Hello friends, I know it has now been a very long time since I last blogged, and I wanted to apologize to you for being absent and also wanted to explain what took me away for so long.
The ramp up to our 2022 summer season started off pretty normal. I did find it a little bit harder than usual getting motivated and organized, felt a little bit brain fogged at times. By May however, I was deep in the throes of preparing the Cantina and getting pretty stressed. Available time for blogging predictably decreased as we attempted to balance two restaurants, manage 14 staff members and a five-year-old. Erik and I begin also to work 7 days per week, 10 hours per day for the 8 weeks of summer.
At 44 years old, the act of standing on my feet all day means I'm usually hurting pretty bad by the end of the day. This summer though it seemed much worse. In June I got a weird tick in my left eye, where occasionally the lid didn't want to go up. It fixed itself pretty quickly, but it was more severe than previous years and I had occasional issues swallowing dryer items. However, there wasn't much time to worry about those things as there were already early indications that the 2022 summer volume was trending lower than 2021, by about 10% and so Erik and I were beginning to be concerned for the fall. Would we make our needed budget to survive the year?
Then, throughout July I began to have a very stiff neck and a weird tight and scratchy scalp. By the end of July I had severe radiating pain down my right arm and my upper chest area was scratchy but also numb. 🤔 I was taking an obnoxious amount of over-the-counter pain killers, but it barely made a dent. I could sleep only on my back because my arms would go numb if I slept on my side. I suspected I might have a herniated disk in my neck, causing all these issues, but figured that with the end of summer and some rest I would recover as in previous summers.
It didn't help then that in our busiest, most hectic week of the summer (the last week in July) our son Einar gets pneumonia and has to be rushed to Visby. We're very thankful to our staff who helped man the restaurant that evening, although it was a restless and painful night in the ER watching Einar's O2 hang around 80%. They had to nebulize him every hour and a half. He slowly got better, but now with just 2 weeks left in the season and the pain being at its worst I was battling on.
By the last open day of the season, Saturday August 13th, I was in a blir of pain and exhausted from not being able to sleep. I put up a brave face for our last visiting guests, but it was difficult. What was happening? Would resting after the summer make it go away? Who knew then that the worst was yet to come. To be continued...