School shopping with tweens....argh

I would highly reccomend that if you are going to go school clothes shopping with a hormonal pre-teen to load up on caffeine and bring earplugs and duct tape. It is seriously and adventure.....and very stressful. Fun but stressful. Now the fun begins.....school!!

So to make a long story short.....the trip to seattle was successful, Bill's foot is looking good and he is using crutches off and on switching to the wheelchair for more strenuous activities. Hiked to Multnomah falls and Bill wheeled probably over a mile all up hill while most of the tourists bitched about how steep the trail was. For those who dont know....Multnomah Falls is the second highest year round waterfall in Oregon. My husband is so impressive and refused to sit at the bottom and watch us have fun. He demanded to wheel up that hill. Inspiration at its best! We got home and dropped off my son for his trip to montana with the inlaws.....I miss him already and he will be gone a week. Dang! SO we went to our neighbors house tonight to unwind from a long stressful trip which included being contained in a small car with loud children for more than 12 hours in a three day period.....whooooa....yeah after 4 shots of whiskey which were jiggers and 4 rum and cokes.....lets just say I am relaxed and feelin good.....I am glad my driveway isnt any longer or steeper than it is. So no more Seattle trips fpr a while hopefully. Grocery shopping tomarrow and then going to see Halloween 2 with Bill. Yay! Alone time! We'll see how it plays out. I am already missing my little boy though. Its tough!

So yeah about this adventure

The adventure is going good accept for the fact that I am posting this from my husbands phone due to no internet signal at the hotel where the va has us lodged. There is a small pool so the kids enjoyed that. I had to laugh because aPparently the hotel wanted to charge for me and the kids. Umm no! He can't drive himself and I am his caregiver and I can't leave my kids alone so they can suck it lol. So ortho appointment in the morning then gonna go look for the childrens interactive museum.

Great adventures in VA land.....and we're off......AGAIN!

So today I spent the first part of the day searching through our storage unit among all the things that we cant fit into our tiny house. (Someone please buy it so we can move already) I had to get the stock wheels and tires that came with my car because the dealership's tires for life extended warranty coverage .....ummm.....how can I say this.....was pretty much a scam. SO Bill spent about 2 hours changing my bald tires on my car to the ugly stock ones that came on it. Dont get me wrong I am thankful for new tires.....but the wheels that the bald tires were on were much prettier. Anyway new tires are on.....and we are off on a 6 hour road trip to Seattle tomarrow for yet another ortho appointment with both kids tagging along. Oh how tomarrow will be a super long day.....I cant wait till school starts. Now I am off to take a late shower.....all my chores are done....everything is packed.....for myself and the kids.....snacks.....games.....DVDs.....wheelchair parts.....crutches......my little car will eventually hate me I just know it. As if tomarrow wasnt gonna be entertaining enough.....lol....my husband gets to drive the whole trip.....normally I dont go on these trips.....but I get to experience how it would appear from the inside of his humvee if he were driving it. Its like Nascar meets demolition derby on crack......with a shot of whiskey. Stay tuned! I will post updates of this adventure from time to time.....hahahahaha.....if I get there!!!!

Today was better than yesterday!

So my days vary in regards to how good of a day I have....I use the pain scale that the VA loves to use for physical pain.....thats about a joke. Anyway today was a smily face and not as painful as yesterday. This applies to Bill and myself. Him with pain and me for stress because when his pain is down in the lower area of the pain chart where a frown begins to come out.....well then that ruins my day because I either feel bad for him or I stress myself out trying to not set him off. It has gotten alot better and since his last surgery I feel like we are getting along better and we understand eachother so much better. He has been reading alot and writing in his journal and even writing poetry....thats strange for me but it has helped him apparently. He is on this how can I please my wife kick. He is basically trying to make up for all the years that we have been fighting not just with eachother but with life. I began to feel a little selfish and I told him that I was tired of everything being only about him all the time. I know that seems wrong but I have sacrificed things too. For one my sanity and two my confidence. Its coming back.....slowly but its coming! Anyway Bill has been buying me cute things, doing the dishes when he can tolerate standing, laundry and he has just all of a sudden gained this desire to try extra hard to make me happy. I appreciate his efforts and I am so glad that he is getting joy out of it too. Its been a long time since he has had this kind of motivation. Today Me, Bill and the kids went and ran some errands and then took the kids to the skate park. So my theory is that now my husband is out of the military he misses blowing stuff up so much and he is an adrenaline rush junkie....now he is taking his wheelchair to the skate park so he can pack what little danger he can into his day without actually hurting himself or other people. Its constructive, it gets him out of the house and its a good workout for him. I of course am always on standby with a box of huge bandaids just in case. The only problem is that the motto go big or go home stands strong in our home. Its a little scary and a little stressful. So with his track record of injuries....I dont think my big box of bandaids is going to make much of a difference. So now on to modifying the wheelchair for tricks, jumps and grinding. I hope other wounded warriors can learn that the word disability still has the word ability in it. It sometimes takes seeing what other disabled people can actually do with what little they have to motivate others to do the same.

Finding the humor in sacrifice!

So here is a small example of the kind of people we are and how we have learned to use humor to get us through some very tough situations in the past. Now my husband is an amputee. However he tried to keep his leg for over a year before making the decision to ultimately have it amputated just below his right knee. The limb salvage surgery just wasnt working. SO....three days before his amputation my husband Bill and our really good friend who is a tattoo artist got together and decided on a super funny idea to help my husband come to terms with the loss of his leg. In the end the doctors admitted that Bill's amputation was by far the most entertaining one to date. The picture below will either make you laugh or it will offend you.....either way I still think its sexy!

