That's the sound of another blogless month passing me by. March was fraught with so many things it's hard to know where to begin.
First, there was that job in Texas that we didn't get. Imagine homeschooling in a place with libraries, a huge homeschooling community, two gardening seasons, and wonderful friends. I don't have to tell you how bummed I was about that.
In the middle of that was Fasnacht, the crazy three-day carnival in Europe. Imagine streets filled with piccolo playing masked folks and confetti so thick it comes up to your ankles in spots. Fasnacht really deserves a post of its own (fingers crossed)... but towards the tail-end of that I had some health issues and had to find a doctor, fast.
I don't particularly like going to the doctor and avoid it as much as humanly possible, so you can imagine what kind of pain/suffering it takes for me to seek out a doctor in a foreign-speaking country. For one thing, most of them take vacation the week of Fasnacht, and their answering machines all have messages in a fast, thick
Schwytzerdütsch. Speak to me in high German really fast and my eyes start rolling around in my head trying to catch a word or two as they zing by. In Swiss German, goodness... you might as well shoot me. In the end, I found one, and he turned out to be from the states, sort of.
My new motto concerning doctors is, if you're going to see one, see one in Europe. I have now seen three, and each of them sat and listened and took me seriously. There were no "come back if it still hurts in 6 weeks" comments. It was more like seeing a lay-midwife in the US; I felt like a person rather than a number being rushed through the system. I have now been prodded and poked, scoped and scanned, and the diagnosis for now is that I will live, at least for as long as I might normally live anyway. Coming from someone whose family has a history of cancer (my grandmother died when she was my age,) this is a fantastic prognosis.
I've learned so many things from my health scare in Europe:
1. Ovarian cysts can hurt like nobody's business.
2. Colonoscopies, while sounding like possibly the worst torture in the world, are really very interesting procedures. If anyone offers to show you the inside of your colon, say yes.
3. The colonoscopy drink mix is really nasty when it's warm, but with a little bit of apple juice and ice cubes, it's actually drinkable.
4. Anthroposophical gynocologists exist.
5. They don't "drape" for a gyn exam in Europe. Modesty is purely an American thang.
6. Hormones can make everything go haywire. And then some.
We managed to get a little bit of homeschooling accomplished in between my appointments and my laying on the couch clutching my abdomen. I also managed to get some editing done on my novel, a huge feat in and of itself. I put in a couple of really long weekends, and managed to surpass the 50-hour challenge doled out over at
Nanoedmo (National Novel Editing Month.) This novel-writing thing has turned out to be another really interesting way to model Perseverance and Commitment for my children. It's a less visual lesson than my
last huge undertaking, but it seems to have made an impression on Sunburst who has taken to trying to edit her own
Nanowrimo story.
March ended with the bona fide arrival of Spring and the news that we might be facing another move
next March, this time to Zurich, where homeschooling has just been made illegal. Lucky us, huh? I suppose we'll be finding out in the next week or two the official status on that. As usual, things are up in the air.
I'm starting to wonder if things felt settled, if I would still recognize it as my life.
