My Weekend of Enlightment

This may be hard to believe, but I took off (all alone) to Atlanta this weekend. Karlo came home from the hospital on Friday and that day proceeded to be one of the worst and hardest days of the year. I suffered so much stress, and anger, and guilt I thought I would simply collapse. Here's a (as-brief-as-I-can-make-it) recap.

Without going too deep into explaining why Karlo and I had a trip booked to Atlanta for this weekend (I will tell that story at some point, but not now) my hopes of Karlo being able to make the trip dwindled with each passing day over the last two weeks. In the beginning, I really thought he would recover on his own with plenty of time. But as the days went on I knew we needed professional medical assistance, and as you saw from a previous post, THAT didn't turn out so good with the doctor causing major delays. So now we are down to the wire and we need to make the decision whether we would go together, I would go alone, or we would just cancel the whole thing. Oh the drama involved in this decision, I can't even begin to illustrate it.

Most of the drama revolved around my least favorite airline in the world, but once again, if I get too deeply into the story it will just serve to infuriate me all over. I'll just say this . . . I spent an hour on the phone with (and screaming at) United Airlines only to get nowhere with them, but elevating my stress to record levels. By the time the afternoon came, my back nerve was fully pinched and my neck was killing me. Great, we just barely get one nerve fixed in the family and another is about to snap.

It became a clear and easy decision that there was no way Karlo could travel, but should I leave him home alone? Would I be the worst wife IN THE WORLD for this? Karlo insisted that I go, mostly because the nature of the trip was one of self realization and enlightenment. Again, this part is a very long story, but I needed this trip more than ever after going through the past month. This opportunity would only present itself once a year and I couldn't pass it up. Off I went Saturday morning, leaving the patient behind to fend for himself.

It was the most grueling two days of enlightenment. I never dreamed it would be so hard, or tiring, or make me so sore. Do you notice anything interesting about this scene?


There are no chairs! I had to sit my bony self on the floor for 3.5 hours Saturday evening and nearly 11 straight hours on Sunday. We got two short breaks in all that time to use the rest rooms.

And hungry. Did I mention hungry? I didn't really eat for two straight days and by the time I got back to my hotel Sunday night I was ready to pass out. I'll have to save the real story about this weekend for later, but here's some more very bad pictures of the scene.

Just about the entire time, we sat and listened to this guy talk. I know you want to know who he is, but that part comes later.

Before lunch we had to assemble for a group picture. That means the photographer had to organize 350 hungry people. It felt like an eternity, but at least we got to watch the special speaker play frisbee in the parking lot.

For some reason part of this event involved meeting in a park at 6:45 AM (my hotel was 40 minutes away) to play games. I still haven't figured out what that was all about, but it was fun. At least I got to STAND UP for that hour and half.