Shadow's blog: "All about me."

Aurora's last heart surgery is scheduled for August 30th. She's going in for what is called a Fontan, which will be the final surgery until she needs a transplant at hopefully 30 years old. if you ahve questions, well wishes, anything feel free to message me on yahoo LLSIRSHADOW or send me a mail here.

Today it is finished. I now have Sole Physical and Legal Custody of my daughter!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOOORAY!

Aurora's heart Catheterization is scheduled for April 19th. This is usually a one-two day procdure, and her actual surgery will be scheduled after this, but it must be within a month of the cath. Everyone keep us in your prayers please.

Aurora's Heart Catheterization will happen within 2-4 weeks of today. I'll get the actual date very soon, and will post it. Within a month of that they'll have to do the surgery. AJ is doing very well right now, but she needs the surgery, she is showing signs that she is in need of it. So keep those prayers comin!

Tommorrow me and AJ make a trip to the Cardiologist at 8:30 AM. They told us at the last appointment that they wanted to do her next surgery when she made it to 15 Kilograms. Well, she's there. So they're going to schedule her Heart Catheterization, and within a month of that the surgery will need to take place. What she's getting is the Fontan Procedure, which is the third stage of the Norwood. For those of you who don't know, Aurora has Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. Here is a link to show you what it is. Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. This next link is to a site that describes the Norwood procedure, a three stage operation which is explained pretty fully. The Norwood.. Aurora is facing the Fontan, which is explained in the next link. The Fontan..   I'll post another bulliten and blog after i get home from her appointment.    I'm feelin really nervous about all this, and scared cause this is supposedly the hardest surgery, and her mom, well her mom isn't around and the court wont let her be around cause she's stuck on drugs. Anyways. Everyone say a prayer for AJ and me. and I"ll keep u all updated on everything.

so went to court today. it was supposed to be custody, but thejudge was like.. um i can't award anything. so he sent it to the people who set up the trial. it was like this judge had no clue. course My ex AND HER LAWYER didnt show up either. we got out and my lawyer even said ' i don't know what that was about. and apologized for wasting our time. *sigh* we were all tryin to get this taken care of before her next surgery. even our last judge, wants this all taken care of before her surgery.. which we find out about on March 7th. so who knows what's going on. gonna drive me fucking nutty. i'm so ... just... FUCKN ARRRGHHHH..

Very short blog here. Tommorrow morning, is the change of custody hearing. The last time i was in court the judge said "unless your ex gets struck by lightning, and turns into a different person, you're going to get custody." Fact is i've heard from the ex in 3 times since christmas, and she hasn't changed, she hasn't been drug testing, and is still living in and out of homeless shelters. SOOo i'm pretty confident, but i'm still nervous anyways. so wish me luck. I'll post another blog and/or a bulliten to let everyone know how it goes.

Lets see, lets go back to march, just after i left my ex. If you remember from a previous blog, she has just bit a hole in my chest, and I'm also bleeding from a head wound (the phone hit me the second time). Well, i left, and took my daughter with me. I went to my brothers, and hid out there for a litle bit. Unfortunately the ex knows where my brother lives. and she showed up with the cops. Since we weren't married, and i hadn't had time to file the domestic abuse report yet, they took my daughter and gave her back to her mom. well that first month, i spent without my little girl, and the ex and her mom wouldn't let me see her at all either. In fact, until i went to the lawyer and filed for custody of my daughter, i wasn't allowed to see Aurora. That was pretty miserable, but really probably a blessing, cause it gave me a chance to get offa drugs and alcohol. Well we made a settlement agreement, which gave us joint custody of AJ, i would have her for a week, and her mom for a week. with special stipulations for if someone gets on drugs. Well, after 3 weeks of switching AJ back and forth, Child Protective Services called me and told me to come get my daughter because her mother has been using coke and other drugs with AJ in the house. Well her mom said she wasn't doin it in the house, she was going to the neighbors house after AJ was asleep and getting f'ed up there. Well, i've had AJ since, and this was may of last year. her mom has not stopped using, has not gotten a job (well she did but she got canned for stealing from the register). I ended up having to take her to court in the end because she refused to provide her drug tests to me and still wanted visitation with AJ. Well, she showed to the first hearing, and the judge told her to drug test, and set up visits with AJ. She didn't do any drug tests.. and didn't show up to the next 2 follow up hearings. Thusly the judge said, no more visits. She told the judge she was going into rehab but instead has been living either on the street or numerous homeless shelters. Also, (through research on the net) i've found out that she hasn't shown up for any of the hearings having to do with the domestic abuse charges i filed. She's gone to jail for not showing up to court. and has had 3 hearing so far. Her last one was on the 26th, and as far as i know, she's got a warrant out because she hasn't shown up to any of them. Right now we have a custody hearing on Feb 12, because i got a letter from CPS saying they were dropping her case because my ex didn't wanna do anything they asked, and said that she shouldn't be allowed to be near her kids until she shows at least 3 years clean. So i filed for full custody, and the hearing is set for the 12th. So this is where i'm at now. Of course i'm doing it by myself. I live iwht my parents cause i can't work. Aurora's Dr.s have ordered that she have 24/7 supervision, and she's not allowed to go ito day care or be around too many people. So i can't work, since i'm the only one who can take care of her. I get a little help from my parents, but not a lot, and it's been a while since i've had many friends. I mean i go to one AA meeting a week, and that's the break i get from my daughter. that's it. Well, I have met one girl on the net, that i really fell for. course, the net being what it is.. i found out about a month and half ago, she lied to me about her age, and hasn't talked to me since. Course now, i really have a hard time trusting, but still hang out here cause there's nowhere else for me to be. I've met another wonderful girl, but can't be with her as i'd like to. so that's kinda upsetting, but i'm not giving up, and i'm not going to let past experiences mess up anything that might be good in the future. It don't help that I'm really shy, and a jealous person by nature, and just want to find love. But i think i'll save that subject for another blog..

