Starting over.. again

Well.. Here we are. I lost weight. I got married. I let it go.

We had a rough year.. to say the least. Matthew was hospitalized a week after the wedding.. then every few months after that. From November thru April Matthew had 4 collapsed lungs needing 5 chest tubes. Matthew was admitted to Ames on Mothers Day for what we thought would be a routine visit.. When things went drastically wrong. 3 days in Ames Matthew went into acute respiratory distress. Matthew basically started to suffocate right before my eyes. We rushed him to ICU and he was put onto a ventilator. 48 hours on the ventilator in Ames and they life flighted him to Iowa City. With a miracle we got him off the ventilator.. But they kept telling us we were not out of the woods yet. Matthew had so much recovery to make. He was down to 111lbs and weaker then he'd ever been. He was oxygen dependent and constantly fought to catch his breath. His body was riddled with infections that that antibiotics could no longer fight. On Saturday June 7th they put in another chest tube as he had yet another collapsed lung. Matthew woke up early June 8th going back into acute respiratory distress. They informed me before even putting him on the ventilator, that they would most likely not be able to get him off successfully. I came in to the room to say goodbye to my husband while he was still conscious.. but he was so air hungry and distressed, I'm not even sure he knew I was there. They put him back on the ventilator and as a family we prayed. We spoke with the doctors, as we had been doing all month, about trying to get him on the list for lung transplant. Matthew was too underweight, too weak, and too riddled with infections for the transplant team to even consider giving him a set of new lungs. Towards the end of the day the doctors told us that transplant would not be an option, and now even the ventilator was having trouble keeping Matthew alive. We knew at that point that Matthew had fought enough. Matthew was removed from the ventilator at 6:00pm Sunday June 8th and peacefully faded away, surrounded by his loved ones.

My husband's funeral was June 14th, just a day before what would have been our first wedding anniversary.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this blog anymore. I want to be happy... but I dont know how to get there from here. I have been pushing forward with everything, and luckily I have some pretty amazing support groups to keep me going. My Mother-in-Law has been extremely helpful with getting all of the things settled after Matthew's death, and has even taken my son to the farm to spend a month out there with her.. to allow me some time alone to grieve.

I can't explain what it feels like to have something ripped away from you too soon. We knew that our time was short, but we never expected this. Not this soon.

I really should have a direction with this post, but I don't. Saturday is my 27th birthday and I'm planning on starting the #100happydays challenge. I feel like I need to step back and find things that make me happy in all of this. I know it will be hard..