The Charmed Life

charmed life  1.(idiomatic) A life in which one is always lucky and safe from danger.

Blessed: Definition: Someone is blessed when he or she feels that God has given them a sense of well being or done something good for him or her.

I have always been lucky. This is not to say that I win the lottery ever- though I do seem to win most prizes at baby showers, bridal showers, mary kay parties, home interiors, etc. etc. (just today I won both door prizes at my friend's mary kay debut:).  At one of my nieces baby showers my sister in law just wrapped a present and handed it to me when I walked in the door. I know you're going to win anyway she says to me.    I lucked out on the parent thing. They gave me a very secure, very loved childhood. We got to take vacations and had lots of family around.  We lived on a lake, and went out on a boat or to the beach most weekends.  Earl and I want to retire to a beach, or very close to a beach in our later years. I had plenty of friends, and a man who most people would say is rare. I took most of this all for granted, living this charmed life, until we had been married a couple of years and I got sick.  I kept having these attacks.  It felt like someone was taking a knife to my insides, I could barely move during these attacks, and they kept getting longer and longer.  Jamie was still little, maybe a year and a half, and Earl was gone a lot. I would start to feel it come on and I would take Jamie and shut us up in my bedroom, and kneel on my bed until it passed.  During which time, I couldn't move and Jamie would tear my bedroom apart.  He would lean on the bed and look at me, I would tell him Mommy will be ok in a bit, and he would then take everything out of the drawers, off the shelves, and sit in the middle of the mess and laugh. Stinker.  By the time it was over I was exhausted and he would be too, so I'd pull him up in bed with me and we'd fall asleep, so when Earl would get home he'd have to manuever through an obstacle course. I went to the dispensary there on the military base several times, they told me I had gastritus, or muscle spasms, maybe a pinched nerve. One doctor (though I had my doubts about them really being doctors) told me I needed to stop pushing Jamie in the stroller and carry him.  I was very young and very naive. We never owned a car in Germany so we walked everywhere so after a few weeks of trying to lug this big kid around I called my Mom and she said "don't listen to that silly doctor, put that baby back in the stroller!" It went on for a year until one weekend in January of 1986 when the attack didn't end. I was miserable and throwing up til all I threw up was acid from my stomach. I laid in bed all weekend because the dispensary was closed on weekends, and I didn't have enough courage to go to a German hospital.  On Monday morning I made it downstairs to our landlady to see if she would take care of jamie for a bit, and I went to sit at the dispensary for two hours. I had been feeling so bad I hadn't taken a shower all weekend, and my hair was dirty, so I put this  bright purple knit hat on my head and sat there, sweating for two hours because I wouldn't take that hat off my head.  I'm sure it looked worse than my dirty hair would have. Finally they saw me, and then called the barracks for my husband. They didn't know what was wrong, but I was jaundiced and my white blood cells were off the charts. They wanted to rush me to the hospital in Wurzburg an hour away. Earl went home, we only lived a block from base, to let Elmie our landlady know, but they wouldn't wait for him to get back. They sent me off in an ambulance without my husband.  The bottom line was I had gall stones, but I was too sick to operate. They kept me on fluids for two days, and then did exploratory surgery. I have a scar that runs from one side of my stomach at an angle to the other side. They were afraid my stones were spread into my pancreas and my intestines, but they weren't. Lucky girl, they said.  But that wasn't the moment I realized I was lucky. I realized during recovery while I drifted in and out of conciousness for four hours. I realized when I opened my eyes and I saw my husband standing there by the bed every single time, smiling down at me. I already loved him, but in that moment when I was far away from home , in an ICU in a foreign country and very scared,  that's when I realized how very much I truly loved this man. He wouldn't leave me, He would never leave me, I think I knew that then. He stood without moving for four hours so I would see his familiar face when I finally became concious.  That's when I knew I was lucky. I don't know what happened to that purple hat.