I miss blogs

I love blogs. Other people's blogs. Not mine. I am super lazy when it comes to updating my blogs and so I usually forget my password and eventually stop updating.

I keep meaning on updating this blog, though. And lucky me, I was still able to get into this account!

I have a particular reason for updating this account now, but I will get to that in a bit (ah, the suspense!). A lot has happened since I last udpated my blog two and a half years ago. This blog was meant to be a chronicle of my time in Korea. So much for that. I am home now and let me tell you, a lot has happened!

I spent another year in Korea after my last post. I've been home for a year and a half now and I my memories of Korea are still so fresh. After about a year in Seoul, though, I started to get homesick. This was expected since all of my friends who signed on for one year contracts started to go home. The friends I made in Korea were my backbone the whole time I was there. Still, I got lonely.

My lonliness was heightened by the fact that dating SUCKS for single white girls in Korea. The Korean men want Korean women and the foreigners want Korean women, too. Damn beautiful Korean women! So, I decided that I would give internet dating a solid try. It was then that I started with eharmony. Yes, I used eharmony. I used it oversees. And I'm happy to say it worked. I started chatting with a very nice fella who I now live with and am engaged to marry. I honestly think that our relationship was successful because we both became so invested in each other during our four months of correspondence before I came home in March of 2010.

After I came home I jumped back into Canadian life (as trippy as that was). I came home, immediately got laser eye surgery (worth every penny!), got my TEST certification, and moved to Vancouver to be with Julien (Mr. eharmony). I quickly found a job at a language school in downtown Vancouver and worked my ass off for about a year. After about six months at my job, which I loved, I started to get super tired (I was working a lot). I got pretty close to having a melt down and got out of there pretty quickly.

Fast forward three months: Julien and I have recently purchased our first home, we have been planning a destination wedding in the Domincan Republic for January 2012, I am picking up my new job quite well, I have tons of spare time, and the world is at my fingertips. But then, I start to notice that I'm a little more paranoid than normal (it's normal for me to be a little paranoid) and that things aren't quite falling into place as I'd planned. Everything has slowed down in my life, but my mind keeps racing. And racing. And racing. I start to feel like I'm going crazy. Then, I start to notice a twitch in my left hand. My racing mind finds every possible reason for my insanity. Still, it doesn't stop. Eventually, it becomes too much for me to handle, and I go to a clinic (first two attempts = fail; third attempt = success!). This all happened in the span of maybe two weeks.

When I went into the clinic in New West (Julien and I had been planning on coming here anyways to inquire about becoming patients as both our family doctors were far away), I swear, they thought I was on drugs. At this point, I couldnt' keep my hand still, my speech was slurred, and my gait on the left side was funny. The doctor did a bunch of reflex tests and asked me questions. He even called my family doctor in Victoria. He was very thorough. He noticed that I had a strong heart murmur was well. He referred me to a neurologist who I was very quickly scheduled to see. Over the next month I had so many tests. A CT scan, two echocardiograms, tons of blood work.

The twitch that I had is called Sydenhams chorea and is almost never found in anyone older than, say, sixteen. It was an auto immune defense response to a strep infection that I never even knew I had! Go figure. So I got some medicine for this and it's pretty much gone now. Thank goodness! It was awful! I wanted to blog about my experiences at the time but I couldn't even type!

Now for my heart. It turns out that I have a congenital bicuspal aortic valve. So, I was born with an aortic valve with two leaflets instead of the normal three leaflets. My valve is quite diseased, probably because of strep infections that I could have easily contracted from dental appointments throughout my life. Sooo, I need to have it replaced. Soon. Like, in four to five weeks.

I haven't been able to find a lot of information about women in my situation. I also haven't been able to find a lot of pictures from the healing process in young women. So, after my surgery, I plan on updating this blog with photos of my scar until I leave for my wedding in January. My hope is that the scar won't be too too TOO nasty in five months. We. Will. See.