Just a BLAAAHHHHG

September! Already....

This last month just flew by! And we are already half way through this month. I have a feeling that the next 3 months we have left here in Arizona before we head out to our new adventure in Idaho are going to go by very quickly.

I don't have anything cute to share for this past month (happens when you don't have anything but a husband right now :) No cute kids to speak of, or take pictures of). But a few things happened for us.

I went to the doctor earlier this last month for chest pains. I've been having these sharp pains in my left side of my chest. After one full night of nothing but pains, I decided to go to the doctor just in case (I have high cholesterol and triglycerides, so that worried me a little). While I was there I also asked if I could go in to get a Sleep Apnea test done. I've snored ever since I can remember (at least from the age of 10...I have a rather long and thick Uvula...you know, that thing that hangs down in the back of your throat? Yeah, my siblings used to tease me that I had a long "hangy").

The first set of roomates I had, I shared a room with one of them. After several months of living there, I noticed my roomate walk in to our bedroom super early in the morning. That's when I clued in that she had been sleeping on the couch for several weeks cause my snoring was so loud she couldn't sleep. I felt SOO horribly embarrassed, and slept on the couch myself for the next several months until our lease was up. I decided at that point that I would never share a room again with roomates to avoid that embarrasment and situation. I was often teased at girls camp for snoring (I think that's one of the main reasons why I never made it past my 3rd year at girls camp...you always hated that dreaded question before the first night of,"Does anyone snore??") and have a horrible memory of being teased by my mean boy cousins when I was 12 years old when I was visiting them in California and they were sleeping in the living room with me and my sister. I woke up and heard them in the kitchen making some kind of concoction to pour down my throat while I slept since I was snoring. I looked up and one of my cousins had come out of the kitchen and was standing over me to see if I was still asleep. They ran and got back in bed when I turned and looked at him. The next night when we were getting ready for bed, one of them said,"Don't snore like a freaking pig again tonight", really rudely. Needless to say, my snoring has always embarrassed me, but it was something I could do NOTHING about. It wasn't cause I was overweight, or something that I could control. It had to do with the make up of my throat! Man, it has always been such an anxiety creator for me if I knew I had to sleep with someone in the same room that wasn't my immediate family. I always dreaded getting married cause I didn't want to have my husband hate me for keeping him up all night. Thankfully, Heavenly Father must have known this was one of my worries, cause he gave me Ryan, who is the soundest sleeper there is. But over the last several months I've thought I needed to go get checked out for Sleep Apnea cause I wake up often feeling like I had stopped breathing, and am tired ALL DAY LONG, can't focus at work, and have a hard time pulling words out of my brain when having conversations. It really affects my whole life every day.

Anyways, the doctor set me up with a Stress Test (where you have to go run on a treadmill and they take an ultrasound of your heart to see if there is any blockage) and a Sleep Apnea Test.

I went to the Stress Test first....and I'm happy to report, that my heart is as healthy as it should be. No problems there. The cardiologist sent me on my way....but it WAS cool to see the ultrasound of my heart pumping :)

Then I had my Sleep Apnea Test. I wasn't nervous going into the test, and they have the room set up like a mini hotel room. It's very nice and relaxing, except for the fact that you have about 20 electrodes hanging off of your body and head, and there is a camera in the ceiling so they can see which side of your body you are laying on during the test. Anyone who knows me knows I suffer from anxiety. And I guess the idea of being somewhere different, with the camera, and that someone was monitoring me all night long was too much. I literally slept maybe an hour the whole night. At least in that hour, they were able to tell that I had episodes of Sleep Apnea.

They requested I come back in and get tested wearing the CPAP machine (little air mask you wear while you sleep so the air keeps constant pressure going through your throat at night, which stints your throat open so it doesn't close up and you get fresh oxygen to breath). They sent me back in with an Ambien to try to help me sleep this time. I'm not sure the total number of hours I slept that time (it still felt like it wasn't a full night, but definitely more than the first time...I remember I dreamed a little). I just got the final report back from my doctor, and they did diagnose me with Obstructive Sleep Apnea, and I have to pick up my very own CPAP machine to try at home. I told Ryan he could start referring to me as an Elephant :) I'm only 29, and I'm looking at having to use this machine for the rest of my life....but if it helps give me back a quality life, I'm all for it. I just want to feel normal and not in a daze all the time. They also say that Sleep Apnea can cause anxiety, so I'm hoping that some of my anxiety might go away too...wouldn't that be nice!!! I'll let you know how it goes once I start my CPAP therapy here at home.

