Tidying the pantry

We have a very small pantry.  A closet actually, in the hallway.  Away from the kitchen.  I've always thought that was weird.  In our next home, we will have a walk-in pantry fo' sho'.  Since it's small, it gets messy pretty easily.  Today I straightened and tidied and organized it and it looks much better!

This is how it looked before. 

And this was the bottom.  Eeeeeeeek!!  Couldn't find nothin'.

So after moving stuff and straightening cans and boxes, it looked like this.

This Mikasa basket I got from QVC was perfect for Larry's guilty pleasure.  Ramen noodle soups.  

I'm still scheduled for surgery Tuesday and now our house is neat and organized!  We bought a CatGenie and it's been the best thing we've ever bought in our entire lives.  Having two cats now made for a lot of work in the litter box department.  This thing has been sooooo nice to have.  Tabbie is having a little trouble getting used to it and had to go potty on Mama's bathroom rug but, bless his heart, he went on the rug and all I had to do was get it up and then throw the rug in the washing machine.  He's a smart boy.  Always has been.  Anyway, I sure hope he gets the hang of it soon.

Four months of da foot and some organization therapy!

March 6th.  Four lonnnnnng months since my initial ankle surgery.  How's it going??  Well, it looks better on the outside for sure.  Some new stuff is going on on the inside (popping and snapping) but I DO NOT want it fixed.  I have to go Tuesday for the skin graft but I don't want anything else "fixed" while I'm under.  I told Larry that.  I'm done with all of it.  If it doesn't get better on its own, it'll be like that 'til Jesus comes to get me.  I'm seriously done with surgeries.

The popping is pretty much constant but doesn't hurt.  The snapping (like a rubber band snapping) is not constant but does hurt.  I still have the burning, biting nerve pain in my toes ALL the time and the cold icy wet feeling in my toes sometimes.  And whatever pain that feels like it's in the bone is also not constant but it's regular enough to keep my attention.  So.  Here's the pic from Monday.  Lots better!!

I've been organizing some this week.  First time I've actually felt like messing with it.  I hopped on the whole Marie Kondo/KonMari tidying wagon in January but fell right back off when I realized I was going to have to have the energy to DO SOMETHING.  I did my closet yesterday and my dresser today.  I am quite pleased with myself.  I still need to finish the closet (I have stuff stuck everywhere!) but that'll have to wait until I can stand longer and climb up on a step ladder.  Sure can't do that right now.

Here are some before and after pics of my dresser drawers!

Bras and panties.  Before:

And after!

T-shirts.  Before:

And after!

Shorts.  Before:

And after!

Summer pajamas.  Before:

And after!

I was so in the zone that I didn't even GET a before pic of my winter jammies.  But here they are after!

And I ended up with TWO empties!  I only had eleven pairs of black yoga pants, too.  I trashed two pairs of holey ones since I just bought two new pairs last week. Ha!  

I'm actually embarrassed to show those before pics.  OMG.  Such a pig.  But they good now.  :)

I'll tackle the pantry tomorrow or Friday.  My dressing gets changed tomorrow and my foot always hurts worse after they change it.  Waaah.  But I'll post the pantry when I get it done, too!

Three months

No scary foot pics this time!  It is getting better, though.  Just a very slooooow process.  When my home nurse uncovered it yesterday to change my dressing, there was actual NEW SKIN growing!!  Just a tiny bit around the edges but I was SO excited!!  Thank you, Jesus, for your precious healing hands!!

Today is three months since the last time I was at work.  November 5th.  And I was only there half a day.  I left at lunch since I was SO excited about my surgery and I wanted to go home and get an overnight bag packed (Just in case.  My mama taught me well about a lot of things and hospital stays is one of them.).

THREE MONTHS.  I sure didn't think I'd still be recovering at home three months later.  These days, I don't really mind it much.  The pain is manageable now with the meds I'm on and I'm able to DO STUFF around the house.  Light housework, laundry, that kind of thing.  I give out so easily so I do a little bit and sit down, do a little more and sit down.  

My high school friend, Kim, has been coming to see me and I have SO enjoyed her company!!  Oh my goodness, I'm so happy to have her back in my life.  We have missed decades but we're gonna catch up.  She's moved back from Delaware and I'm trying to get her to move even closer, like our neighborhood.  Ha!  