Aurora was born on AUgust 5th, 2004. The pregnancy was pretty normal all the way up utnil about 26 weeks. We went in to get an ultrasound to find out the sex, and the lady doing the ultrasound didn't even end up looking until about an hour and half inot the ultrasound. This isn't normal, usually they last half hour at most. well then she pulled three or four doctors in to look, and after all of this was done, these doctors we'd never met took me and aurora's mom into another oom and asked us to sit down. They told us Aurora has a condition called Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. The left side of her heart did not form properly, and she would be born with half a heart. Well at this point they asked us what we wanted to do, gave us the options. Abort, have her and simply watch her die while they try to find a transplant for her, or try a three stage surgery that should give her heart about 30 years. Well of course we chose option 3. We finished the pregancy, (it was very high risk and we were at the doctors 3 times a week) and had AJ in 2004. Well i'm not gonna go into too much how it felt seeing my firstborn come into the world, cause any parent already knows, and if you're not a parent.. you wot know till it happens. Anyways. right after they helped her into this world,they put aurora on a portable incubator and rushed her off to the Newborn Intensive Care Unit. I followed her. As a matter of fact, there's no way anyone could have stopped me. After two hours of watching them poke and prod at her, doing an echo cardiogram on her heart, they finally let me hold her. That was the greatest thing in the entire world. i get all teary just thinking aboutthe first time i held her. I fell in love instantly. Those of you who don't believe in love t first sight definitely don't have kids.. Anyways, Aurora was in the NICU for a month, and they let us take her home before her first surgery. After a week at home, we took her back to the hospital and she went through her first Open Heart Surgery. It took 8 hours, which was worse than an eternity in the worst imaginable place you can think of. I hated it, but i knew that she needed it to survive. She was not like other babies. She was not pink and pretty, she was beautiful of course, but she was blue. her skin looked like a smurfs. you can still see some blue tint if you know to look for it. but that's outta order. She came through that first surgery okay, but spent a month in a medication induced coma, and another month recovering in the hospital. Well we took her home after that.. and were very happy to do so. She is immuno suppresed, so there's all kinds of instructions we had to follow. No contact with other people, specially not kids, no leaving the house, no places where there are a lot of people, and she requires 24/7 supervision (even now) she could go from being perfectly healthy one second, to blue and dieing the next. It's pretty damn nerve wracking. Well about a year after her first surgery they took her back into the hospital for her second surgery. All of these are working up to bypassing that left side of her heart, so that her heart doens't have to work twice as hard to do what our normal hearts do. This should make it so her heart can work and not wear out till about 30 years old!. She was in the hopspitla for... 5 days!!!! She's the strongest girl ever! 5 days to recover from open heart surgery.. i was just blown away. well march of 2006, i left her mom, and after a couple months, CPS called and told me to come get my daughter from her mom (the cops forced me to give my daughter to her, i tried to take her when i left, and the cops wouldn't let me keep her, even though i filed domestic abuse charges) anyways. i've had her pretty much full time since then. it's been about nine months. So the next step is in february there is a hearing to change custody to me fully. and the judge has alredy said she's going to award me custody. After that we've got an appt atthe cardiologist on march 7th. They said that they are going to schedule the Catheterization then, and the surgery will have to happen within a month of that. So april or may aurora will be having her last heart Surgery.. Called the Fontan procedure if you wanna look it up on the net. IT's the worst of the three and has an avg recovery time of 2 to 3 months. So that's what we got to look forward to in the coming months. and i'm just hoping that the custody shit and all the other crap is dealt with by then. ANwyas. that's it for AJ''sblog.. she's doing just great right now by the way. gainin weight real well, active and happy like any normal kid. the Dr.s are impressed with how well she's doing!... So there's AJ at a glance.. or a short read. lol.

