It's All In The Heart!

As of the end of this year, I have run a total of 8 marathons! I used to really enjoy running them, but this year, for some reason, I seemed to be having problems with my breathing and my stamina. I knew that I had asthma, which I believe was mostly runner induced, but it seemed to get worse this year for some reason. After running the Salt Lake and Ogden marathons in the spring and finding that my stamina just wasn't getting any better, I decided to go see my pulmonologist to see what was going on and to possibly resolve any issues before I had to run my next marathon...the St. George Marathon! Do you know what he told me? He asked me if I had ever thought that it might just be because I was getting older! When he said that, I just smiled and told him that I was willing to accept that, if that was what it was, but I wanted to rule out other things before I settled for that as my answer.

The doctor sent me to get a stress echo, which involved running on a treadmill and an ultrasound of my heart to see what was going on. At the same time, he threw in a “bubble study” because I just happened to mention that my dear friend had found that she had a hole in her heart and her symptoms seemed to be similar to mine. I think he threw in that “bubble study” just to appease me, but it turned out to be a “tender mercy”. While they were doing my “bubble study” they realized I had a hole in my heart too!

I was almost relieved to hear that there really was a reason that might be causing me to have breathing problems but I had no idea what was ahead of me. Once they determined I had the hole, they had to figure out how big it was, so they sent me for more tests. They also sent me to get an MRI to see if I’d had any “events”, which I found out later was the same as “mini strokes”. Well I’ve had a lot of migraines in my life and I’ve heard them referred to as “mini strokes” before, so I was interested to see what the tests would show.

The doctor scheduled an MRI and a couple of other tests and then I was supposed to go see him 2 weeks later. However, when they called me on a Friday night at 7:30, the same day they had done my tests to tell me that I had a small hole that was going to require surgery...I knew it was probably even more serious than I thought. I mean, when does a doctor’s office ever call you the same day to give you results to a test...and on a Friday night at that?

The next Monday morning, I got a call from the surgeon’s office to schedule my surgery and although they had an appointment that Wednesday, I opted to put it off at least a week because I had too many other responsibilities to take care of. So on November 2^nd, I went in for a simple surgery. The surgery wasn’t supposed to take longer than a couple of hours and all it required was that they cut a small hole at the top of my leg and go in through an artery to my heart so they could insert an “occluder” (that I thought looked similar to a jelly fish) in my heart that would seal up that hole and gradually the cells would grow over it and so it would become a part of my heart.

When they were prepping me for surgery, I was informed that I wasn’t going to be fully sedated because they needed to be able to communicate with me as they inserted the occluder. To say that I wasn’t too happy about that would be putting it lightly! I mean, they had to insert the occluder through a vein in my leg and they had to put it in my heart, which meant that all of my “private parts” were going to be exposed…and I didn’t want to be coherent enough to realize that! Fortunately, even though I was “awake” I can’t remember much of anything!

Before I went into surgery, the doctors all emphasized that my hole was quite small, but they never told me just how small. Their concern was that my MRI showed that I had had several mini strokes and I also had a thing called Factor Five that had to do with the fact that my blood tends to clot more than a normal persons...which in combination were all prime factors for a stroke...thus their concern!

Well as it turns out, once they started the surgery, the small hole (which I later found out was supposed to be 2mm in size) turned out to be not even close to small! It was not only NOT small, it was 20mm! The occluders they had weren’t even big enough for a hole that size, so they quickly had to call other hospitals to see if they had one big enough. Fortunately, they had one at Primary Children’s hospital and my surgery was being done at the U of U hospital, so they just had to walk across the way to get it, but my short, simple surgery turned out to be anything but short and simple! However, I was definitely lucky because they said that if my hole would have been any bigger, they would have had to do open heart surgery! What a blessing it is that they had found my hole before anything major happened to me!

After the surgery, I had to stay in the hospital overnight so they could monitor me, but other than a huge bruise on my leg, I really had no major side effects. I had to lay off any strenuous exercise for a full month, but as soon as that month was over, I was right back running and swimming just like I had been before! I can’t say that I feel SO much better than I did before, but I also haven’t run any big miles yet...so I have yet to see if I can feel a difference and I truly hope I can!

The End of Summer

Our summer came to an end and it was time for the boys to go back to school…and like all good things that come to an end, it was met with bittersweet feelings from all of us! The boys were excited to go back and be with their friends and do something different, and I was excited to get back to a normal routine. But at the same time, we all knew we’d miss the days of playing in the pool and sleeping in as long as we wanted to and just doing whatever sounded fun each day. There was no doubt that we’d had a wonderful summer and we’d done a lot of fun things together, but there will always be another summer for more of that and for now, it’s time for the boys to go “broaden their knowledge”. Unfortunately, that means they’re growing up too...and that’s what I’m really not ready for!

Our Summer in a Nutshell!