Since I spend most days in my pjs and no makeup, it was so nice to go out for lunch with Kim last week (even though I was wearing my wound vac around my neck and folks were staring at me like I had something they could catch!) and then go get our hair done.  I had not had my hair cut since the end of October (in preparation for my surgery) and I was looking like quite the shaggy dog.  I got my bump back and I'm so happy!  I've been getting my hair cut short in the back and stacked into a bump and kinda long and tapered in the front.  That works for me.  It's easy and it's cute, too!  

I'm not making any long term plans but I am absolutely giddy about that little bit of fresh new skin that's so pink and pretty around my wound.  It's the little things, you know. 

Thanks for your prayers.  Keep 'em coming!!  They're working.   

My walk through life...mostly barefoot

***Fair warning!!  Bad foot pic attached.  Watch out!!***

When I taglined this blog, I thought that was the perfect way to describe my blog.  My blog that shares my walk through life and because I'm almost always barefoot, I do this walk pretty much always without shoes.  I love being barefoot.  I love the feeling of cold tile on my feet, beach sand between my toes, cool garden mud on the side of my foot, I love everything about NO SHOES.  I hardly ever wear them, even at family functions.  I'll kick my shoes off in a corner.  I've always been this way.

This nightmare with my foot has me worried.  I went back to the doctor yesterday and he told me he'd see me again in four weeks.  If this wound has not closed up by then, he's going to have to do a skin graft.  And take skin from my thigh.  This freakin' nightmare just keeps getting scarier and scarier.  I did not sign up for this!  I don't like this ride.  LET ME OFF.

This was my foot yesterday in Macon.  It's awful.  It's so very painful.  It's really, really trying on me, emotionally and physically.  I just cannot see it closing up.  So I am facing a THIRD surgery.

I don't think I'll ever be barefoot and free again.  I can't see past today and today, I just don't see my foot ever being the same.  Dear readers, whether you're someone who knows me personally or if you're a reader who has never commented and I don't know you, I would really appreciate your prayers over my foot.  God knows who we are, whether we know each other or not.  

Surgery number two

We arrived at Jack Hughston Memorial Hospital at 1:00 Thursday, January 3rd, went straight to the ER as we were directed, I was admitted and I was in surgery by 3:30.  I woke up in recovery to the sounds of nurses and techs talking about real estate and buying new houses this year.  I had bitten my bottom lip sometime while under anesthesia, really, really hard, and I could taste blood in my mouth.  I couldn't feel anything in my foot at all.  
After a while, they took me up to my room on the fourth floor, where Larry was waiting for me.  I was attached to a wound vac to begin this negative pressure wound therapy to try and get this thing to HEAL.  My bloodwork came back positive for staph so I was put on IV antibiotics for a day and a half.  The hole that had formed in my wound was actually one of the anchors coming loose that my doctor put in to secure that tendon in place.  He fixed that as well.

Larry stayed by my side, "sleeping" on a cot one of the nurses brought him.  I put that in quotations because he didn't sleep at all.  He had his own stress test and doctor's appointment on Monday so I sent him home Saturday to get some rest and see about our boys.

Here we are snuggled up in that tiny hospital bed, watching that tiny TV but we were home.

I joked on Instagram that here's me and Nikki in hospital beds at the same time!  I got to watch my story on that tiny little TV but not much else.  It only picked up 18 channels and the only "news" channel it picked up was the fakest news out there.  Oy.  I ended up watching a lot of "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "King Of Queens", two of my very favorite old shows anyway.  Probably did me good to take a news break.

This was the view from my room Saturday afternoon.  There was only me and two other patients on the whole floor.  The food was delicious, the care excellent and the pain meds kept coming.  

And this was my nighttime view.  I always looked forward to those seven little lights glowing across the way.

I came home Monday, on two weeks of strong antibiotics and attached to this.  A portable Genadyne NPWT Pump.  I hate it.  I hate having to carry it around.  I hate the sound it makes when it's sucking fresh good blood up into my wound, I hate everything about it.  I have a home health nurse who comes twice a week to change the dressing and when she was here Thursday, the dad-blamed thing actually looked better to me.  

