Vertigo

My surgery is over with and now all I have to do is recover! Easy right? HA…not so much. This is a quick recap of how it’s gone so far.
Thursday morning we headed to the park cities surgery center at 7:00am for my surgery to repair a severe deviated septum, reduce the size of my turbinates and then do sinus surgery to clean out my maxillary sinus. Anyway, The surgery lasted about an 1 1/2 hours to 2 hours and then I was headed to recovery. Well all I remember is them slipping me “happy juice” and then I was waking up in recovery with a lot of pain and feeling like someone hit me upside the head with a sledge hammer. After a while, they took me to my own room where my mom and Jonathan could come in. They gave me some lovely pain medication and then, well let’s just say I don’t handle anesthesia well so I had to get some more medication. Anyway, I was still pretty sleepy and it was hard to keep my eyes open much less stand up and walk. We were able to leave later that afternoon and got home around 1:30 or 2:00 and I layed on the couch for the rest of the day and night. I’ve pretty much stayed on the couch ever since then. As long as I have the pain medication in my system I’m good, but the second it starts to wear off, OHH boy ohh boy does it hurt!! I can’t sleep in our bed yet because if I lay my head that flat it hurts, so I’m still camped out on the couch for now and hopefully I’ll try our bed tonight. I was hoping i would have been able to go to church this morning but that was not going to happen. The medication definitely takes away the pain but at the same time it makes me dizzy, unable to hold things and pretty much wipes me out.
I’m tired of sitting on the couch and doing nothing, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every episode of flip this house or what not to wear on TLC. So this afternoon I went out in the front yard to water our plants –I had to do something. I was out there for about 5 minutes and that was the extent of my moving around today. Maybe I’ll try to do more tomorrow. All in all, the surgery went great and i’m recovering slowly but surely. Hopefully I’ll be able to go to small group on Tuesday night.

Here’s a quick shot of myself when we got home Thursday:

Have you ever heard of something called laminin? Here is how Wikipedia describes them :”Laminins are a family of proteins that are an integral part of the structural scaffolding of basement membranes in almost every animal tissue.” Laminins are what hold us together….LITERALLY. They are cell adhesion molecules. They are what holds one cell of our bodies to the next cell. Without them, we would literally fall apart. With my science background I knew all this already, what I didn’t know is what laminin looked like.
Below is what the structure of laminin looks like. Keep in mind that this is NOT a ‘Christian portrayal’ of it. If you look up laminin in any scientific/medical piece of literature, this is what you will see:

Now tell me that our God is not Amazing!
The ‘glue’ that holds us together…ALL of us…is in the shape of the cross.

Colossians 1:15-17 comes to mind.
‘He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created; things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things HOLD TOGETHER.’ Colossians 1:15-17

Thousands of years before the world knew anything about laminin, Paul penned those words. And now we see that from a very LITERAL standpoint, we are held together…one cell to another…by the cross.

You would never convince me that is anything other than the mark of a Creator who knew EXACTLY what laminin ‘glue’ would look like long before Adam even breathed his first breath!! To some people this is nothing more than a simple coincidence but for those of us who have Faith in the Lord we know it is soo much more than that! It’s just another way our God shows us He is there and real. He is our creator and is behind every little molecule and chromosome that makes us who we are.
We praise YOU, Lord!

Useless fact of the day:

Feel a bit scatterbrained now and then? Make yourself a big jug of sun tea. Not for the caffeine, but for one heck of a potent compound that could fine-tune your focus. It’s theanine. When people in a study consumed theanine (an amino acid) and then performed a challenging mental task that required both looking and listening skills, their brains became quite active. Specifically, the right parietooccipital cortex lit up. That’s a part of the brain’s circuit system tied to attention span. So if you feel more alert and focused after a tea break, it’s no wonder! Awesome….I love tea so now there’s a good reason to drink it.

It’s final, my ENT called yesterday and my surgery is set for this next Thursday at 7:00 am. This past week I got yet another sinus infection and this one was probably the worst one I’ve had in a while. But when I talked to the ENT’s office yesterday they called in some more antibiotics for me and this time added some steroids. I can already tell the steroids are helping becaue I could taste a little bit when I ate my breakfast this morning! I just hope they don’t keep me up at night or make me be in a bad mood…steroids are infamous for that.

Anywho, on another subject, I GRADUATE tomorrow! YEAH….It has finally happened. after taking 3 years off after my associates degree and then taking 1 or 2 classes at a time (except for the last few semesters where i took 3 or 4) I finally finished my bachelor’s degree–Even though it’s the same degree I already have! That’s what made it hard to finish, because I already took most of these classes for my associates degree so I ended up retaking them. O’well, I’m done and it’s over with. Now for my masters! Just kidding, I’m going to stop going to school for a while and then maybe one day get my masters.

I was looking through some pictures on Jonathan’s flickr page and ran across our pictures from the arboretum when we went back in 06 (a month and a half after we started dating). It’s funny to see that some things never change. Here is a picture of us from 2006:

and here is another picture from this past weekend when we went to the Arboretum:

It’s amazing we ever get any pictures where he is actually smiling instead of this goofy look on his face. But to be fair here is a good one where he is smiling–I like these the best!