The other BIG news is that Ryan was officially accepted to BYU-Idaho!!! That was our final step before the big move...making sure he could actually attend! I'm proud of him and am excited to see where BYU-Idaho leads him in his future career endeavors.

We are just getting geared up for the move. I'm sure it will be here before I am ready. I need to start packing boxes and throwing things we don't need away! I still have stuff sitting at my parents house that I need to go through! EEK. Not fun. But it must be done....

Rockband 2 comes out on Sunday. Ryan is planning on running down to Best Buy first thing Monday morning to pick it up. We are excited for it, and the new songs we get to play!!! YAY!

I've been in kind of a depressive funk lately, and I'm hoping I come out of it soon. I think the move, and leaving my friends and family, is part of it. I think my medical stuff lately is another part, and being anxiety ridden about the fact that I have officially been TOLD I stop breathing while I sleep (I can't WAIT for that CPAP machine, just to stop worrying about it!). And I think the fact that I've gained 15 pounds in the last 9 months that I've been married (after staying at a decent weight for 3 years while I was single) and can't fit into any of my cute clothes anymore, and my hair color looks like crap ever since my best friend moved to Las Vegas last year....it's all just piling up. And the sad thing about depression is once you are in it, you can't do anything to fix the problems you are complaining about cause you just don't feel like doing ANYTHING! I hate this cycle. Hopefully it will pass soon...I usually get into a depressive funk a few months every year...and this is my time this year! I'm hoping to get out of it before we get out to Idaho, cause I want to start trying to have a baby soon after we get out there, but if I can't get out of this funk, I'll ask to get on some medication...and I don't want to be on that medication when I'm pregnant (they prefer you NOT to be). I think if I could motivate myself AT ALL to start exercising, that would be half of my battle. Now if I could just do that..............

Sorry, I didn't mean this post to sound negative or anything. Things are going good for us! We are getting all our debt paid off before the move, are enjoying our time together as a married couple without kids, and are both looking forward to what lies ahead for us and our family.

OH, AND we got a new calling at church as Primary Teachers for the Valient classes (age 9-12). Ryan does good teaching them about the scriptures. He had to teach all 10 of them by himself last Sunday while I was having my last Sleep Apnea Test done. I was so proud of him and how he handled it. He enjoyed teaching them.

I got to go out to lunch with two of my sisters today, Candy and Kristen. I'm trying to spend as much time with my family as possible before I move, and it was fun to go out with them. We also went and spent some money together at Target, clothes shopping! I still had some gift cards from our Wedding, so I bought myself a treat with a few new clothes. I needed them! :) We had fun together.

I'm also addicted (no pun intended) lately to that show on the A&E channel, Intervention. It's about families who are surprising their family member with an intervention for their drug or alcohol abuse, to send them to a treatment center to recover. I find it interesting to see where people come from in their lives that bring them to that point. They all have stories, and they usually are full of abuse or dysfunction. It's interesting to see how we all really have two roads we can travel in life, when dealing with hard things growing up. Some people will choose to go down one path and keep their lives going in a positive direction despite what has happened to them, while others take what was done to them and spiral out of control down the other path. I love the psychology of it all, and quite honestly, the sympathetic/compassionate side of me aches for these people who have experienced so much tragedy in their lives, and makes me yearn for their happiness and success. I want to help and save them all, but I can't. As I want to do some sort of counseling later in my life for women dealing with abuse, I am interested in learning all I can about how people end up in these situations, and figuring out what the best way to help them out of something that seems hopeless to them, keeps me watching.

That's about it for me today! I'll try to have some fun news to share later this week to off set this plain old blog :) I can't pull my creative Pam out today, but I'll do that soon!