Not long after my discharge from the hospital (about one week), I began to feel very sick again. I soon felt weak and faint, could hardly breathe or walk and started to develop another fever. We ended up going back to the emergency room at Mayaguez Medical Center and I spent another week in the hospital with major hemorrhaging from placenta that was still retained even after having a D+C the week before. I lost so much blood that I needed 6 more units transfused for a total of 8 (the human body only has about 10!). Suffice it to say that it was a very scary time for us.
I am not sure we have fully processed that ordeal, but we are now looking forward to re-establishing a new normal as a family of three.
Britton and Aeden
Now we are happily trying to deal with the lack of sleep, feeding and changing schedules and the sheer confusion that comes with an infant instead of worrying about life and death issues. Thankfully, I am recovering quickly and am beginning to enjoy going outside and even working a little more in the gardens -something I hadn’t been able to do much of at all throughout the pregnancy.
“Hey, Momma, more boob!”
“Ok, enough with the pictures!”
We have mostly just been recuperating and settling in at home, but we have made a few voyages off the compound and we’re getting better at it.
A visit to the ocean
Enjoying our new normal at the finca -Aeden’s 1st month picture
And poor Kitty feels like he’s playing second fiddle, but we still love him! 🙂
The Doobie Brothers song, Long Train Running, became the soundtrack and mantra for the birth of our son. There was a documentary about the Doobie Brothers that we watched in the hospital after his birth and that particular song just worked its way into our subconscious. The question kept repeating: Without love, where would you be now? Through the long cold steel tracks of life that long train running brings us many places, but without love, where would we be now?
A week after the blessed birth of our son Aeden I became very ill and had to be hospitalized for 4 days due to a partially retained placenta. A fever developed that shot to 104 F and I lost so much blood that I was on watch for cardiac arrest and needed two blood transfusions, an iron infusion, IV antibiotics and a surgery under general anesthesia.
Lots of pokes, tests and prods
After some very scary moments on the line between this world and the next, we are now hopeful that we are in the clear and that my condition has improved. I am recuperating currently and finally have had a chance to give an update. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the village that came together behind the scenes to help our little family through this very rough time. If it weren’t for this crew of amazing people, I am not sure how we would have made it through.
First of all, thank you Britton for being there in the “sickness” part of sickness and in health. You have been extremely strong through this period that could break most people. I love you so, so much.
Britton is a great dad!
Thank you Missy, Ben, and even little Juliana for taking in a newborn, our precious baby, feeding him and loving him when we could not have him. Not many people would open their homes and hearts in such a way. Thank you to Missy for also rallying the troops for even more help. She kept us in communication, checked on us, provided us with supplies and so many other things. I do not know what we would have done without you when we were desperate standing at the emergency room door and they wouldn’t let Britton and I enter with our baby.
With Missy and Ben (and little Lucia)
Thank you to Megan and Kat who nourished us and our baby and provided us with extra breast milk when we had none. Thank you for everything else you did behind the scenes. Thank you to the fairy sprites Joanne and Francine (who I still have yet to meet) for cleaning our house and providing us with food and encouraging words. Thank you Jo for also making sure I made it to the hospital and making a special trip for the breast pump. After our ordeal it was so nice to walk into a clean house rather than the disaster we had left it when we rushed off.
Thank you to Ricia for washing our clothes and linens as well as the food and other supplies that have helped in my recovery. Thank you to Laura for the visits to the hospital, the food and the supplies we forgot in the hustle and bustle (like towels and pillows). Thank you to my family especially my mom Charlotte and aunt Annie who flew a long, long way to see me and make sure that I was alright. Thank you to Bill and Jenn for being in constant contact with us, the hospital visits and the smorgasbord of food when I was finished with surgery and doped up on morphine. Thank you to Brittany, Missy’s long distance ER doctor friend, who walked us through the steps and urged us into action or calmed us when it wasn’t needed. Thank you also to my friend Lisa who is a nurse and also encouraged me to seek medial help. Thank you to the medical staff at Mayaguez Medical Center. Thank you to the nameless people who donated the life-saving blood.
Blood transfusion
Thank you to Britton’s side of the family and everyone who wished us well and prayed for my recovery. I felt very loved in my darkest moments. Please forgive me if I missed someone in this list; it was quite the whirlwind. But know that you are appreciated! We may not have village tribes per se anymore in our modern world, but this was a shining example of the power of love when people come together to help one another. Without love, I don’t know where I would be right now, but it is possible my train may have stopped. So, thank you, thank you, thank you!
After Maria took down a lot of our trees, it was so disheartening. It looked as though a bomb had gone off and nowhere was it more evident than in the vegetation. As “plant people” and people who live directly in the jungle with all the other forest dwelling creatures we took notice of the changes. We humans weren’t the only ones traumatized by the hurricane. Birds, bees, mongoose, iguanas, and all sorts of other creatures were displaced. There was a sadness that is hard to describe to those who haven’t been through something like that. I am still trying to wrap my mind around the complete and utter chaos that that storm brought to life and its still rippling effects.
In the plants, it was so obvious. Many were pulled from the earth, trees lost all their leaves, and others leaned so far sideways they will never be straight again. The plants that lived through it seemed to go into a shock survival mode of instant spring within about a month, trying to bring on more leaves and flowers, but they were just trying to hold on to life while they restored themselves. Like us all.
