An Eventful Week

So, I always say that nothing terribly exciting ever happens to us; which is probably why you haven't read a real post from us in quite a while. However, this past week has had some exciting moments!

On Thursday, I (along with another member of my research team) presented a poster on the research we have been doing for the last year and a half at the Fulton Conference. It was a great experience and it's something that always takes me out of my comfort zone a little bit, which is good. For those of you that don't know about my research job, here's a little run-down: We are finishing up a quantitative and qualitative study on how multiple chronic illnesses affects older adult couples. I have been recruiting couples through the Diabetes Management Clinic, interviewing them, transcribing the interviews, and coding and analyzing the interviews. It's been incredible to talk with these couples about their daily experiences. This poster contained most of the quantitative results, which is something that I didn't have much to do with on the actual study but wanted to learn a little more about it so that's why I volunteered to help out.
Chad, being the supportive hubby he is, came during his lunch break so he could see my poster and he took a picture, so here it is! Notice the poster to our left won first place...which is funny, because ours looked so much better. =)



On top of trying to get this poster put together, I've been feeling quite overwhelmed with my tutoring job. Last weekend I had to read about 14 students' 10-12 page rough drafts (total = 140 pages!), annotate on the drafts, and write each of them a letter telling them what they needed to work on. Then, this week I had to conference with each of them for 30 minutes. I had to do this in all of that spare time I have... Needless to say I'm glad it's over. It was a great experience to feel like I was helping these students with their papers, but it's stressful when I have so much going on anyway. Thursday night after dinner, Chad and I went into our bedroom to relax at about 7:15 and we totally crashed! We were both so exhausted that we slept for hours. When we do things like this (going to bed before the sun sets) we always laugh about how old we're getting, but I'm not gonna lie, it felt great.

And it doesn't stop there...In the middle of the night Friday, I got up to go to the bathroom. On my way back I tripped and rammed my left foot into the bedpost. Ouch! Now, I'm a pretty clumsy person, so stuff like this happens all the time. This time, however, it didn't quit throbbing. I tried to go to bed but it hurt so bad that I couldn't fall asleep. I took some medicine and in about 45 minutes I was able to lie back down. I awoke the next morning to quite the scene:

You can see one place where I hit the bedpost, on the second toe from the left (the big red spot). The other place I hit was right on top of my pinky toe.

Check out the fatty left two toes on my left foot! These pictures don't really do it justice. They're black and blue, too.

After I realized that the pain was not going away and was actually getting worse, I went to the doctor. What did he say? My pinky toe is broken. I actually think that the next toe over is broken, too, but I didn't think so at the time and it probably didn't get looked at in the X-ray. So what did the doctor tell me I can do? Absolutely nothing. Gee, thanks. So, I'm hobbling around and trying to avoid bumping it on anything, which is difficult considering I'm a chronic klutz. I've been keeping medicated with about 600 mg of ibuprofen every 4 hours. Anyway, I'm worried about driving, I drive a stick, and work, I walk about 3 laps with a lady every day and I walk another resident's dog. Oh yeah, and that graduation thing too. But that's not for another three weeks, so I should be better by then. In the mean time, I'm really going to work on that chronic clumsy thing...