In my mind, summer is the greatest time of the year and as long as the kids are on summer break, I think I deserve to have a break as well. That means that even though a lot of things happened over the summer, I was “on break”, so I only wrote about a few of them. Unfortunately though, now that I’m going to try to do some catch up, it’s going to be nearly impossible to share everything that happened, so it will have to be in abbreviated form!

After only being out of school for a week, I had to leave the boys and go to Girls Camp for a week. That was an amazing experience all by itself, but I’ll save that story for another time. Since Rod still had to work and wasn’t going to be home to take care of the boys, they got to go spend that week with grandma and grandpa Carling in Logan, which they absolutely love to do, so they didn’t mind. Then I was only home from Girls Camp for one week and it was time to go to San Diego for our summer family vacation. Unlike most of our summer vacations, this vacation was different in that it didn’t include the trailer, the boat or the 4 wheelers, but it was amazing nonetheless!

At Girls Camp - all of the Stake YW leaders after our Ugly Duckling skit

Girls Camp with our new Stake

Our hotel in San Diego

Shamu times 2 at Seaworld

The Shamu car at Seaworld

The whole family at the Wild Animal Safari Park

At the ocean

After breakfast at our hotel

The boys favorite souvenirs were the smashed pennies

After we got home from San Diego at the first of July, we were finally all home for an extended period of time and our summer fun around here began! We sat up the pool for the first time on the 4^th of July because quite honestly, even if we would have been home at all during June, it probably wouldn’t have been warm enough to put up the pool anyway! Besides that, I hate trying to keep the pool water clean and swimmable so I didn’t see any sense in setting it up any earlier than necessary. Once we got it up though, we probably used it almost every day...and sometimes multiple times in a day!

Swimming/rafting in the pool, who cares as long they're in the pool?!

Besides swimming in the pool, we went to the movies, to see fireworks, to parades, to the park, to reunions, and to the splash pad. The boys also took swimming lessons, played baseball, and played with their friends. We all went boating with our brothers (and Brittney of course) and we also went to Lagoon, and did I mention, swimming in the pool? The boys were basically fish this entire summer and surprisingly, they didn’t even have much of a tan to speak of...and it’s not because I was good at putting sunscreen on them, because I wasn’t!

All the brothers, but where's Brittney?

Our new water tube

At the July cousins birthday party

Fireworks - our favorite part of July!

At the Lamb reunion in front of my mom's childhood home in Hyde Park

We went on a walking tour of Hyde Park at the reunion

As if the pool wasn't enough, the boys pulled out the waterslide

We got home from San Diego just in time for Hayden's Pinewood Derby

At the Splash Park with the Harrisons

The roller coaster at Lagoon was one of our favorite rides - it was also the ride where we lost Jared and Hayden - it was a scary couple of hours!

What do you think? Do they look ready to play?

Me and the boys at Lagoon - one of our other favorite summer traditions!

Baseball anyone?

Swimming lessons with the Rosenlunds

Hayden's scout troop at Day Camp

Can you say "moose"?

Before the summer was over, we finally got the chance to go 4 wheeling one more time and we went with our friends the Jacksons. It was only a day trip, but we went all the way to Logan to go up Temple Fork Canyon so we could see Old Ephraim’s grave. And for those of you who don’t know who Old Ephraim is, he was an infamous 9 foot tall grizzly bear that was a huge menace until he was killed sometime back in the 1920’s. The grave was pretty amazing and was built to be exactly as tall as Old Ephraim was...and he was obviously huge!

4 wheeling is a little dirty but it sure is fun!

Old Ephraim's Grave - notice how tall it is

After we saw the grave, we continued to ride up into the mountains despite the black clouds that were gathering in the distance. I was a little worried that we might get rained on and even get caught in the middle of a lightning storm, which wouldn’t have been a good thing being on top of the mountain, but luckily it never did catch up to us! Right in the middle of our travels, we came across this huge meadow of flowers…and there were butterflies everywhere! It was incredible to be surrounded by butterflies like that but I loved it! I have now lovingly renamed that meadow (as if it had a name to begin with) “butterfly meadows”. It was an amazing day…and a good way to bring our summer break to an end!

The butterflies and "butterfly meadows"

Just Another Day in PARADISE!

One of our family’s favorite things about summer is going on vacation...or several vacations if we’re proactive enough and make plans to do so! And normally we like to make our vacation plans well in advance…like at least 6 months! Well we broke tradition this year! We made plans 6 months in advance all right, but it was to go to Nauvoo but at the last minute we decided that it was going to be way too expensive, so we canned that idea and decided we’d go somewhere else instead...but where? It took us a while to decide, but when Rod suggested going to San Diego, we all loved that idea and knew that was exactly what we wanted to do!

Rod and I sat down to make reservations, but finding the “perfect” hotel online isn’t as easy as one would like to believe. In fact, aside from the number of “stars” or the customer ratings, it was almost impossible to decide which $100+ a night hotel was going to be the best deal for our money...and one thing was for sure, if we were spending that much, we definitely wanted to get our money’s worth!