The treatment has gone 117 hours and 2 minutes so far.  I'm told three to four weeks should do the trick.  After the pump has done all it can for me, a less invasive bandage/dressing will finish it on up.

I'm excited for that.  For spring, for warm weather, for sun on my face and for days spent planting flowers.  Lots and lots of flowers.  Lantana, I think.  And sunflowers.

One thing I've learned through this whole nightmare is hard times show you who loves you.  My Larry has been phenomenal through the whole thing, taking such good care of me and Banjo, Tabbie Hoffman and Kismet.  Our housekeeper came while Larry was with me in Alabama and she fed the boys and let Banjo out to potty.  That sweet boy had NO accidents.  My friends from work call and check on me, text me and come see me, bringing tons of food and love.  My precious mama checks on me every day, even though she's going through her own private hell.  When I tightened my circle, I absolutely kept the right ones inside.  My friend, Debbie, came yesterday bringing coffee, sausage and egg croissants and maple doughnuts and we talked about doing our annual Peaches to the Beaches jaunt March 8th.  

Eight weeks.  Foot, get ready.  

New year, same me...

...because I'm already fabulous!  Ha!  

I don't usually make New Year's resolutions.  I just try to do better than I did the previous year.  I can do that again with 2019.  No need to make weight loss promises to myself, no need to promise to be a better person, kinder and more forgiving.  I just will do what I need to do to feel good about ME, love on those around me, who stand with me and by me.  That's what I'll do.

I have pretty much cut some folks out of my life the last couple of years.  Toxic, abusive and controlling people that I love, still love, but can't tolerate anymore.  It's sad, really, but you gotta do what's good for YOU.  Decades of verbal abuse and just putting up with it, biting my tongue and not defending myself are over.  Completely over.  Apologies that I'll never get and closeness that I'll never feel again, those realizations have been hard but I got through it.  2019 is the year that I move on from it, not looking for apologies anymore and definitely not needing that closeness anymore.  

Oh well.  Life is like that sometimes.  The world continues to turn and life continues to fly by.  I still can't believe how fast 2018 went.  Most of it I spent in pain with my foot.  Oh, how I wish I could go back to that pain!  That pain was nothing compared to what I'm going through now.  The hematoma left my foot with a huge crater and no matter how carefully and lovingly Larry has cared for it, it is not healing.  The pain is unbelievable.  I cry all the time and nothing helps, not narcotics, which I have in abundance, not rest, not staying off it, nothing helps.  It is not healing like it should be so tomorrow, I'm having a second surgery, this one at their Jack Hughston Memorial Hospital in Phenix City, Alabama.  

Debridement.  Google it and cry with me.

Workers' Comp has assigned a nurse to come here to our home and take care of me.  She will come and change this sponge and drain thing that will be put on me tomorrow.  She'll come every 3 to 4 days, I'm told.  This whole experience has been nothing but a nightmare.  I just wanted my foot fixed.  I wanted the nerve pain to go away so that I could walk like a normal human being, go hiking with my husband, walk on the beach with him without hurting.  I had NO idea that this was in my future.  But it was and I know God has me wrapped in His loving arms.  I know that.  I know He's with me during the dark, dark nights that I sit in my recliner and cry.  I know He's with Larry, who feels completely helpless in this whole mess.  God has amazing healing powers and He will heal me, too!  This was part of my journey to get to the next phase in my life.  I know I will survive it and that I will come out on the other side smelling like the pink rose that I am and wearing real shoes again.

I appreciate your prayers and thoughts of us as we continue to fight this.  For better or for worse, in sickness and in health.  Larry has kept those vows like a champ.  I could not have made it without him.

The Spirit of Christmas

So we were watching this Christmas movie on Netflix called "The Spirit of Christmas" the other night and I just fell in love with the story and with the angel that Daniel placed on top of their tree. I set out to try to find it. Since Daniel died 95 years ago, I just knew it had to be some kind of antique family heirloom thing. I still searched Google until I found it, using every word I thought would lead me to her.

I found her! On Amazon, of all places. Ain’t she beautiful??

I am right proud of myself for this.  I found this thing with NOTHING to go on except "vintage angel halo pointy".  Ha!  She's a Willow Tree Starlight Tree Topper and she's not 100+ years old after all.