Have you seen the commercial advertising that Paige Davis is returning to host Trading Spaces on TLC? I loved that show from the beginning, but when she suddenly left I lost interest. For some reason her almost annoying perkiness and antics made that show fun to watch. Without her you were left with two arrogant designers and a few nervous homeowners.

With Paige back, TLC is switching things up. In the advertisement they ask if you could trade spaces with your ex or your mother-in-law. Can you imagine? I can’t, which makes me all the more excited for the upcoming show on Saturday’s (January 27th is the premiere).

I don’t have an ex, unless you count that guy I refer to as Rat-Boy that I dated back in high school, but I do have 2 mother-in-law’s. (No, we don’t live in Utah. My husband’s parents are divorced and his father is remarried.) I get along very well with my husband’s mother and we have similar tastes in decorating, but his step-mother and I differ in this area quite a bit.

I shop at places like Big Lots and outlets, so I can proudly tell you the price of most of the items I display in our house. My step-mother shops at very pricey stores and insists that your pillow cases match your lamp shade. I’m lucky if our pillow cases match the sheets!

Now if they cast me on this show and I was trading spaces with Rat-Boy, I would honestly staple rubber rats all over his walls. Maybe I’d add a few snakes in there too just for fun.

Honestly, I can’t say that I have any particular style. I like to be surrounded with warm colors and things that remind me of family. I couldn’t tell you the difference between French Country and Contemporary. A designer would probably take one look at my style and classify it as, “What Was On Sale!”

Real love is standing in our kitchen filling syringes of medicine for my PICC line, cleaning up the dinner he made, getting our son in the bathtub, carrying laundry baskets upstairs to fold and put away, while I sit in the recliner coming up with more things for him to do.

After he finishes that, there is some orange puke to clean up (nasty antibiotic medicine) in the bathroom with some Clorox cleaning wipes. Thank God I choose to enter marriage with this partner and said yes.

When I told him I had arm hair growing his reply was, “I don’t think you smell that bad.” That’s reality.

Thank you for all the well-wishes. I have been very neglectful in my blog reading lately. You’d think a person who spends all day sitting in the same place, with no real work to do and nothing but Project Runway re-runs on would have time.

Truth is I’m still busy. Filling syringes. Even sick people have stuff to take care of.

Thankfully, it turns out I do not have MRSA. That is a blessing in itself, but I do have a rather nasty staph infection that I can’t say, let alone type the name of on here. Nasty enough that they inserted a PICC line (not fun at all), and I will be on IV antibiotics every 8 hours until February 11th. Sound like fun?

As I listened to the home health nurse explain to us last night how to draw up syringes of this medicine and that medicine, I thought about all the medical care really sick people go through. Especially those who have the responsibility of caring for a sick child and all the work that it entails.

I spent one summer during college working at a place called Bradford Woods. They hosted 1-2 week camps all summer for children with various illnesses and disabilities from Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis. For 11 weeks I lived in a cabin that was not air-conditioned and took care of 8 campers at a time who required 24 hour care. I did this with 4-5 other counselors.

They called us counselors, which was really a joke. Our main role was as a nurse. The various camps included a week of children with down syndrome, a week for children with cancer, two weeks of children with cerebral palsy and several two week sessions that included a broad range of diagnosis’s (that included everything from AIDS to spina-bifida to children assessed at a cognitive level of 48 months).

There were very few campers who did not require constant attention, but to see their faces light up when they arrived in “the woods” as they called it, was priceless. Most of them had only known the inside of their own homes and hospital rooms as scenery. To live in an actual cabin and trek through the miles of paved hiking trails, was a dream come true. This was chance to be a regular kid by camping out under the stars.

The amount of physical work that went into this job was unreal and taxing on my own body. If only for a mere 7 days, I knew what it was like to be their caregiver on a 24 hour basis and it was hard - physically, emotionally, mentally, even spiritually. One of the areas they did not touch upon during our 3 week training was how affected you would be by these children.

I found myself falling into love with each of them, but in-particular there would be one in each session that just stole my heart. You wanted to make them all better and fix their problems, but the issues were well beyond my control. Learning that took most of the summer.

If anything the experience made me appreciate my own health. I was offered a chance to return the following summer to work there, but as much as my heart grew during the previous summer, it also ached. Instead I choose to follow other interests and I always wished I’d given those children one more summer of my time. Now more than ever, as I sit here trying not to wallow in the physical abilities I don’t have, I wished I’d chosen differently. Because my limits are temporary and theirs were for a lifetime.

I am laying in a hospital bed just down the street from my house. Thursday afternoon my ankle/foot started hurting and by Friday morning I could not put any weight on it.

This is the ankle I had surgery on exactly a month ago and it had gone really well (in comparison to previous surgeries I’ve had). Not to gross you out, but my incision had opened up and there was A LOT of yucky stuff coming out of my body.

I told my husband that we were either going to the ortho surgeon’s office or the ER, because the pain was that unbearable. So off I hobbled on crutches and they worked me right in.

The instructions that followed were not at all what I had expected - go directly to the hospital, admission for 3-4 days, surgery later on tonight to clean out the wound and IV antibiotics to treat it.

After several hours of admission paperwork, signing over my life and giving vials of blood and culture tests I found myself back in that cold operating room, with my arms strapped down and my body in the shape of a cross. I woke up in post-op shaking, crying and hyperventilating.

I didn’t sleep at all last night. My body bounced back and forth between chills and hot flashes. The infection finally caught up with me, as I ran a fever of 102 for a while. I reacted to the germs by throwing up anything that came close to my lips.

The combination of phenergan, percocet and morphine kept the pain minimal, but when they wear off it gets pretty bad. Thankfully, I have my own room, a flat screen TV and my laptop to occupy my jail time.

I’m now under the care of an infectious disease doctor (a new specialist to add to my list). My cultures came back positive for a staph infection and they are waiting to see if it is MRSA - which is methicillin resistant bacteria.

The specific type of infection will determine the course of antibiotics I’ll need. One possible explanation as to why a month later my incision would develop into this type of serious infection, is that I do not have a spleen (from the car accident) and it has left my immune system compromised.

Having internet access from a hospital bed may not be the best idea in the world. I read this about MRSA and started feeling sick to my stomach.

This lovely bed that moves up and down will be my friend for the next few days. At this point I’m thankful for single patient rooms and morphine! It’s the little things that make me happy. But I’m also thankful for a loving husband who is keeping me company and laughing, and my family who has helped care for our son and visited.

Why is it when we are hurting, we punish those around us?

My brother has had a lifetime of hurt inside and rarely lets anyone in. He’s experiencing a down time, but it certainly isn’t something he can’t turn around.

His personality thrives on down times though. Instead of using the negative to fuel his motivation to change things, he uses it to justify his mood.

Life is never going to be perfect for him, but he could find happiness if he would recognize all that he has going for him.

God knows no one has tried harder to be his constant support than my mother. She has gone above and beyond for him, and been his cheerleader through the good times and the bad. That is a tough thing to do when the person you believe in has all but given up on themselves.

Despite everything she has given, he decided not to show for her birthday dinner tonight. It angers me that controls her feelings like a puppet-master, deciding when she can feel happy and relieved, and when she should be sad and worried.

I’ve seen the good within him and it’s absolutely beautiful. I feel like he’s missing something within his heart that would give him a sense of peace.

How do you help a person realize they are their own worst enemy?