Hearts

Boy I hate that I have to put a disclaimer here--after all, my blog, my words, my opinions, should be A-OK--but we all know that isn't always the case. Sigh. So after what B went through earlier this week I'll put this disclaimer: I know that my troubles aren't necessarily any worse than anyone else's or that many people have it much worse. That is nearly always the case if you get right down to it..sure, there is one person out there who has it the absolute worst in the entire planet but...I doubt they're blogging about it :) So there you go. I do not need any drive-by STFUs.

This has been a tough week. Tough. On so many fronts, on so many levels.

My Dad is not good. At all. I call and he gets on the phone (unwillingly) and I might get two words from him. Two words. Either he's cognitively slipping that fast or he is so depressed that he cannot even respond to his own daughter. I cry every day over this, either in my office with the door shut after my lunch-break phone call or in the evening with Mr. LC after my drive-home phone call or all by myself in the shower when it just gets to be too much. He could live like this for years. Trapped in a body that has ultimately betrayed him, trapped in a brain that has suffered a traumatic and devastating injury. There is nothing about this that is fair or just or right and every day--sometimes every hour--I think about this, think about how I can help, reaching out to other health professionals for their opinions, reading articles about stroke, researching and researching and nothing helps. I just feel more helpless, more lost.

I guess I finally know how my parents have felt all these years watching Mr. LC and I hurting so much. Watching what we had planned for our lives slip away, bit by bit, as it was taken from us. Watching us get hopeful about a treatment and thinking we'd finally break free of our nightmare and then watching us get crushed all over again. Watching us navigate amongst friends and families who blissfully move through life having babies and babies and babies while we sit on the sidelines clinging to each other, hoping for a simple chance at what they have. My parents could only watch and want to help so desperately but had nothing--nothing at all to offer other than love.

I have always said that IF causes a heartache that you didn't even know can exist until you go through it. This is the same. I can't fix my broken father just like my parents can't fix the broken LCs.

On the IF front things are no better. I can't fix us. I have read and researched and read and researched and poured so much of my life into this and I am exhausted.

This week has been very hard. We have big decisions to make. Time looms. No one can make these for us and it is just hard. That's all.

Mr. LC's car is teetering on the edge. It's a 1995 model. When I think about the 20K check I wrote last month to pay for our twelve hours of two-line bliss I think about his car. His need for something else. Only we don't have a choice, do we? Those of us stuck in the trenches. We can't just choose to have car payments or vacations or building large retirement funds over building our families--we don't have that option. Some how, we have to figure out how to pay for chances that cost more than most people could save in a year but we do it, don't we? Choiceless, we do it.

We are choiceless in so many things.

My heart is heavy this week. So heavy. I can't even get into it all here, my safe place.

Instead, I will be grateful for certain things. Grateful for going to the movies with two of our favorite people and then going out for a late night meal to pick apart said movie (Avatar ya'll--once someone said "Dances With Wolves" only with aliens, well....). Grateful for my pets and my husband who never judge me, only listen and snuggle with me and catch my tears when they fall. Grateful for hobbies, and exercise, and two legs that work--that automatically run when I tell them to run and do yoga poses when I tell them to do yoga poses--my body may not work the way it is supposed reproductively, but I am at least grateful that it moves because in those moments of running hard, of breathing hard, of sinking deeper into a yoga pose, of feeling lactic acid searing through my calves I know that I am alive, that this is not a dressed rehearsal, and that somehow, I have got to get out of this place.

With that, I'll leave you with a distraction, pure and simple. Dark chocolate brownies with a raspberry ganache and a cream cheese frosting piping. Cut into the shape of hearts, because even when your heart is broken, it is good to bake.