The Adventures and Misadventures of Vacation 2014

I, Kienbock's Girl, have had several adventures and misadventures in the last few months.

My husband and I took my hard earned vacation time to go to Europe and spend time with our exchange daughter and her family. We planned since our daughter left us to visit her this year. Back in February, we bought tickets, and started planning a vacation that ended up taking the 4 months before to plan it out entirely ... and then of course we didn't stay on the schedule we created, but we never do as we add and delete as we go with the flow. So, we spent 2 lovely weeks with our daughter, and a week with her family. Overall, it was a very good vacation but I learned some things.

1. Always travel with the husband - do not fly alone.
2. Only fly with Iceland Air if you're going to Iceland. The seats are too tiny for a normal sized person let alone a 6'1" man with gigantic shoulders, they make you follow ridiculous overhead luggage sizes, and they don't feed you any food (you must pay) and give you drinks 2 times in an 8 hour flight.
3. When flying, attempt to find affordable seats in business or 1st class - or pay for a last minute upgrade if available.
4. When flying, even if the doctor tells you not to take it, take lots of ibuprofin. 
5. I sincerely dislike Belgium. Beautiful buildings, great history, but dirty/stinky cities with some poorly mismanaged transportation systems and no sense of direction combined with expensive food made it a little difficult to fall in love with. 
6. Always travel like a local. I mean, I already knew this, but I knew it even more since I'd never taken the train outside of Germany when living there. 
7. Our exchange daughter does not always like to go to many museums on vacation and spend a lot of time looking and reading everything like I do. Find her a bookshop and you're golden.
8. Buying laundry soap in the ghetto of a French speaking country is not exactly ideal.
9.  Don't let Belgian buses kidnap you. ENTER FROM THE FRONT - they're not the same as Germany!
10. Belgian fries really are better.
11. Vacation isn't a time to relax - it's a time to get out and do stuff!
12. Candlelight wine cruises through Amsterdam are fun. They're even more fun when they stop for a short tour of the Red Light District, and a couple mysteriously disappears from the remainder of the tour.
13. Buying tickets online to the Anne Frank Huis might look sketchy (trust me, it looks sketchy) but it was an EPIC WIN. 
14. No one is kidding about the line to the Anne Frank Huis. By the time we entered (1/2 hour before it opened, we got early entry!), the line queue was around the building, and halfway down another block ... so an easy 2 hour wait minimum. By the time we exited, I'd estimate it was probably 2 city blocks long.
15. Speaking English isn't a crime or shocking to anyone in Belgium or the Netherlands. In fact, so much more English is spoken there than in Germany or any other country we've traveled to, it was like Spanish in America. Except that everyone could understand you ... and most Americans' Spanish is like baby talk. 
16. Take your internet capable phone with you. Even though you can't call people, you sure can e-mail or FaceBook them and post teasing pictures of you and your hubby and daughter.
17. Hotels in Bruges are cheap and SUPER nice.
18. Hotels in Brussels and Amsterdam are expensive and mediocre at best.
19. Renting an apartment in Brussels was kind of cool.
20. Renting an apartment in Brussels was kind of not so cool. 
21. If you forget to eat an unopened sandwich that you bought on the plane, the U.S. sniffer dogs will find it, and get you in trouble and have all your things looked through just to throw the sandwich away ... the sandwich that cost you about $12.

I'm sure there's more I could put here, but let me just say it was a vacation we'll never forget, and believe me when I say we took thousands of photos to prove just that. 

Things Must Change

DISCLAIMER: This is not meant to hurt anyone's feelings. It is not an attack. THIS IS HOW I FEEL. THESE ARE MY OPINIONS AND EXPERIENCES. You can't change that.


Since many people responded to my previous post in a way I half expected (dared to hope wouldn't), I would like to remind everyone who reads this that this is a blog about MY life, MY experiences, MY views, MY opinions. None of which is something that you can affect with words. So, I'd like to explain something about having depression and a borderline personality ... mothering them will not work. Telling them things aren't so, will not work. Giving them an "open door" will readily be ignored. And again, I am not saying this to hurt people's feelings. I'm stating the truth. It forces me to withdraw further.

I've spent my entire life reaching out, and floundering. This is something I struggle with daily. I've tried initiating friendship, I've tried carrying on friendship, I've tried being a good family member ....in all of these situations, I get walked upon. People lie, people flake, people don't want to be around me, people don't want to do the things I want to do - but when the tables are flipped, they expect me to respond. I'll give an example.

I was acquaintances with someone in college. I really wanted to be her friend; she was a really interesting person and someone I felt I could connect with over a weird interest in serial killers. (Since that is aside from my point, I'll leave you wondering.) One summer, she stayed at school. I called her and asked if she could come help me put together some furniture as my husband and I had just moved and he was working full-time and attending classes. She came over and helped me put together the dining table, the chairs, and a small coffee table. We got to talking about things, and she wanted to be a bone specialist. I explained I had a really interesting book on bones. It told this hilarious story about how Michael Jackson thought he could buy the Elephant man's skeleton - which is just wrong on so many levels. I ended up loaning her that book, and another one. On another occasion, we went together to Moscow to have her hair cut since she didn't want to go alone. I thought we were building a good rapport. That year in college, she wanted my support with a major decision she was making. I threw myself behind her because I really believed she could make change happen. Not long after this, she didn't get the position she wanted and I feel she blamed me and my husband for not being her champions. Shortly after this incident, she invited us to a costume party. My husband and I had spent most of the afternoon fighting, so neither of us was in a good mood and we couldn't put costumes together in time. We called and told her we wouldn't be able to make it, that neither of us was feeling very good and that we were fighting, maybe it was best we didn't make her party awkward. This was quite truthful. I think if we had gone, we would have been fighting a lot longer than we could have been. She stopped talking to us much after that unless it was out of convenience. We never received invitations again, when we'd ask her to do something she was always too busy to spend time with us, but not other people, she never returned the books I loaned her, and then a few months later, she moved to the other side of the country to attend graduate school. We've never heard from her again.