My ex was... well lemme see if i can put it into words. We met one night, i was house sitting for my parents, a freind from work called and asked if i wanted to hang out. I told him he could come over, but he needed to bring some chics with him. I was kidding but he took me seriously. My ex came over with him, went to the bathroom in my parents house and changed an 8-ball of coke into crack, and proceeded to smoke it all on my parents patio. This is how i met my ex. I was a safe person to be with so she could do her drugs. This is how it all started off. We ended up sleeping together, and because of the type of person i am, well i tend to put lots of feeling into sleeping with a person. Sex for me isn't 'just sex'. it's a display of emotions, it's a way of showing someone the love that you feel for them. It's (to me) one of the most intimate ways of sharing yourself with someone. Sex is a way of baring your soul to another person. Well unfortunately i later found out she didn't share these ideas. But getting on with the story, we ended up moving in together, and soon after, she and i decided to quit using drugs. She went into rehab for 3 months was gone. I stayed at home, kept doing school, and quit on my own. Granted i didn't really want to quit, i just was doing it to support her, which hurt me in the end in retrospect. after she got out of rehab we moved to a bigger place, and her 4 year old son moved in with us. He had gotten taken away from her and placed with her mother by CPS due to excessive Meth use. I didn't even know about him till well into our relationship. I loved him though and accepted him unconditionally, becomeing as much of a father to him as i could be as his real dad was (and still is) in and out of jail for drug and other felonies. Well we kept together for a while, and then she cheated on me for the first time. With her ex of course on one of his stints out of jail. i forgave her, and made as if to ignore the whole situation. I had her promise that it owuld never happen again. This is really the point that our relationship took a downward turn. It didn't happen again for a while. but other things started to happen. Suddenly i couldn't do anything right. I wasn't good enough in bed anymore, i wasn't nice enough to her, i wasn't paying enough attention to her, school was taking my time up too much. If i was at school i was talking to other girls and thinking about cheating on her (i don't have many social skillz, so this really wasn't happening). and she hit me for the first time. Got mad at me for some reason i can't remember and punched me in the face. Again, all of this stuff i figured was my fault somehow and i had to do better... One of my hobbies is playing computer games, it's a great way for me to relax, and enjoy myself.I quit doing that completely because she felt it was taking time away from paying attention to her. I quit going to school and started to fail out because she felt it was taking time away from her.Slowly i became more and more miserable because no matter what i did , what i gave up, how much better i did, it was never good enough. I did everything she asked because she said it would make her love me more and we'd be happy. None of it worked, but i did it anyways because i 'loved' her and thought it would make her happy... Well she cheated on me again, this time with a guy she met on the bus one day. again i just kind of ignored it. told her i forgave her and she promised not to ever do it again. Things got worse again, she started to hit me much more often and was always telling me what a lousy person i was and how i could never do anything right. So i would try to do better. doing everything she asked, trying to anticipate and head off her anger beforehand, but again nothing was ever good enough. well this was the pattern of our 4 years. she'd cheat on me, things would get worse, she'd cheat on me again, things would get worse. 6 different guys, after the first two, all the guys were men i tried to make friends with and brought home to hang out with us. I stopped making friends and got realy lonely. Life was really lousy for me at the end. we started using drugs again, and i just got more and more miserable. Nothing i did was right, or made her happy. I wasn't allowed to do anything for myself at all, it had to be all about shannon or i would get hit. I would let her do whatever she wanted to me as long as it kept her from doing it to the kids. I don't mention my daughter in all this because well it seems kinda superflous. One of her biggest complaints was that i didn't 'communicate' well. I tried, really i did. I would open up and tell my feelings, i'd talk and talk and she'd would interrupt, tell me that i was wrong, and go on to tell me why and that I just needed to sit and listen to all HER problems. I don't want to go into this with the point of i never did anything wrong and was the perfect person. I have my problems, and some of her complaints were completely true. but I did try my hardest to stop doing the things she didn't like and make her happy. That was my problem though, trying to make her happy. I finnally realized (after i left her) that was my biggest problem. I couldn't make her happy, only she could do that and i was just standing in the way. Lets get to the end of the story. Near the end of our relationship she started sleeping with a friend of mine. I considered this guy my best friend, and they were scerwin behind my back, in my bed, in front of my kids. Wel he wannted her to leave me, take the kids, and be with him. She didn't do it, wouldn't do it, and he got mad. Beat the hell out of her in front of our house, in front of our kids one day (long story in itself i'm not gonna get into here). well we had to move because of this guy, and moved into the boondocks. she had some friends who needed a palce to stay and let them move in with us. They stayed for a couple months, and ecided to move to pheonix. well my ex thought they owed us something for us letting them stay. One day she got sick and her mom took her to the hospital. she came home told me she had TB an they gave her some drugs that would adversly affect her Bi-Polar and cause her to go crazy. Long story short she went nuts, destroyed our house, and tried to beat me up. thew a phone at me and cut my head open, and when she tried to hit me again i held her hands and pinned her on the ground, she bit a hole in my chest (i'll have the scars forever) and after that.. i left. i realized i couldn't tkae it anymore and would have killed myself to get out of the situation. This would have been no good for my kids and so i left instead. I've been working for almost a year to get custody of my daughter, and that's another story i'll get into later too. In retrospect, i've been really happy since then, but lately ahve become very lonely. I wonder what a real loveing relationship between two people who can share and love each other unconditionally is like. I don't know if i would know it if i saw it. So here i am now. kinda lost and lonely, but i have my daughter, she's safe with me and away from her mom. I think i'll rite more on the months since i left a little later..