The Most Important Blog I've Ever Written

So Joe and I hadn't really discussed his surgery much up until tonight. The word "surgery" scares the shit out of me, but deep down I figured it was no big deal. I mean.. it's just an ankle, right? Basically, all I knew is that they were going in his ankle, shortening some ligaments and some other medical stuff that I don't understand. But apparently, it's much bigger than that.. and that's the reason I'm still up at it's 3am.

Joe informed me tonight that they are putting him under. That terrifies me. I was under the impression that he'd get a local anesthetic.. maybe some laughing gas or something. I had no idea they would completely knock him out and put him under, or that he would have his leg open for three hours.

And then it occurred to me that today may have been my last full day with my husband. Sometimes, people don't wake up from that shit. I don't know how common it is or isn't.. and frankly, I don't care. A .01% chance is high enough for me and really threw a lot into perspective. For the past three nights, I've been yelling at Joe to stop snoring.. when I may never hear that snoring again. And maybe we should have spent today doing something special. We didn't.. and I can never get today back. That made me realize that I should treat every day as if it's special.. because it may be the last one we ever get.

So then Joe starts talking about how he doesn't have a living will - which made it all the more real to me that this is really going to happen and it's serious enough that he really should have a living will written out and that something could very well go very wrong. He wouldn't have even made mention of needing one if he didn't think it might be necessary.

And then I thought of Hailey, and watching her play with her daddy and how much I love watching them play and hearing her squeals of laughter.. and how Monday night may be my last chance to ever hear that again. And she loves her daddy SO much and I know he loves her - even if he sometimes has a hard time showing it.

I feel like I have a knife in my heart and someone is just twisting, stabbing and wrenching it repeatedly. I feel sick.. and dinner is in the toilet. I don't know what to think or do. I've never experienced this sort of thing before and will have no time to cope or prepare before Tuesday. I mean, I wish I'd known all of this sooner, although I doubt that would have done any good. How does one prepare for this sort of thing!?

I have no idea how I'm going to make it through Tuesday. I keep playing scenarios through my head and just bawling my eyes out. My mind is racing. I just don't know how I'm supposed to get through a day in a hospital with a near 10 month old and knowing that they are going to put my husband into a sleep he may never wake up from. I'd apologize for being dramatic.. but this is serious shit.

Great.. and now he's mad at me for being upset. Of course I'm upset! Why wouldn't I be upset!? I've never been SO worried about anything in my entire life. I'm afraid of having to wake up without him. I'm afraid of being 22 years old and having to bury my 26 year old husband. OF COURSE I'M FUCKING UPSET!!! Why in the world would I not be? He told me "don't worry about me". Uhh, too late!

And Hailey is having a bad night I guess. She's up for the fourth time. This isn't like her at all. She's so crabby tonight. I let her dance in her bed a while when she got upset. She wore herself out and went back to sleep. But now she's up again and crying. *sigh* I'm sure it could be worse... but I wish she hadn't picked tonight and I wish Joe had told me all of this shit sooner - although I don't know what difference it would have made.

Usually my blogs make me feel better. Not tonight. I'm gonna try to go sleep, although I doubt that's gonna happen. :(

Labels: ankle, ankle surgery, army, dads, family, fathers, Hailey, Joe, kids, Kimi, life, marriage, military, parenting, surgery

Being a World of Warcraft Widow

I started playing World of Warcraft in early 2005 with an ex boyfriend of mine. I played for a few months before the boyfriend and I broke up, and he took my account with him.

Fast forward to 2006, my husband bought me World of Warcraft to play in order to preoccupy myself. It wasn't long after we got married that I conceived our daughter and I was going to be staying home with nothing to do.

At first, my husband said that World of Warcraft was "stupid" and that he "didn't understand why anyone would play it". But that didn't take long. I'd been playing for about two weeks when my husband decided to give it a go. A week later, I lost my account to him as he'd begun to completely take over.

