ONE MORE DAY

Last Wednesday we met this little tu-tued cutie when coming out of Hays City Store. I believe her name was LuLu.

Her mama called her The Ambassador of Smiles, and she was just what my hubby needed that day!

Not long ago, I looked at my calendar and realized that, early next year, Hubby will have gone Five Years without having to be in the hospital. Now, that may not seem like much to you, but for us it's a bit of a miracle. If you've been reading this blog for long, you might remember the string of bypass surgery, stroke, being life-flighted for bleeding in his brain, blacking-out episodes that led to a pacemaker - a pacemaker that came with a terrible staph infection, etc., etc. At one point he confessed that he didn't think he would live to see either of our kids married, much less grandkids, and it nearly broke my heart. But look at us now!

So why did Hubby need the ambassador of smiles? Well, back before Christmas he started having problems with constant drainage and coughing. Cedar Fever, right? Everyone gets it here that time of year. But when everyone else got better, he didn't. It just went on, and on, and on. I made him go to the doctor and he was put on antibiotics a couple of times for sinus infections, but the hacking always came back. Finally they did an MRI and referred him to an ENT, who told him that one of his nasal passages was completely closed, and he had enlarged "turbinates", both of which prevented proper drainage, which leads to sinus infections (and sometimes to sleep apnea, which he also has). The cure was a simple day surgery that only takes about an hour and a half -- a day surgery where they break your nose and rearrange it, ream out your sinuses, and leave you with a toothache in every tooth, dripping blood from your nose and down your throat, and unable to breath through your nose at all from all the splints and what-have-you that they stuffed up there, barely able to eat or sleep. For Five. Whole. Days.

At least he finally got to ditch the gauze-filled sling under his nose!

Four down. One to go!