In the first week of January, Paul started complaining off and on that his arm hurt. He mentioned it kind of casually, that it was sore as if he'd worked out but he hadn't really done anything with it. He didn't sound like he was in a lot of pain or that he was particularly upset about it so I didn't think much of it.

On friday night he called me before he came home from school and said that he thought there was something wrong with his arm. Again, he didn't sound alarmed or in pain so I told him I would have a look at it when he got home.

He walked in the door, took off his coat and sat down on the couch. I glanced over at him and actually did a double take. I'm not sure that my butt touched the couch between my side of the couch and his, all I know is that I was examining his arm in under three seconds. His entire right arm was swollen and red, from his fingers right up to his shoulder and his chest and back around that shoulder. It was hard to the touch, like touching the fake plastic flesh of a mannequin. He said it only hurt in his shoulder but the arm ached like after a hard workout.

I couldn't convince him to go straight to the hospital, but I managed to convince him to go to the medicentre. Roughly an hour later we were on our way to Emergency with a referral letter from the medicentre doctor.

On a Friday night Emergency at the University Hospital is always a zoo, but because of the potential severity of Paul's case, we moved quickly through triage and into a "room" (curtained stall). After being examined by five doctors (one of them just poked his arm a bunch and acted like Paul was lying when he said he didn't work out), they sent him for chest x-rays and gave him a shot of blood thinners in his belly. They said that the biggest possibility was a blood clot and that we would have to come back the next day for an ultrasound.

Morning found us back in emergency, waiting for the results of the ultrasound. The technician found clots all the way up Paul's arm and a large clot in his shoulder, where the worst of the pain was. Apparently since there was no injury, no family history of clotting, and the clot was in an uncommon area, the doctors were quite worried. They gave him another shot of blood thinners and a prescription to continue them, a prescription for blood thinner pills, requisitions for a ton of tests, and a referral to a hematologist. We left for home, tired and shaken up.

It required a significant adjustment of our lives, a complete role reversal. Paul had always been the strong healthy one while I was generally weaker and sicker. Now I was doing the lifting and carrying while he had to rest and remember to take his pills and get his tests. We had to be careful of anything that might cause him to bruise or bleed, and he had to avoid all kinds of foods that would interact with his meds. While I was happy to cover where he needed help, Paul is just not good at being sick and remembering all of the important restrictions. He didn't want to have to slow down and not play hockey and watch what he ate. I was frustrated at what I saw as his lack of attention to his health and he was frustrated by all of the restrictions.

We've adjusted some now and found a better balance, but it's going to be a long haul until Paul is healthy enough again for things to get back to normal. I don't think they will ever get back to the way they were because I think that now he knows I am stronger than he thought I was (and I am less confident in his health than I was - paranoid, he says). The next hurdle is flying out to Vancouver for a wedding without me freaking out about him randomly hemoraging while fulfilling his duties as a groomsman.

The beginning of a new year is a time for resolution, in every meaning of the word.

RESOLUTION (noun)

1. A decision to do something or to behave in a certain manner
A course of action determined or decided on.
The state or quality of being resolute; firm determination.

The most common association of resolution with the New Year is to write down one’s New Year’s Resolutions. For example, this year I resolve to:
a) get out of debt (and by default, Paul gets this resolution too)
b) get back into to debt but good debt, by purchasing a newer and more reliable vehicle, and also by paying for Paul’s schooling
c) get healthier – both in terms of avoiding illness and in terms of increasing overall fitness
d) be more positive and less cranky with people. I ended 2005 on kind of a sour note after a pretty fabulous year and I don’t really want to do that again.
e) get more sleep – I’m exhausted and only getting more so (this is actually a sub-resolution of resolutions c and d)
f) finish our wedding Thank You cards – which we’re hoping to do before our first anniversary (we’re doing a website with all of our photos on it and sending at least two printed photos with each card, hence the long timeline)

2. The fineness of detail that can be distinguished in an image;
The process or capability of making distinguishable the individual parts of an object, closely adjacent optical images, or sources of light;
The ability of a microscope or telescope to measure the angular separation of images that are close together
The act or process of separating or reducing something into its constituent parts: the prismatic resolution of sunlight into its spectral colors.