New Adventures in PTSD land

So as wives who have wounded husbands know PTSD can bring on a whole new world of excitement....maybe excitement isnt the right word! Things are likely to happen and you either choose to accept it or deal with it in creative ways. So here is a little example of an incident that made me laugh recently. Yesterday I spent most of the day at my inlaws house getting my car worked on so it wouldnt scream at me anymore. After a day of that.....wheww....car is noise free. However I was on my way home yesterday and got kind of a disturbing phone call from my husband who has recently found a new found love for trying to restore his 1991 5.0 mustang which is his baby. He hasnt been able to work on it for years due to mobility issues. Anyhow he calls me in sort of a disgruntled state asking me if I can pick up wasp spray on the way home. I replied with well we have two cans and proceeded to tell him where they were located. I asked him why he needed it and if everything was ok and he replied with.....I have just been in a firefight with a few troops of wasps who had recently made a nest in my car. So he made a bunker, got the hose and proceeded to attack the enemy wasps until he was safe enough to wheelchair out of the area to a safer FOB (forward operating base).....lol....he needed more ammo.....thus the wasp spray.....he said he was then off to locate the weapons and he was gonna go slaughter the rest of the colony and take no prisoners. Needless to say no wasp lived the attack and nobody in our platoon was injured or killed. So the car is free from enemy fire and is ready for clearance.....or some shit like that. Anyway I thought it was the funniest thing ever. I had to share this! It made me laugh and he had fun! Just another day with my husband and his PTSD!

My car screams at me.....

So I have in the past year begun to have a ton of car problems off and on. My car was bought new in 2005 as a 2006 and there was 11 miles on it when we drove away from the dealership. Now 4 years later and I feel like all of this traveling for medical appointments has really begun to take a toll on my poor little car. It has almost 80,000 miles on it and today I spent a couple hours hanging out at the inlaws house while my father in law changed my brakes and inspected my car. My brakes were so bad and they have been screaming at me for weeks now. Yay no more squeeling little Honda. It seriously sounded like I was dragging a bag of baby pigs behind me down the road. No my tires could blow at any moment and I seriously think that the dealership we bought it from has the crappiest mechanica on the planet. I dont think that they do all the required maintenance when we take it in. Anyway I had to vent about that. Hopefully our truck will be paid off in a year and I can trade my car in for a hybrid something for better mileage, fuel economy, space and more earth friendly. Those are my hopes anyway. We'll see our credit is hashed though from previous issues.....dont wanna go into that.....a whole new set of drama.

I missed the bloggers window of opportunity!

I have recently realized after reading numerous blogs spanning over a few years from multiple women that I should have been blogging from the start of our horrid ordeal. It would kind of be be nice to be able to go back and see how far we have came as a couple and as individuals over the past 5 years. We have been through a tremendous amount of hell, pain, suffering, fights, family deaths, amputations, surgeries, births and so much more than I can even list here. Even though I never blogged all that time I wish now that I had kept a personal journal. It may have helped alot with my situation. I journal now and even though I just started this blog.....there is still so much to look forward to and now I feel like instead of needing to blog as an outlet for tough situation and hard times I can look forward to blogging about the good times and not only where we have been but where we are going in life. Things are definately looking up however life for us and our family is still a struggle at times. Stay tuned anything is possible when you live with a combat wounded veteran.

The Cliff's Notes

So I am new to this whole blogging "experience" so I think I should introduce myself and give you an idea of my situation so I dont have to do what I normally do which is tell the dang story 50 times a day.....or I just get to the point where now I just say hi to people and forget all the rest and if someone asks how I am doing I just say I am doing fine or good.....even if I am not fine. It saves me hours of explaining and questions and dumbfounded looks. My name is Naomi and my husband was injured in Iraq June 23rd 2004. He was driving lead vehicle in a small convoy on a night mission when his humvee hit and IED which was detonated from nearby. The blast was large enough to toss and uparmored humvee into the air and onto its top. The humvee was demolished. Everyone lived but a few of the guys including my husband were very severely injured. My husband was injured the worst since the blast was basically all on the driver side where he was sitting. Alot of people say wow he was so lucky. Yeah I guess you could say that but over the past 5 years we havent felt very lucky along this beaten path that the military likes to refer to as recovery. Its more like hell on earth. Nobody on the planet can prepare you for what I have and continue to deal with. My husband's injuries consist of a L1-L4 burst fracture....he how has hardware holding his spine together. He has a RBK (right below the knee) amputation after a year of limb salvaging his right foot. He just had reconstructive surgery done on his left foot and ankle (another limb slavage basically) a few months ago and is just now beginning to bare weight on it. He had a revision done on his stump last year so it was kind of considered a second amputation since they had to remove 2 inches of bone to fix his issue. He also has a TBI and plenty of good ol' PTSD to go around. He has left leg nerve damage and he also has pains in his left knee from overcompensation while trying to walk for 5 years on a broken foot that the Army addressed as fine. Anyway the road to recovery for us has been a very long and stressful one. Words cannot express what my emotions have been through. When I say us as in our road to recovery I mean just that.....we are recovering together because I dont care what anyone says.....we both suffer and we both carry the burden of war injuries. Thats just the way it is. Now after 5 years of dealing with more than a husband and a wife should endure we are trying to get our lives on a somewhat normal path and finally get some stability back. My only worry now is that my husband may lose his other leg eventually and that mentally I am now on my last crayon in my box of 120. He just recieved his 100% permanent and total VA disability rating after fighting and apealing twice while his buddies have just slipped right through the arms of the system with their back pains and their mild if any TBIs and gotten their 100% over a year ago with no issues. So here it is 5 years later and I am going to try out college since I havent been able to go back to school or work in quite some time. I am just trying to get my mind right and do normal things that normal people do every day. I dont know what normal is anymore if there even is such a thing. If there is.....can I borrow some please. I will pay you back later!