We finally ended up calling a travel agent to see if they could offer us any good deals that we couldn’t find online…and boy are we glad that we did! Before we called, we had pretty much decided that we were just going to stay at a Holiday Inn Express because Rod and I both knew that that would be a safe choice, but our travel agent found us a deal that was “too good to pass up”! And best of all, it was only a little bit more money than our “safe choice”!

The hotel that our agent found us was called Paradise Island Spa and Resort…and it was just that, a true paradise! If we wouldn’t have known better, we would have thought we were on some tropical island somewhere! It was beautiful! The resort was on Mission Bay right across the street from Seaworld. The entrance to the resort was a long palm tree lined road and our “room” was a bungalow with a patio overlooking a pond that was surrounded by palm trees. There were 5 pools scattered throughout the resort and one of those happened to be right across the road from our room. It was perfect and worth every bit of what we paid for it!

This is the front door of our bungalow

This is our view from our front door

This is our room

Each day that we were there, we had a $40 allowance that we could use to eat at any of the 3 restaurants on the resort property, which sounded like a good deal. We did decide though that we’d probably get the most for our money if we used that credit for breakfast, so every day we started our morning at the Barefoot Bar and Grill eating on the patio overlooking the ocean…and the breakfasts were wonderful! Oh and did I happen to mention that this place was perfect?

Waiting to be served our breakfast!

Following the ducks along the boardwalk around our hotel

Rod was happy to be out of the car

We left home early on a Monday morning and drove all the way to San Diego in one day. That was a trip that none of us were looking forward to repeating on Friday when we had to go home, but it wasn’t so bad on the way because we were all full of anticipation! After driving all day, we checked into the hotel, went and got something to eat and then the boys came back and swam until it was time to go to bed!

The entrance to the resort

After a long day of driving...a dip in the pool was nice!

On Tuesday morning we got up and drove across the street to Seaworld. We would have walked but it was a little too far for that. I hadn’t been to Seaworld since I was probably 10 years old, so it was as exciting for me as it was for the boys. We saw all sorts of sea life including dolphins that the boys were able to pet, we rode the Skytower Ride and the Bayside Skyride, we saw the Shamu show, the dolphin show and the sea lion show, and the boys rode on Shipwreck Rapids. They had to do that one without me though because I didn’t really want to get wet and it wasn’t really warm enough to get wet anyway! We left the park long enough to go and get some dinner, and then we came back to watch the Shamu night show and fireworks before heading back to “paradise”!

Ready to start our day at Seaworld

Waiting to ride The Skytower Ride

The boys got front row seats at the Sea Lion show

Slug Bug Shamu!

Petting the dolphins

Waiting for the Shamu show to start

Shamu - times 2

The dolphin show

Picnic in the parking lot for lunch

Shamu at night!

We spent Wednesday at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. We bought tickets to ride the tram so that’s what we decided to do first. The ride itself was at the opposite end of the park, so we had quite a walk just to get there. I was so excited to see all of the wildlife, but I was a little disappointed when I realized that the tram ride was much shorter than it had been when Rod and I were there right after we got married…probably 13 years ago! The boys didn’t know any different though, so they loved it...and we still saw lots of wildlife! And what we didn’t get to see on the tram, we still got to see...we just had to walk to it! Probably one of our favorite exhibits was the elephants because there was a brand new baby elephant. The boys and I could have stood there and watched them for hours!

Where to now mom?

Getting Rod to pose for a pic was a rare thing - this was my favorite photo of the whole trip!

Riding the rhino

We actually got Connor to pet the animals - that's even more rare than a picture with Rod!

Our view from the Tram Ride

The baby elephant was one of our favorites

On the way home from the Wild Animal Park, we made Rod take us by the temple. I got out to take a few pictures but I felt a little awkward in my levis so I didn’t go too far. It’s a beautiful temple!

Thursday was our last day in San Diego. We decided that we’d spend that day going to the Mormon Battalion Historic Site and to the beach. We had no problem finding the Mormon Battalion Historic Site and while we were there, we went on their little tour and the boys got to plan for gold. I just enjoyed spending time with other LDS people for a while. You don’t realize how much you miss that until you spend a few days away from Utah! Finding the beach wasn’t quite as easy though. We thought we’d go out to Coronado Island and find a fun place for the boys to swim, but finding open beach front wasn’t that easy. We eventually found a beach back near our hotel so that the boys could at least go and wade for a few minutes, but they were more excited to go back to the hotel and swim...so that’s what we ended up doing!

Going to breakfast

At the Mormon Battalion Historic Site

Panning for gold - and they even found some!

We finally found the beach!

Dinner was at the restaurant where they filmed Top Gun

Overall, we had a wonderful week and when it came time to go home, I was sad, just like I usually am. We were especially sad about the long drive ahead of us. But at least we now know what it’s like to spend a week in Paradise!