Well, Hello! It's Been Awhile!

Just wanted to let y'all know I'm still here.

And to let you all know that all my medical tests came back normal. No worries, praise the Lord! Thank you all so much for your prayers.

The ordinary chest x-ray I had before the Upper GI was what revealed that I have a small peptic ulcer.

So glad to know I had to suffer needlessly through that wretched Upper GI procedure when if the doc at that lab had just looked at that x-ray first, I and my insurance company could have been saved the discomfort and expense.

It's amazing the discomfort a "small ulcer" can cause a person.

Not to mention wondering how in the world I would wind up getting an ulcer? I'm a SAHM, for pity's sake! The most 'stress' I generally have in my day is trying to remember to thaw something out to make for dinner and remembering to get my son's cross country uniform washed for his meet the next day sometime before midnight.

Unless, of course, you count the anxiety I sometimes experience having a precocious little boy that is prone to do things like unlock the front door at midnight from his upturned toybox hoping to wander the neighborhood by the light of the moon...or running full-speed towards an aquarium shark tank (which was old-school and had no safety gates in place) where he very nearly fell in the drink.

Or the nightmares I have about such things as said little boy crawling into the families homemade helium balloon tethered in the yard and floating up into the wild blue yonder...causing the local authorities to have divert air traffic and scramble to find a way to get a renegade weather balloon down to earth with the child still inside...

Oh, wait. That wasn't us.

But it could have been. Judah very well could have been Balloon Boy.

Which is exactly why we don't have a large helium balloon tethered in our back yard.

Movies like Up and that crazy dude who rigged up his lawn chair to enormous bundles of helium balloons and was seen by pilots in a nearby airspace give impressionable young children ideas, after all.

Hearing about such worst-case-scenarios in the news keeps moms like me awake at night.

On second thought, I suppose there could be sufficient cause for an ulcer. And more than a few gray hairs.

Anyway, the doctor has me on an over the counter medicine that has, after just a few days, stopped most of the misery that has plagued me for much too long.

I feel like a new woman.

Or would if it weren't for the fact that I had to visit the doctor again yesterday about a spider bite on my leg which I got while visiting some friends who live way out in the middle of the desert.

It left a hard, shiny 'bullseye' on my leg which was about the diameter of a drinking glass and had what appeared to be two spider sized fang punctures at the center.

The doctor assured me it was not Lyme Disease, but that any number of bug bites could have caused such a reaction.

I'm on antibiotics now as a precaution against potential infection.

Before I even went in, I read in one of my homeopathic medical reference books that Lavender essential oil put on a venomous spider bite should help dissipate the effects of the venom. I figured it wouldn't hurt to give it a shot, and wonder of wonders I actually had some Lavender essential oil on hand.

I do believe it took down the swelling before the antibiotic even had a chance to start working.

So, now that I'm done worrying about death-by-gangrenous-brown recluse-bite and have no storm chaser helium balloons out back to tempt my son, I think it's safe to let down my hair a bit.

I'm going to put the boy down for an early nap and then take my own self off to finish the sleep that began about 2 am but woke from after only four hours.

If sleep is what one can call it when they wake at every little sound.

Though I'll admit I'd rather do that then have to worry about my four year old boy hanging out of a balloon basket miles above terra firma.