Friday, December 30, 2011

Nelson Family Christmas

So, I was originally supposed to work today (after a two week long vacation) but instead I was mandated, and I probably won't have to work at all today, so I decided to catch up on my blogging from this weekend.

On Monday, December 26th John and I headed from Minnesota to Brookings to celebrate Christmas with John's extended family. We had soup and munchies for lunch, and then we opened presents.



Tuesday we took the day off from Christmas and cleaned the house and caught up on laundry. It was nice to have a day to ourselves.

Wednesday we went out to Jim and Barb's for Christmas. We had lasagna, salad, garlic bread, and cheesecake. It was delicious. Then of course it was time for presents again. We announced our pregnancy the same way to John's family, and they were all very excited as well.

It was an awesome Holiday Season, and we still have New Years to celebrate! I'm ready to grab my sparkling grape juice and welcome in 2012!

Christmas in Minnesota

John and I headed to Minnesota to celebrate Christmas on December 23rd. The 23rd was actually my mom's 50th Birthday so we celebrated with family and friends at the Frontier Bar. It was a pretty good turn out and it was nice to catch up with everyone I hadn't seen in a long time.


On Christmas Eve, John, Dad, and I made cashew cookies because I wanted to bring some to the Nelson Family Christmas. Then we opened presents with my parents, brother, and sister. We had my parents open a Grandparents book, which was our announcement to our family that we are expecting a baby in July. It was nice to finally share the news with the family. I have known since about week 3, and now I am 13 weeks pregnant. That is a long time to keep a secret!







After opening presents, we headed to Janel and Tim's to eat and hang out. At around 6pm we headed to Fairfax to watch the Christmas Program. Afterwards it was back to Tim and Janel's for more eating and mingling.

Christmas Day we went to church in the morning, and visited with people we hadn't seen in awhile. After church we headed to Mark and Kathy's to celebrate Christmas with my mom's side. It was nice to see everyone and hang out for a while. And my mom was busy blabbing to everyone that she was going to be a grandma, she was really excited.

We had a really good Christmas in Minnesota, it just went by way too quickly. We were so busy going from one place to another, that the weekend flew by. But it was a good holiday get-together, and now everyone knows that we are expecting a little one in July.

Happy Holidays!!

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Christmas!

John and I opened presents last night because we will be in Minnesota for Christmas. I think we did a pretty good job.

John got me a Kitchen Aid standing mixer, which I absolutely love. I just had a cheaper hand held mixer, so it's a treat to finally have a nice mixer to cook and bake with. He also got me pajama pants, a book light, and a couple books by my favorite authors.

I got John a Shop Vac (hey, he wanted it), a coffee thermos, starbucks gift card, sweatshirt, travel coffee mug, a movie, LED flashlight, and a remote control helicopter (he wanted that too).

We both had a fun night opening gifts and can't believe Christmas is almost here! Merry Christmas too you all!








Catching up

Holy Moly, it has been 2 months since I last blogged. I don't know how the time has gotten away from me. However, in my defense I have been busy and have had some medical stuff going on. I will get into that later. I will touch on the highlights from the last couple months.

Halloween- Well I had to work Halloween Night, so I handed out candy to the little kids until about 6:15pm and then headed to work. We had around 30 kids come to our house, not too many, but enough.

Thanksgiving- Again I had to work. I actually worked Thursday-Sunday of that weekend, so needless to say I didn't celebrate the holiday in any fun way.

At the end of November, I had a routine eye appointment with my Optometrist. Well, it turned out that my optic nerve was swollen, meaning there was a bunch of pressure in my head putting pressure on my optic nerve. The Optometrist referred me to a neurologist, who examined me and then had me have an MRI of my brain to see what was going on.

I did not expect any of this after a routine eye exam. Let me tell you, having an MRI is not really a fun procedure. It's loud, crowded, and a little scary. I am glad I am not claustrophobic because I don't know if I would have been able to do it. But anyway, the MRI came back completely normal, no brain tumors or any other scary things, which was both good news and bad news. It meant that my brain looked good, but meant they would still need to do more tests.

I was also referred to a Ophthalmologist who took pictures of the back of eye to look at my optic nerve and to measure the pressure in my eyes. He basically told me the same thing as my Optometrist, which was that I had severe papillary edema.

My Neurologist was guessing that it was a "pseudo tumor " which means that my brain acts like a tumor is there, when really there is nothing abnormal. They don't really know why it happens. Anyway, the neurologist had to perform a spinal tap to diagnose and relieve the pressure. When she tapped me (which wasn't very fun) my pressure was 51, and normal is around 8. So there was a ton of extra pressure on my optic nerve, which if it gets bad enough can cause permanent eye damage. Yeah, pretty scary stuff.

During the spinal tap, she removed about 4 tubes of cerebrospinal fluid, which is a very high volume. This would relieve the pressure for about a day or two since the body just makes more cerebrospinal fluid. In order to treat the pseudo tumor, they put me on a diuretic to help slow the making of cerebrospinal fluid.

So there it is, my life for the last couple months. Like I said, it's been pretty crazy. Along with the diuretic, they are monitoring me pretty closely with every 2 weeks appointments with the Ophthalmologist. I never imagined having such a unique medical situation. However, I am finally feeling good, and at my last eye appointment they said the swelling was mildly better, so it's on it's way.

In other news, I accepted a new nursing position at Avera. I am going to work in the Recovery Room, which is where patients go immediately following surgery. It will be patients of all ages and of all surgeries. It will be 8 hour shifts which will be a nice change. One weekend every 6 weeks and one holiday per year. There won't be any night shifts, except for being on call, and every time I come in on-call it's time and a half. I am really looking forward to this new opportunity, but I will miss all my Ortho co-workers!

Sorry for the wordy post, but I had a lot to catch up on. I can't say my life is not interesting. Thanks for reading!