Growing the Palmer Family: A Roller Coaster of a Day: One of the Best and Worst Days of my Life.

So I haven’t written a blog post in a while, because I have been feeling so sick, but I had planned to write one today no matter what. This post is turning out a little differently than I had originally planned. I planned on it to be upbeat and exciting and full of all of my good news, but I am really not feeling it right now. No worries, the baby is ok. (S)He is growing well and right on schedule with a heartbeat of 174 beats per minute. :-)

But let me go into the details of one of the best and worst day of my life:
This morning started out like any other morning, except instead of waking up puking my brains out I woke up excited to see my little one today. We left in plenty of time to get to the Dr. for my 9:30 appointment, knowing that we would probably hit all sorts of traffic trying to get downtown at that time of day. We got a little lost on the way to the Dr. as I have only had one appointment at this location previously.

Driving downtown around the hospital with a million signs pointing a hundred different directions can be quite confusing, and we almost missed our turn, and made a quick left to try to make it…. Right into the path of another car. She was almost able to stop before hitting us, so thankfully no one was hurt, just delayed an hour and a half while the police came and wrote up a report etc. I called my Dr. and they said they would do their best to work me in still.

By 10:30 we were back on our way to the Doctor. My wonderful doctor was able to get us in and we saw our first pictures of our “beautiful” baby blob. (Pictures below… you can even see what I think is a tiny leg in one of them.)

After an hour and a half at the doctor where they drained pretty much all of my blood, we went out to lunch at P.F. Chang’s (It was 12:30 and I still had not thrown up!!). I called my mom and my MIL and let them know that their grandbaby looked good, as they were waiting anxiously to hear.
Fast-forward 3 hours. I am sitting at home trying to get my whole day’s worth of work done in a few hours, while being distracted by my beautiful blob, and I get a call from my daddy. I answer excitedly thinking he is calling to tell me he saw the pictures and to talk about his grandbaby…I was wrong. (Although he was kind enough to start with that and not send me into full shock.)

No, the reason he was calling was to tell me my sister’s base in Afghanistan was attacked by suicide bombers and she had been airlifted to the hospital over there. My stomach sank through the floor. I have never gone so quickly from such an emotional high to an emotional low (and I don’t think it was pregnancy hormones.). I still don’t know all the details, just what was relayed to me from him, by her in a pretty addled and shaken up state. Thankfully, as far as we know, she is not *SERIOUSLY* injured. She “just” has a really bad concussion, shrapnel injuries to her forehead and hands, and POSSIBLY a broken bone in her neck. (Hopefully we will know more soon, and I personally think those are pretty serious, but I guess relatively speaking…).

As far as I know, (based on every news article for any part in the world that I could get my hands on combined with what I know from her) the Taliban drove a truck into the middle of her base, close to the base restaurant where she was sitting with some people eating, and blew it up. She blacked out, as she was about 45 feet from the explosion, was dragged into a bunker where our guys proceeded to kill all the (excuse my language) *^%^%^%#@^*&^%$^@. She was then airlifted to a civilian hospital in Kabul, where she was able to call my parents. That is really all I know. I hope to know more soon, as I am really just writing this as a distraction to keep myself from thinking about it and crying.

As a Pollyanna, who always likes to see the bright side and silver lining, my one hope is that because of all of this my sister will get to come home and be a part of my pregnancy and the birth of her first niece/nephew, whereas otherwise she was planning on being over there until March.

On that note, here are pictures of my beautiful baby blob. :-)