Ringing in the New Year

So long 2018. It's been real and unreal at the same time.

I spent much of this year recovering from the residuals of last year: 2017 marked the death of both my parents, along with a significant discovery of an unruptured aneurysm, and three negative student experiences in one semester (four if you include the one who died in a car accident). Additionally, one of my church teachers died immediately after our class on anxiety concluded. Therefore, I spent the prevalent part of 2017 in a daze from one experience to another.

So the beginning of this year promised to be better. Then in February, I was astonished once again as my aunt, my father's sister, died in much the same manner as my mother, in her sleep.

Then in March, when life was seeming to return to it's new normal, I found myself in an extended hospital stay from a ruptured aneurysm, one stemming from the very one I'd had surgery on the previous year. I spent three weeks in the hospital, two weeks at home, and another two on half-day duty.

Thanks be to God that I had no permanent long-lasting physical effects other than mental fatigue--more scientifically referred to as as neural fatigue. Other than that, I have the full use of of all my limbs and mental faculties, with the exception of gaps in my memory from those weeks of my hospital stay; I can only lucidly recall the last two or three days of my stay.

All of the other experiences of this year kind of petered out as insignificant in the shadow of my hospital stay. It was such a defining moment that this year seems almost segregated into two in length.

So while this New Year's Eve celebration took me a while to get started and will be on a decidedly smaller scale (no grapes, shrimp, or nachos), I will still ring it in properly if a little more quietly.

Welcome 2019.