So much to tell...

Over Christmas break, it's become really wildly apparent that my daughter is just like I was, which means she has a variant of ADD/ADHD. It wasn't just that she painted her carpet, which she knew not to do. It wasn't just that she thrashed her bins with markers and paints, which she knew not to do. I think the topper was when she clipped off the end of her finger with a pair of dressmaking shears and could offer no reason why as she stood bleeding profusely in front of me, while I tried to wrest from her what really happened.

I needed to know whether she needed stitches or not, which finally got her to admit what she'd done. When Mike retrieved my shears, we found a neatly snipped piece of her skin on them.

I'm so sad. I have no desire to have two children on medications. She's a brilliant and vivacious person. Russell certainly is, too, but the medications bring their own issues. Russell is having pretty serious gastric reflux, which could very well be a function of his meds added to his heredity. On the plus side, we might be able to have somewhat normal lives, if both kids are on meds.

I'm just tired. I've known I'd need an IEP for this child because she's so totally brilliant. She's not out of Kindergarten and she's reading to herself. Sometimes, she needs help, but mostly not. She's also at that place in spelling and writing where kids nail the consonant sounds -- beginning, middle and end, but still are working on that whole vowel thing, thus, bottom is spelled "btm." She can add and subtract numbers in her head, as well as on paper. I just was hoping she'd be able to bypass some of her heredity and not be the impulsive bouncy mess her mom can be. I want her to have a normal life, despite her brilliance -- make them keep her in the age appropriate grade, but with work that challenges her at the same school Russell went to. It's going to suck.

I'm tired of being incapacitated -- unable to do little more than gimp from place to place in the house, ask for help from strangers to push my stupid wheelchair through narrow doors, wait for people to pick dropped items up for me or pull items on high shelves down for me, sit in a chair to do aerobic exercise, and be unable to adequately check on my children and make sure that they are ok.

Today, a second opinion from another orthopedist changed that. I'm getting a compartmentalized knee replacement. It's where they replace the part of the knee that's messed up. The orthopedist said that there was no reason to wait until my 50's considering my pain and discomfort and being that I'm going forward with the gastric bypass surgery, that that was simply icing on the cake. He said that my weight wouldn't be an issue. He also seemed to think that with the physical therapy, I'd be three shades of much better on all fronts. The surgery will be happening in the next month.

I feel like I've been given my life back with that prospect looming.

However, next week, I have a cone biopsy, in which they determine whether or not I get a hysterectomy. I'm not looking forward to the results either way. Essentially, it means cervical cancer with lesser or greater degrees and while it's the most easily treatable type of cancer, it's still cancer with a big "c" and makes me feel small and scared as if I'm a cartoon character dwarfed by this enormous C on Sesame Street or something. The letter of the day is "C" as in careless sex in my 20's, cervical dysplasia, and cancer.