A long time friend of mine suggested we switch servers to play with him, and since we were still pretty new to the game, it was easy enough to just start over fresh on a different server. That's how we ended up on Thunderhorn. A few more friends I'd known over the years on another game called the Realm Online decided to make the switch to WoW and came to play with us. Because of that, I decided to start our own little guild called Divine Illusion (yeah, yeah...it was many months later that I discovered that Divine Illusion is actually another RPG oops!).

The guild was started as a place for us to just talk, keep in touch easier, level and have a good time. But my husband and I were still sharing an account and it became harder and harder to get any play time because of it. He was easily sucked in and would come home from work at 6pm and play until 2-3 in the morning! Needless to say, we've had many talks about his gaming habits. I eventually gave up on playing and let him have it. It wasn't worth arguing over.

The guild quickly grew in his control and morphed into one of the largest, casual guilds on the server (which is quite impressive since Thunderhorn was quite a large server to begin with). We purchased an account for myself and I began playing again when the guild was about six months old. But Thunderhorn was such a large server that queue times had grown unbearable and in anticipation of the Burning Crusade expansion, free transfers to new realms were offered.

We were hesitant, and didn't take the first offer to move to the newly created Ravencrest server. But once threats of simply moving accounts themselves was brought up by Blizzard, we decided to take our chances and moved the guild to the newly made Zangarmarsh. A good portion of our guild came with us - most of the officers and long time loyal members.

After the move, we instantly began to recruit to pick up any stranglers. Several servers were offered free transfers to ours - including the very large Whisperwind server (ironically, the server I had started out on back in 2005 with my ex). Things were great and our numbers were growing! We quickly became one of the stronger guilds on the server.

Today we stand at over 200 individual accounts - and that's a mighty lot of people. Of course, running a guild of that size takes A LOT of personal time - which is how I became a World of Warcraft Widow.

My husband has spent the majority of our marriage working 12 hour shifts at work - not including the hours spent on commuting, PT, extra duty, Platoon meetings and doctor's appointments. Needless to say, we don't always get a lot of time together. We get even less time because of World of Warcraft!

Don't get me wrong... I love the game and have enjoyed it. But it's always been more of a pastime and extra hobby for me rather than a responsibility. Running a guild is work..but I never wanted it to become a full time job. Heck, between being a wife, mother and running my online store - I've already got three of those!

It's no surprise that I tend to not log in very often. It's usually every few days. It's become hard to even play the game because as soon as I log in, I have to work - instead of just taking my character to wherever I want and actually playing. It should come as no surprise that my character is still three levels shy of the level cap and that's only because my husband took a couple of hours and blasted me through a bunch of quests.

My husband on the other hand, has been level 70 for quite some time now and has spent countless hours grinding reputation for whatever faction suits his fancy. This week, he's big into leveling up his fishing skill and is already up to 375. In fact, for his birthday, he purchased a set of WoW Trading cards so he could have the code for a fishing chair in the game. *Sigh* Way to spend money in a useless manner dear. Oh well, happy birthday!

My husband often comes home and talks to me for a few minutes, but the moment I step out of the room, he quickly logs into the game. I have to be prepared when he comes home to try to keep him occupied more than five minutes, or that's it.. he'll get on the game and I won't really see him again until the next day when we repeat the process.

Don't get me wrong... we spend time together. It just feels like it's few and far between these days. I blame the game...while he tells me it has nothing to do with it. I don't think he even realizes just how much time he spends on it. He'll come to bed at 3am when he has to get up at 6am for work. He'll sit there and play for 12 hours straight, without noticing. He's forgotten to wake me up from naps on many occasions because of it.

My birthday is coming up.. and part of his gift to me is supposed to be a World of Warcraft free birthday. We'll see how that goes...

Labels: birthday, gamers, gaming, life, marriage, shirts, world of warcraft, wow stole my husband