Night in the E.R.

Yesterday was just a normal day for me. I went to work, come home, drove a friend around, grabbed some coffee and watched a movie until 12. I went to bed and I tossed a turned for about an hour. I couldn't fall asleep because I was kind of having some difficulty breathing and it seemed like my heart was beating very fast. I thought it was maybe just the caffiene from earlier, so I got up a tried to watch some tv to fall asleep. But the more I sat there, the faster my heart was beating and the harder it was to breathe. My body started shaking and my breathing was irregular. I woke my dad up and he drove me to the hospital. On the way there I started feeling very light headed along with my heart racing and hard breathing. My arms, hands and legs starting tingling and started to go numb. My lips were cold and my face was numb. We got to the E.R. and the nurse took my heart rate which was at a rapid 140+...crazy since I had just been sitting still for the last couple hours. Normal is 70-80, so it was double what it should be. They put patches on me and hooked me up to the heart/blood pressure monitor. They also tested that my heart was pumping evenly although very fast. They drew bood, hooked me up to an IV, gave me oxegen and took an X-ray of my chest. They then gave me some medicine throuh the IV that would help calm my heart rate. Praise God, my tests came back negative for blood clots, possible heart attack, failure, damage, thryroid, etc. They told me that it's common for heathly people my age to have their heart race when they get under a lot of stress. They said I need to stay away from caffeine and also eat potassium because my blood work came back that I was laking potassium. My heart was beating so fast I couldn't breathe in enough oxygen that the heart needed to pump, so the tingling feeling was carbon dioxide in my blood. I was at the E.R. for about two hours and they let me go when my heart rate was down to 100. The medicine made me really drowsy so I came home (at 4:45am) and crashed out!

It was so bizarre and scary! My dad and I were praying the whole way to the hospital. That's the reason I was calm and kept from passing out before we got there. I'm having to take it really slow today so my heart doesn't race again. Please be praying for me, that this won't happen again in the future. I'll be meeting with a doctor soon to learn more about what I can do to keep my heart and body healthy.

Jazz Band Collage

I just wanted to share my most recent project in Photoshop. I did this on Monday and it was soooo fun! We had to make a poster for the Preservation Hall Jazz Band that will be here in Denver in a couple days. The hard thing is that we started with all old black and white photos. I did all of the colorization and layering to create the different effects. Overall, I wanted it to look like a jazz club. I used a total of four photos. The man playing the piano is the focal point and note that I added some smoke coming out of his cigarette. Let me know what you think!

{Click To See Larger}

Photoshop Fun

I've been having so much fun the past four weeks in school. We've been working in Illustrator and I am learning so so much! I just wanted to share a couple tutorials I have done in the past two days.

This one is a collage of a much of photos. Very random, but contemporary:


This one is a technique called matte painting. You can an existing photo or video clip and you recreate it. They do a lot of this in post production of movies...such as Lord of the Rings, all the amazing mountain views are matte paintings. Or in Star Trek, the surfaces of the planets are made by matte painting. So our project was to turn this house into a haunted mansion. It was so neat. I recreated the background and lightning, I dirtied the paint and broke some windows and columns. It was so cool!
Before:

After:


We're going to work on a Jazz band collage on Monday, so I'll have to post when I finish.

Three Years and Counting...

I'm am so very excited to say that as of today, Clint and I have now been dating for three years!! Wow! It's so unbelievable! It just comes to show how three years can fly by so fast! Our relationship has grown so much this past year and I know it will continue to. We have had a lot of life changes this past year including college, jobs, cars and weddings. It has been a great year and I am so grateful that God has kept our relationship so strong while living 700 miles from each other these past 2 1/2 years.

I wanted to share a scrapbook page that I did awhile back commemorating our first date which was Clint's Senior Homecoming. That day doesn't seem so long ago, yet three years have past. It's so hard to believe that within the next couple months, we'll both be graduating from college. I love you, Clint! Thanks for being an amazing boyfriend!

If you click on the page, you should be able to read it.