New Year’s Eve is a time when we put our past under a microscope and examine it closely. We take the beautiful blurry image that is our life and comb through it, analyzing our intentions and wrongs and hurts; poking and prodding at them to see if they still have the impact they did way back when. We stand, crouched with our noses to the weave in the fabric of our lives and examine each thread to see what they led to and where they came from. We peer through the prisms to examine all of the colorful components that make up our lives. Alternatively, we apply rose colored glasses to soften the edges, to back away and make things blurry and beautiful again.

3. The progression of a dissonant tone or chord to a consonant tone or chord (Music).

To break that down into lay-person’s term. To go from a part of a song where the music clashes to a part of the song where it doesn’t. This applies to several parts of New Year’s. Firstly, the singing of Auld Lang Syne, where there is invariably someone who is both drunk and tone-deaf shrieking along at the top of their lungs, resolution happens when the drunk person either falls down or passes out and either way stops singing. Secondly, with my friends, we have two New Year’s Traditions: we burn our regrets, and we hang our hopes and wishes on a tree with bright shiny ribbon. Regrets equate nicely to a dissonant chord, they are things within our lives that clash with the way we wanted things to be. Hopes and wishes are bright and shiny and happy, like a consonant chord. We’re basically hoping that the background music in our lives will stay consonant for the remainder of the coming year.

4. The part of a literary work in which the complications of the plot are resolved or simplified.

A large part of New Year’s is reflecting back on the year past. It is a time when you try to tie up any obligations and resolve the plotlines in your complicated life. This year I accomplished many things that I expected to and many more things that I did not. In 2005, I:
- survived breast reduction surgery
- got a new job
- moved in with Paul
- got married
- won NaNoWriMo (and didn’t hate my story)

So really, 2005 was a combination of beginnings and endings, I emerged from 2005 substantially different than I went in. It was the year of change and stress and incredible happiness and personal accomplishment, and while some of these things were hard, they were still good.

5. Something settled or resolved; the outcome of decision making.

In this way, 2005 is settled and 2006 is forecast. It’s an arbitrary landmark, this end of the year celebration, but it gives us a chance to end a chapter and begin anew, once every 365 days (give or take). We resolve while looking back at what came before, at what we would change in our past, and we resolve while looking forward that we will make changes, that at the end of our cycle we will have less to regret and greater things to hope for in the next cycle.
It continues, on and on, until we reach our final outcome, our final resolution, and we burn our lifelong regrets and tie our hope on the tree.

For New Year's we were all pretty tired from the wedding and we went out to Amanda's place for a relaxing, game-filled New Year's. The best part of the night was from 2 am to 4 am when a smaller core group of us just hung out and talked and laughed.

This included three couples that normally lived far away and who add some indefinable quality to our group; they are catalysts, somehow, and make our group of friends greater than the sum of it's parts. When they are in town we have more activities and we have far more fun doing them. Even if we're just sitting around we laugh more and complain less. There are so many people that have moved away now that it feels like those of us who remain are just a shell, holding down the fort until the others come home for Christmas or a summertime wedding. The problem is, this year our group has no summer weddings planned. We may have to wait until next Christmas to be whole. Twelve months is a long time to go without your favorite people and it hurts my heart to think of so long an absence. The times when those special people get on the plane and leave puts teeny tiny holes in all of our hearts and I think that's maybe why we never do much as a group in January and February. We are all a bit curled in on ourselves, trying to rest and heal. Taking a break so that the contrast between life with them and life without them isn't so harsh. This year I'm going to try to suck it up and be brave, to plan parties and activities and fill the cold months with fun in any way that I can.

On that note, New Year's photos:








My gorgeous sister-in-law.












Amanda and the frame we gave her that Paul put together wrong, I affectionately called him a dummy, and Amanda laughed herself silly.



















The Spud Trooper that Paul got from Sarah to go with his Darth Tater.

















Chantal trying to teach us this tongue thing they do in Tanzania.














Melly trying to do the Tanzanian tongue thing.











Homey Hot Wheels.











They look so innocent sitting together until...
















...Wrestlemania!!!
















We laughed until late in the night.













And went home around 4 a.m. very sleepy.