We bought an RV.
An older one, that had been sitting in south Florida for 3 years.
Can you say 'musty'?
How about 'smelly'?
Oh, and everything has a light green coating of fuzz! J., my hubby, was so excited about it when he drove it home and into our yard. It was really hard to put on a happy face when I first stepped inside it and the smell hit me like a basketball to the head - jarring, dizzying, and nauseating.
"Isn't this great?" J. said with the excitement of a boy getting his first dirt bike. "Well, it's something!" was all I could say. I sat on the off-white leather couch - hmmm, comfy. I tried to imagine us living in this thing full-time, but the thought made my stomach lurch so I pushed that out of my mind and tried to breathe. Uck, that smell! This was not good. He says I ruin everything he's excited about by my negativity, and I didn't want to do that this time around, but he knows me too well to be fooled by some false optimism.
"I'll get used to it. It'll take a while, but right now, this is the best I can do". Honesty being the best policy, I figured I would have time to get excited about it for real. In the meantime, we set about fixing it up - I washed every surface, drawer, and closet, eliminating the green fuzz, and he gave it a new bed frame. We changed it from 2 twin beds to one queen-size platform. He worked on various mechanical issues - it's a 1987, and even though it has a new engine and a new generator, there are a million little things that don't work and need attention. Then we got 2 feet of snow. That put us off our schedule - we were trying to leave by the beginning of April. The snow melted, we got back to work on the RV, and then I found out I needed surgery.
Do I need this? Someone came up with the saying "When it rains it pours" for a reason! It's because it's true! It turns out I had had an ectopic pregnancy and it had to be removed. This was not a planned pregnancy, but it made us sad just the same. We had created a baby, but it couldn't survive. Don't ask me how we would have raised a newborn in an RV, but that's something to ponder another day. I went into the hospital for same-day surgery last Tuesday, and all went well. The doctor did it laporoscopically, meaning he only made 3 small incisions, but he said I had been bleeding into my belly and my fallopian tube was a mess, so he removed it. I've never really had surgery before, so I was scared to death, but I made it through and am recovering nicely. I got sick from the anesthesia and my doctor had me stay overnight. Other than that, it went very well and the pain in my abdomen from the incisions gets a little better each day.
As I've been convalescing, it made me think: how many stressors can one person have at any one time? As many as you can handle, I suppose, but I really don't want to find out how many I can handle. We don't have steady jobs, we're losing our house, we get calls from creditors all the time, we have to ration money for gas and anything else we need, we have no health insurance, we have to sell most of our possessions as fast as we can, and on top of all that, I had to have surgery. It's a lot to juggle.
The one thing we do have is each other, and that's a lot. J. took such good care of me in the hospital and after, and I have been able to be much more positive about the RV in recent weeks. I have learned that 'things' don't matter, but people do. As corny as it sounds, go and hug the people you care about, and be present when you're with those you love. The love and support of each other, family and friends are what have kept us going. That love will continue to sustain us, because that's all that really matters. So when all these stressful things rear their ugly heads, I think about the amazing nurses who made me laugh and gave me pain meds; the friends and family we laughed with yesterday at the Easter lunch; and my friends who don't live close but are only a phone call away.
So maybe i did need all this, to show me what's really important. I thought I knew, but now I really get it. I hope all of you do, too!
We're hoping to be outta here in 2 to 3 weeks, but we still have a lot to do to make that happen!
