Straight up truth time.
This penultimate blog post isn’t late because I’m lazy. It’s late because God was teaching me and my family what is important. My sister and my aunt and keeping my commitments to things like my jobs and family are more important than these goals or this blog.
I don’t often share this type of information so publicly since I’m a more private person, but here it goes.
After several days of abdomen and chest pain, my sister was in the hospital for the few days leading up to Christmas. The night before Christmas Eve, she was finally taken into surgery to have an emergency gallbladder removal. She’s home now, with her newborn, husband, and in-laws, but we’re still praying for no more complications.
I love my sister a lot, so even though I knew it wasn’t necessarily life threatening, it was really hard to go to Old Navy to work, do my online job, work on making Christmas presents, and generally not try to go sit with her in the hospital the entire time she was waiting in pain.
It honestly still doesn’t feel like Christmas since I haven’t had a night to just sit on couches and talk with my family like we do every year.
It’s not over…
My mom’s sister is also in the hospital. She’s been there for much longer than my sister was, and it doesn’t look like she’s leaving anytime soon. My aunt is in need of a heart transplant, as well as possible gallbladder and liver surgery (based on my last update of her). We’ve known for some time she’s had heart problems, but this all feels like a punch in the gut to our family. Currently, my parents are on a mini adventure to take my grandparents down to Indiana to see her in the hospital. According to my dad, the roads aren’t always great on their route, which is not surprising but adds even more stress to an already stressed family.
All of these happenings are also giving me and my family flashbacks to four years ago when my grandma had a stroke a few days before Christmas, which led to the last four years of massive changes for our family. Traditions thrown out the window, a house recently sold, freedom lost, and everyone growing up and getting old.
I was only 18 years old, a senior in high school, and a dinky youngest sister without her brother or sister in the state/country that holiday season. I spent my Christmas morning with my aunt driving my grandpa up to the hospital to open presents with his wife. With the massive ice storms that had caused large parts of Michigan to lose power, I never knew where I was gonna sleep that night or eat or just sit or if it would be warm or in a hospital. I learned that McLaren hospital in Flint has really good chicken wraps.
Looking back, I was worried about really stupid things, but I was also only 18 with no real life experiences expect a year in retail.
Now, as I’m getting ready to graduate from college, my siblings’ families are growing, and we’re all just generally getting to be who we are as people at this point in life, I can’t help but wonder what the next four years will hold.
Probably a lot of sad stuff.
Probably a lot of happy stuff.
Probably a lot of stuff I’ll never see coming.
But for now, I’m gonna post this blog, check in on my sister, and hope that in the next week and a half my family will get some good news on my aunt, have safe travels, and be able to spend a few hours together here and there before I go back to school.
So, that’s why my blog is late. It’s not as important as sitting with my family and checking in with each other. I’ll wrap up this blog really pretty with a digital bow and everything next week, but for now, I’m gonna go take a shower and not worry about the fact that I didn’t learn winged eyeliner last week. There are more important things right now.
If you’d like to see the complete list of 52 things I’m accomplishing this year, click here to check out my first blog! For now, here’s what I’ve done and what’s to come in the next few weeks:
Last week: Wear makeup every day. Learn how to do eyeliner, dang it!
This week: Relax.
Next week: A new year begins… And one last blog post!
gwens52things.wordpress.com 