Our ravaged tropical gardens the day after Maria
So this spring we have been even more renewed by the sight of true spring. The flowers are blooming again. The bees are pollinating. There is new growth and repair. There is hope. And this scent fills all of us with it. For us, at the farm, this means more work, but we are enjoying it. As I grow this new life form as well, we are preparing in harmony with nature.
Many of our parcha -passionfruit- vines were severely damaged but they are growing and blooming again!
Farm meadow area
Takes a lot of mowing to keep the yard looking sharp -before and after mowing about 2 acres with 2 push mowers (one each)
Lots of yard work!
New baby turkeys came out of the jungle with their mama and we put them in the coop out of harm’s way
Some of the bounty of flowers we take to the Farmer’s Market on Sundays
A new area we are cleaning up and replanting
Turkeys roaming the pineapple garden
From the farm to the Farmer’s Market-flowers, pomarrosa, guineos (bananas)
Scene from the Sunday Farmer’s Market
Another section near “Ridgeline” that we cleared of downed trees and is now being replanted
Hawk Lane and the end of the pink roble bloom
Mulberries (a favorite tree of the birds)
Pineapple that is almost ripe enough to pick
More pineapples growing
Sale and delivery of banana plants (long load!)
Pretty birds, sugar cane, palms, bougainvillea and bananas
I didn’t realize when this photo was taken it would be one of the last ones with our friend Sage
Sometimes I think when people watch our lives from afar they think we live in paradise, a heaven on Earth. And sometimes I truly believe it too. I have seen and experienced some of the most fantastically beautiful things in my life. I am truly grateful for the ability to sleep in as late as I want, spend time with my love, explore new places, meet and get to know interesting people, have new cultural experiences, eat fresh juicy fruit from our own trees, swim in luscious warm crystalline waters, swing from the trees, breathe a sigh of contentment as we watch the sun dip into the sea, hear the birds chirping in the morning and our cat snuggle up to us in bed and so much more. It is truly an isle of enchantment.
Gathering flowers from our farm in honor of our friend
But life is life no matter where you live. It can get messy, it can get hard, it can be frustrating. You get thrown curveballs. Things that seem stable can suddenly crumble under your feet. And in those moments, it can seem like a living hell. And for people like us who have transplanted from another place thousands of miles away you may feel lonely, isolated and not accepted. There can sometimes be felt an undercurrent of prejudice or racism. It’s hard to make a living here. And whatever demons were underneath and hidden by a sense of comfort in your homeland eventually seem to rear their heads and become more pronounced under constant stress. We have known more people die, become addicts, break up or otherwise have a major life upset here (and then usually move away) than I have ever seen back in Colorado. It is just a whole lot harder to hold everything together. There is a reason this place is called Derelict Junction and the 413 is known as the Road to Happiness…or the Road to Rehab.
And for many, it’s a sort of purgatory. It is a waiting out, a finding out, a crossroads. Which way will my life go from here? Let’s go have some fun while we can, they may think. Let’s throw caution to the wind. And while they are here they live in this in-between, the waiting room between heaven and hell.
Beach memorial for Sage (photo credit Kari DiPalma)
The death of our friend Sage really affected me. I think I always saw Naomi and Sage as kindred spirits. Adventurous souls with a dream. They were some of the first people we ever met when we moved to Puerto Rico. They welcomed us and encouraged us in our pursuits and we were so excited for them, especially the start of Rincon Beer Company. To see their relationship collapse and the end of their era together come so tragically shook me to the core. We are all so very fragile even when we appear so strong. We try to put on a show that nothing can shake us, that we are “better than,” that we are infallible, that nothing can ever break us. But it’s not usually one thing, it’s the accumulation of a lifetime of weight and burdens that eventually become too hard to carry. We need to remember that we are all carrying something and sometimes we need people to help us and we need to help people take a load off.
Rincón style beach potluck memorial
Life seems to be a series of moments that shift between heaven, hell and purgatory. We are always up on the high moments, the moments in heaven. We want more. We want more pleasure, more good times, more angelic periods to celebrate and brag about on Instagram and Facebook. But underneath the surface and often tied to these highs there are the lows. There is often heartache, sadness, anger and other lows that we hide away in the shadows and don’t talk openly about. And interwoven between them are all the other neutral moments of chores and waiting, passing time. The purgatory between them that keeps the highs and lows a little calmer. It is like the weather floating between perfectly sunny skies and hurricanes that we live most of our lives, if we can make it.
It saddens me deeply that we couldn’t reach Sage from his depths that we couldn’t even see hidden under his happy smile. And I still just shake my head in disbelief and in shock that he is gone. I feel so much for Naomi and what she is going through. It just hits too close to home.
The final chapter for Sage was a wonderful Rincón-style community event for this unforgettable pillar of our town. It was a beautiful paddleout ceremony, the first I had ever participated in. People told stories and anecdotes of Sage as the sun gently set and flowers swirled all around in the circle of many of his loved ones. We splashed water as a sort of “cheers to Sage!” And depending on your perspective it was a bittersweet moment, heaven in hell or hell in heaven.
