swim lessons this summer but never got around to it after my mom got sick. 

So, I'm all like..."is that the deep end or the shallow end?" that the kids were jumping into while playing a game when we got there.  It was the deep end.  I warn that he can't really swim so they show him to the shallow end.  Well, he can't stand that because all the other kids are jumping in the deep end and catching a ball that an adult is throwing to them. 

The next thing I know,  I look up and he is about to take his turn for the ball right in the deep end.  Charlie is preparing himself to go in after him, fully clothed.  Well, the little fish pops up like a bobber and swims right to the side.  I guess he knows how to swim now! He's diving, jumping through inner tubes and cuttin' flips off the side. 

I must have appeared to be the most overprotective nagging mother on the planet because I kept jumping up and reprimanding him.  Charlie had to go over once and threaten to remove him from the pool if he didn't stop cutting flips off the side and nearly missing the water and hitting the concrete with his corner jump.  He had two very close calls.  I needed a valium and a shot of Jose Cuervo by the time we left.

I got a Wendy's frosty instead.  My mom, the therapists and the other 3 patients on the rehabilitation floor made homemade ice cream at the hospital last week that she said tasted just like one so I had been craving one ever since.  

She went home Saturday, after a 17 night stay in the hospital.  I told y'all that she has a rare type of vasculitis called Wegener's Granulomatosis but as it turns out, they still haven't fully committed to that diagnosis.  I told her they may have to name a new vasculitis after her because she has not been a textbook case of any of them. 

She is currently on twelve different medications. The pharmacist's mind was completely blown when we tried to have them filled Saturday.  It resulted in 3 trips back and forth to the Wal-mart pharmacy, several phone calls and the tracking down of the doctor who wrote them at the hospital so that she could "explain" them to him.  

Fun times.

My mom still has a long road ahead but she has improved greatly since the day she went into the hospital.  We don't know for sure how much eyesight and feeling in her hands and feet that she will regain but she sounds like her "old" chipper self again when I talk to her on the phone and that is beautiful music to my ears. 

I've learned, through all of this, not to take my health and the health of those I love for granted because it truly is a fragile gift each and every day that we continue to be blessed with it.