I have a bacterial infection in my cheek.

A freaking nasty complication from my tooth extraction. When I say nasty, I mean nasty.  Be glad you read my words from the safety of your own worlds because boy, I woulda knocked you over with the stench of my stank breath.

Pain.  Can’t Even Begin To Explain The PAIN.  Worse then natural child birth, in my experience anyway…because it lasted 3 days.  Burning..terrible, make you go smuckin nuts terrible.

Luckily I’m okay. I have to take these antibiotics for like a month to kill the nastiness.  At the end of each day I feel better but by morning again the burning is back.

UGH!

What a piss poor attitude I have developed.

I know there is someone that has it worse then me.  And I’m sorry But This Sucks.  Seriously, it does.

I know, I know, I keep going on and on, boring you and myself to tears, medications for the high blood pressure, anxiety medications, tooth extractions, antibiotics, blah blah blah. I’ve become so predictable and repetitive.

I can hear the gossip….What’s Kerri gonna write about tomorrow?

Probably her tooth…or her blood pressure…blah blah blah.

Isn’t there anything else I can possibly pour my heart out about??

But it just keeps happening. All of my emotions are getting all scrunched up and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry or yell or be silent. I’ve been everything and I’m so sick of it.  Sick Of It.

I opened up my medicine cabinet the other morning because I couldn’t stand looking at my swollen face any longer and found myself staring at 6 prescription pill bottles that have made themselves at home in my once neatly organized cabinet.  SIX!!! Two weeks ago I had ZERO…0..None!

I started to cry, like a stupid crazy person I started to cry. I wanted to throw all those bottles at some one and just watch them ping off their face one after the other. The disdain I have for these smuckin pills is making me bonkers, making me reach into the corners of the past and it’s bringing up all these memories. Those orange tinted prescription medication bottles are going to be the end of my sanity.

My father has had heart problems MY whole life. He was right around 32 when he was put on high blood pressure medicine. He has a heart murmur. He has an enlarged heart. He suffered a stroke. He now has a defibrillator.

These things, have described my father since I’ve known him.

In the house I grew up in there is a hallway that leads from the kitchen to the den. The downstairs bathroom is located in this hallway. There is also a small shelf. On that shelf, every day that I remember living in that house, sat a tray that held my fathers entire medication collection. I remember there always being a lot of bottles, that we were not to touch them and that if I accidentally bumped the tray and they fell over I’d get really, really freaked out.

Those bottles were and still are a part of who my father is to me . In those days I never really wanted to acknowledge those pills because I was always in fear that without those pills my Daddy would die. If I acknowledged them I would be acknowledging his hearts inability to stay healthy and to be strong.  If I acknowledged them I would be admitting my father was human and he would someday die.  That was and still is the last thing I want to do.

It sounds silly.  I’ve always expected the news to come.  A late night phone call to say Dad passed in his sleep, had a heart attack, got hit by a bus (our inside joke) but instead it has always been,  Dad’s in the hospital, they found (fillintheblank), they gave him new medication and he’ll be home in a few days.

and he’d come home with a few more trophies for his pill tray.

My Dad told me once, or at least that’s how I remember it,  that he’d never want to be kept alive by pills or machines.  It’s artificial.  It’s not real life.

I have carried that with me, obviously.  And now, following in my father’s footsteps it seems, I don’t know how to throw that crap out of my head.

I know that the medication is good and it will make me healthy but it feels like I’m cheating a little.  Someone once said to me, “Back in the day, if you had high blood pressure, you’d just die young.”  That would be that.  Now, we kinda cheat.

I’m scared to rely on something because it makes me vulnerable.

It is both a blessing and a burden to have these bottles staring back at me every morning.

Reminding me that I am not invincible and my children will someday realize that.

Reminding me that my father puts up one hell of a fight each and every day so that I can still think he IS invincible.

Until one day……..it’s as simple as that.