The reason for the long absence

The morning of the 28th, about 2:00am, I woke up coughing and could feeling something weird in my mouth. I went in to the bathroom and spit up a large mouthful of blood. I yelled for my husband and he came running as I continued to spit up mouthfuls of blood. He got on the phone with my surgeon, and we spent the next two hours trying to get the bleeding to stop. It would stop temporarily, but if I did so much as roll over in bed, it would start again. Finally, about 4:30, we called a friend to come over and sit with our son while we headed to the emergency room. After being poked and prodded by the ER physician, it was determined that I had a "small arterial bleed" and would need emergency surgery to cauterize the artery.

In to surgery I went, the anaesthesiologist applied pressure to my throat as I went under so I wouldn't vomit up the blood that was in my stomach, and a minor surgery later, I emerged cauterized and stitched.

I have never looked so white in my life as I did when I got home later that day from the hospital. I don't know how to quantify the amount of blood I lost, but two weeks later I am still a little anemic and lightheaded at times. It was an incredibly traumatic experience. Geekboy had to give me a blessing that night because I was so scared of going back to bed. I knew that if I fell asleep I would bleed out and die in my sleep. Cooper was very clingy that day because he woke up and his parents were unexpectedly gone. So my husband gave me an incredibly powerful blessing of comfort and healing, and then all three of us piled into our bed and went to sleep. We all needed to be together that night.

I've spent the last week and a bit in pre-semester meetings. I've met with my tenure committee. I did a conference presentation that rocked (and I'm not the one who said that) and prepping for the new semester. It starts tomorrow.

My vacation wasn't very restful. Maybe I'll relax over Christmas.