cancer – day 467

I wasn’t feeling particularly well this morning, and I didn’t get up until 9AM (which, you have to remember, is 7AM out in CA). I was having my first cup of tea and texting with Johnny about getting together this afternoon when Mom came and said Eric wanted to take a little boat ride and the kids wanted me to come.

The sun was out sometimes, but it was chilly, especially when you’re going full bore for an hour each way to this dam Eric wanted to go to. On the way there I had neuropathy pain, but it was mostly bearable. Going back, though, we had an hour into the wind, and it just destroyed me. I could barely keep fro crying and my hands and feet were just these nasty fireballs being stabbed with glass shards. When we finally got to the dock, I hobbled over to the sauna house because it was closest, and I went in and sat behind the door on a bench and finally let the sobs come out. And then my dad walked in, coming out of the bathroom in the sauna house. There wasn’t anything he could do about the pain, but he did sit there with me and hold me while I shook and sobbed and trembled and gasped for breath, trying to get enough of this pain out that I could control my behavior back in the house with the kids. Poor Dad, I think that was the worst episode he’d had to witness. Eventually I calmed down enough to hobble into the bathroom to wash my face. Then I skipped lunch and limped my way up the stairs on the outside edge of my heels to go rest in my room for a couple hours to give my hands and feet some recovery time.

Eric left to go fishing with his buddy all afternoon, and Mom & Dad took he kids and Nancy over to Orr to see the bears, so when Johnny came by with Emma, his three-year-old, I was the only one there. I took them through the house and the sauna house, and we played with Emma a little bit with some of the kids toys. Then we decided to go for a boat ride, just a slow putt-putt along the shore of our bay. Emma was a sweetheart, she liked telling me about her sister and things she likes to do and just about anything. She was also very well-behaved in the boat, sitting quietly watching the waves and the birds and the shore while John and I chatted about boats and cabins and snowmobiling and people from school.

We docked at The Landing for a few minutes to use the bathrooms and get Emma a gumball and some drinks. Then we putted back over to our dock. Everyone (except Eric) was back from their excursion, coming down to the dock as we pulled up.

We didn’t brush right up against the dock like we had at the landing, but I was able to jump on the dock with the lead line all right. But I needed to grab the sidebar and pull the boat back in sideways and not let the back end come around into the shallows. Well, wouldn’t you know it, the boat was a lot heavier than me and net thing you know, there I was in the lake – splash! I was Johnny backed the boat out, I climbed out and we docked the pontoon between the docks instead, no problem. Good thing I was wearing my swimsuit under my clothes because as soon as the boat was tied up safely, Cameron brought me the diving goggles and I went back in the water to recover my blackberry, which had been clipped to my pocket. It was down about 10 feet in some slippery rocks. I handed it up to Johnny and swam over to the ladder again. “It’s still on!” John tells me in this shocked voice. It was definitely full of water though, the screen was all blitzo.

Johnny and Emma stayed another hour or so, John talking with my parents and me playing with Emma in the hot tub. She was having so much fun that she was adamant that she would NOT leave. Johnny and I used to get teased about that, how incredibly stubborn our kids would be because he and I are both incredibly stubborn people. If this is how stubborn Emma can be with just Johnny’s stubbornness, just imagine what a holy terror of a kid we would have had if we’d gotten married. 🙂