This is a pattern in my life. Like it or not, I can give someone every reason to believe me, to trust me, to be kind to me, I can reach out, and then suddenly it's gone. Often without explanation. This remands me to keep to myself. I stop asking anything, and thus I never get anything. I become infuriated when people think they know how to fix me too. I don't want to be fixed. I don't want to understand YOUR view. I don't live in YOUR world because my problems are mine. They stem from me and MY environment. Not yours.

I don't want people's pity. I don't want people's feeble attempts to open doors. (And I say feeble because in MY experiences they have all been feeble, never honest.) I hate to say it, but what I want is someone to just know and then act. Yes, I'm a woman and yes that means in some cases you are expected to be a mind reader. I'm sure everyone can relate to that, but what I am saying here is that I often don't have any idea what the hell it is I need. I don't get it from my family, and I don't get it from the people I know. Often, the only person in the world that can give me anything is my husband. And, he's got enough on his plate - I hate pressuring him to do more. He's been so wonderful that I can't just dump on him anytime I feel like. In fact, he is NOT a punching bag or a trash can. This is something I expect other people to automatically accept without explanation. He can't always be the one.

Finally, my speaking out about my views and my experiences isn't here for you to judge or change my mind about. Things have to change. I'm not some five year old that you can get to believe in Santa, I'm a 30 year old woman with a husband, a degree, a career, 2 home businesses and medical problems. Consolation does not come in the form of "wishing" things for me, or telling me "that's not the way it is." It makes the issue(s) worse. So what is my motivation for doing this?

My getting rid of the poison in my heart, I can be free. THAT, is worth the pain and heartache in the end because at the end of the day, I know who I am and that is all that I want to matter.

Kleenex and More Deep Thoughts

Today, when trying to blow my nose before using my allergy nasal spray, I grabbed the tissue box on my desk at work. The tissues were not sticking out of the top like they should have been ... they were stuffed down inside still. For some reason, the last Kleenex did not pull out the next. After picking up the box, I tried pinching and grabbing the next Kleenex. Epic fail. After a good 15 seconds of trying to get the darn thing out (and 15 seconds is a long time, took me about 8 tries to get it out), I realized that I can't feel my fingers.

It always escapes me that I can't use my hand. I still get into the mindset that I CAN TOO carry in the bag of groceries, or vaccuum the carpets. There are a few big things that I absolutely cannot do such as scrub things, ride most rollercoasters, or hold on for dear life to the "Oh Shit!" handlebars.

After my first surgery and I came home from the hospital, we video called my family. My sister, her husband and their two kids were staying at my parents' house that Thanksgiving. My siter's very precocious daughter is very much like me. I remember she was sitting on my mom's lap, and we were all talking about the hospital, and the surgery, etc. I was explaining how I couldn't feel my hand, but I could wiggle some fingers pretty good, moving them up and down and bend them slightly. This was a very big deal to me at the time, mostly because I was afraid I'd lost the use of my hand forever. One of the things my mother used to do is try to alleviate heavy issues with humor. Often obnoxious humor. She asked me if I was working on my "bird." It took me a second. "Mom, are you asking if I can flip people off?" If you recall I come from a very devout Christian household where saying crap was a sin. My mom says "Yeah," and shows me her middle finger. She did it right in front of my sister's daughter. I told her that wasn't appropriate. She said "Oh, she's only 3, she doesn't know what it means. Show me your finger!" My mother was encouraging me to flip people off. This was a post-surgery therapy I could live with. Much better than lifting my arm over my head and trying to pump a fist about 10 times.

Losing feeling and range of motion is something I'll live with forever, and is not easily accepted. I'm had these issues for years now, yet when I go to grab that kleenex,or I make an effort to try and flip someone off with my right hand, it's evident. You would think by now that I would be used to this kind of thing.

Showering is easier now, but still difficult. A side effect of surgeries has been an extreme sensitivity to temperature changes, or, conversely, an apparent lack to knowing my temperature. It's weird. I have both worlds. The scar tissue in my arm has built up rather knotted, and it does not like hot water, or cold water when I'm washing my hands or showering. One therapy I used to do was sand at the hand therapist in Kansas City, which is like water therapy. You stick your arm inside what looks like a rolling heater, and it blows sand all over your arm. Some of the things you can do inside it are make repetetive movements with your hand and arm, or squeeze objects. I like the hand motions, and I've transfered that to water. Although my hand and arm do not like hot and col, they really enjoy water. Water breaks down barriers that are evident 99% of the time. I love making swishing motions with my hand and moving my arm gently from side to side anytime i'm in a pool for example. Nothing pops, no tendons twinge over bones and scar tissue, nothing feels completely out of place. But once you remove the water, it's like the kleenex box all over again.

What drives me to be so patient and to only contemplate is my lack of anger with my arm itself. Sure, I'm mad that it took years for doctors to discover that I wasn't a hypochondriac, suer I'm mad that I was born with a bone compensation, sure I'm mad that people treat me certain ways based upon my abbilities - but I don't let any of this stop me. I continue on with my life. I realize that anger gets you nowhere when you can't conctrol the situation. Since I can't control hardly anything involving my arm, I've become an overly patient person with myself. I don't push. I'm the ever driving hammer at the nail.

I don't recall if when I left the office today though, the kleenex I took brought up the next one .... I guess I'll find out tomorrow when I need to take my allergy medication.