Relative Something

Taking advantage of Cyndie’s reduction in activity, we spent some time while she rested yesterday, creating a chronological outline of the medical issues she has experienced throughout her entire life. If each one were a chapter in her autobiography, the book would be more than 40 chapters long.

We came up with 15  surgeries and 3 or 4 medical procedures, starting with one before she was even a year old and not counting two pregnancies or the time she stepped on a rake and split her eyebrow open. In some of the occurrences that have happened since I started blogging, I was able to hunt for and find exact dates, including pictures.

I wonder if I have a picture for every surgery.

After searching, we couldn’t find evidence that I had blogged about the concussion she had that took us days to figure out because she didn’t remember what happened when she hit her head. She picked up a friend the day after and remembers telling her of having a severe headache. The day after that, Cyndie was home, and we were hosting a visitor. Cyndie looked fine in the morning,  but in the middle of the day, I noticed Cyndie had developed a profound black eye that extended from her forehead to her chin.

Why I wouldn’t have written about that is a mystery to me. I was also hoping to find a picture of how vivid her bruised-looking face had become. That led Cyndie to make a doctor’s appointment, which resulted in her getting an MRI of her head.

She loves telling the story of the technician asking ever so gently if he wasn’t also supposed to get a view of her face since it looked so bad. Both of us laugh about her having already signed up for a Master Gardener class that she tried to complete despite the concussion but, in the end, wasn’t able to remember much of anything she learned.

It was a very interesting day-long exercise of dredging up past events and then trying to compile a chronological outline with dates so we could have all the information in one place. So many stories that we’ve told and re-told over the years, but never before locking in dates or the order of events.

It paints quite a varied portrait of incidents, both dramatic and mundane, in her medical history.

Now that we have the outline, I’m eager to capture some of the interesting details that can present a fuller story about what her experiences were like for each of the different incidents.

Maybe I’ll end up amending the subtitle of this blog to “*this* John W. Hays’ take on Cyndie’s experiences.”

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