There are few things I dread more than having to venture into the city to go to a medical appointment. Perhaps because I’ve now spent the bulk of my adult life sitting in a waiting room because of my desire to have children who are either born broken or born with a tendency to try and slice off their digits at every given opportunity.

I’ve done my time with the medical establishment. Which is why it seems a cruel hard fate to know that today I have to make the long drive into the city, pay for parking, wear one of those ugly hospital gowns that never seem to snap shut properly and therefore flash everyone in the room with a delightful view of my arse crack and then lay down on what is basically a metal coffin and listen to the obnoxious clanging of the MRI machine as it takes pictures of my back fat.

It’s going to be awesome. And I’m so not shaving my legs for it.

To say I’m not really excited about my afternoon appointment is a bit of an understatement. Especially since I’ve been down this road before more times than I can now count and it leads to surgery, more pain and me walking around stooped over a bedazzled cane as my dad offers to give me an enema.

(For some reason the man is obsessed with fecal regularity. Especially mine. As a postoperative gift, instead of the typical flowers most daughters get, he brings me a box of stool softeners. I wish I were kidding.)

Let the good times roll!

However, as pessimistic and irrationally cranky about my own experiences with the medical establishment and my mucked up back, I have nothing to say about the treatment my children (dead and alive) have received in their short little lives.

We are blessed with a fabulous children’s hospital and surrounded by expert medical peoples who go above and beyond the call of duty to ensuring all my children keep their digits while ensuring my youngest lives to see another day.

Jumby’s life hasn’t been the easiest, starting from the day he was born prematurely and weighing one pound four ounces. My kid was as big as a block of butter. He survived his size and the plethora of health issues that happen when you are born a micro preemie.

He survived the abuse he received thanks to the medical establishment and he fights daily to overcome his existing disabilities. (For those of you who are unaware, he’s legally blind, deaf, developmentally disabled, and quadriplegic who eats through a tube and will remain diapered for the rest of his days.)

But Jumby is awesome. Regardless of all his impairments, this kid just keeps on thriving. He has a sense of humour that is inspiring and spreads more joy than a diseased tick can spread Lyme disease.

But life isn’t always easy with him (understatement of the week alert!) and there are times I’m rendered exhausted by the sheer enormity of what it means to tackle this many disabilities at once.

This most happens when Jumbster is having a bad day with pain and spasms and there is nothing we can do to help him medically other than love him through it.

It can sometimes suck.

I’d move mountains to make his life (any of my kids’ lives) better. Pain free. Healthy.

Even if that mountain was medical marijuana.

And that is what I’m yammering on about in my latest Momversation video. Which I hope you will take the time to watch.

This year, my husband and I declared us miserable old fuddy duddies and refused to make any plans for New Year’s eve.

Oh fine. For the sake of honesty and accuracy I’ll amend that statement so that my husband doesn’t have a coronary.

This year *I* declared my husband and myself miserable old fuddy duddies and refused to accept any of the plans my husband tried to make to ring in the new year.

For one stinking year, I just wanted to sit home in my pajamas, watch a marathon of Criminal Minds, and do absolutely nothing. I didn’t have it in me to dress up, go out or host a get together. I wanted to start 2012 quietly. I just wasn’t in the mood to play.

My husband and my teens, however, weren’t completely on board with my lack of plans or enthusiasm. They were itching to go out and it wasn’t long before both of my teens had arranged to go over to a friend’s house for an impromptu slumber party to ring out the year.

My husband volunteered to drive them over to their friend’s house because he is friendly with the dad. Fine. Whatever. Go abandon me for wilder pursuits. Go enjoy your night of merriment and frivolity because I am going to enjoy holding the remote control and changing the channel whenever I feel like it, I muttered back at them as they fled our house.

I was just happy to be home, with my Criminal Minds and my television remote.

An hour or so later, my husband came back from dropping the kids off and when he walked through the door and looked at me, he stopped short.

“Um, what have you been doing since I left Tanis?”

I looked at him blankly and waggled the remote. “Nothing. Watching television. Why”

“Um, have you noticed anything unusual about your face today? Looked in a mirror recently?”

“Well, I showered early and I looked fine then. But I think I’m getting an eye twitch. Why? Do I have spinach in my teeth?” I asked as I hopped up to look in the mirror hanging in our foyer.

And then I saw what was clearly freaking my husband out.

My right eye was swollen.

“Weird.”

“Totally. But I guess that explains the twitchy feeling and why it kinda hurts to waggle my eyebrows,” I murmured as I examined my face.

The next morning, my eye was so swollen it was almost sealed shut.

The morning after that, it looked like I was growing myself a third eye.

It’s been awesome. Awesomely grotesque.

I mean I’m used to my face looking like this:

Except lately I refuse to wear my contacts and my hair is blazingly red so I probably look more like this:

Except of course when I’m playing with my computer. Then I tend to look like this:

I like to take weird pictures of myself and randomly send them to family and friends. It freaks them out every time.

But today, on day five, my face looks like this:

I mean, it’s not quite normal but clearly there is no third eye growing like there was a few days ago, so I suppose that’s progress.

So basically I wrote this post just to show you all that my eyelid is swollen, I’m still in my bathrobe and clearly I need a shower and some make up.

Awesome.

Carry on then.

312 pictures.

That’s the sum of my son’s life in photos.

I know because I counted every single one, days after he died.

11 years ago today, I looked like this:

It’s okay. You can totally laugh and call me a beached whale. I still twitch when I see that picture. I mean, really, how sexy can one gal get?

Less than 24 hours later came this photo:

Shale didn’t yet have casts on his clubbed feet and I remember being horrified by the tubes and his crooked little feet. I didn’t want to touch him. I was scared he’d break even further. I was stuck in this odd limbo of grief for not having a perfect baby and the horror of not knowing what to do with a broken one.

Then came the big button incident of ’01.

My lovely child couldn’t control his tongue and it kept falling back and blocking off his airway. Any time he was flat on his back or upright he’d choke on it. So the all knowing doctors stitched it to his lower inside lip in the hopes he’d be able to finally get off his stomach.

Three weeks later, he did.

Only to go back flat on his back again.

One lesson I quickly learned in the early moments of Shale’s life is just when you think things can’t get worse, they can.

Oh life and your silly little lessons, mocking my naiveté.

There was a lot of tubes and wires, surgeries and casts, transfusions and general hospital chaos filled panic but eventually it all led to this:

Shale finally came home.

His first birthday found me unprepared. I figured I wouldn’t make a cake since he couldn’t eat it but it didn’t seem right to deprive his sugar loving siblings of cakey-goodness, so I bought donuts as a happy compromise. It became our January 4th tradition while he lived.  Of course, while I remembered to buy donuts I completely spaced on birthday candles.

Oh well, beggars can’t be choosers and all that.

The days blurred by with doctors appointments, hospitalizations and the haziness of life in general.

He grew hair, learned to sit and give high fives.

He grew. Even past the age they told us he wouldn’t.

He learned to walk. He taught us how to live beyond the fringe of normal and see the world with new possibilities. He taught us how to be the people we are today. He loved.

And oh, how he danced.

And then, he didn’t.

It’s an odd thing to celebrate a birthday of a boy who no longer lives. But I suppose it is no odder than loving a child who is simply a memory.

Time slips by and nothing seems to change just as everything is.

My son is still gone. I still love him. Most don’t even know he existed for the years he did.

But today, as the sun shines through the parted clouds and glistens off the snow riddled with footprints, my family will take a moment to recognize how much he gave us and how grateful we are for the moments we had with him.

Happy 11th birthday kid.