The ghost of Easter past........

Yesterday, I was very homesick for the days when my kids were little .Easter was such a joy back then.

Except for this one :

Picture it ,Grand Junction Colorado ,a couple weeks before Easter 1982.

I was 7 months pregnant with my second son Ian. My oldest was not yet two. We were dirt poor and living in this motel type apartment. The night before ,we had gone to the drive in movie and had spent the night at my husbands’ sisters’ trailer. My husband ,Robert had to get up and go to work at the crack of dawn so Wes and I were left there to spend the day with Freddie (the sister),

I woke up sick as a dog. I was well beyond the morning sickness stage of pregnancy. All day long the vomiting was so bad that every few minutes I was violently puking up the saliva I had swallowed. By the time Robert got off work and arrived to pick us up I knew something was seriously wrong with me.

We wound up in the emergency room for 10 hours before they finally figured out that I had appendicitis. Next question, which they did not bother to hide from me “ How do we remove the appendix of a seven month pregnant woman?”

What they wound up doing was putting this huge wedge under one side of me so the baby would flow to the other side and hopefully stay there for the surgery. Instead of the customary 2 or 3 inch incision, mine was about a foot long ,all the way across my huge stomach. They also feared that the surgery would cause me to go into labor.

Unsure if I would ever be waking up ……I succumbed to the aesthesia

I woke up to the sound of screaming newborns right in the same room with me. Yes I was on the maternity floor. However, the screaming babies were not my own. . I felt like someone had taken out all my insides, beat them up with a baseball bat and threw them back inside. I thought I would surely die from the pain. In spite of my advanced pregnancy, I was mercifully given Demerol shots round the clock.

Meanwhile my baby Wes was at the mercy of my completely incompetent husband and is left with Freddie during the day. They had no idea how long I would be in the hospital so my mother sends my little sister Soul out from California, on a Greyhound bus to take care of Wes. I think Soul is about 16 at the time. Nope she was 15 because I was the ripe old age of 19.

Her bus shows up in the middle of the night, and naturally there is no Robert there to pick her up. He had passed out and totally forgotten about her.

She will have to fill in her own events here because the only other thing I recall thru my Demoral induced haze, is that at some point Robert also locked her out of the house. Freddie took Wes to see the Easter bunny .Two weeks later, I was still in the hospital. The next day was Easter and I begged them to let me go home to my baby.

Reluctantly, they did. Oh Lord, I needed to be there for my son but physically I was SOO not ready to be out of my hospital bed. My early labor never happened. For the rest of my pregnancy I could not even stand upright. I had to walk bent over like an old woman.

Two weeks after my due date Ian finally arrived. Perfectly healthy, in spite of “our” surgery.

Hope you all had a wonderful Easter