Alabama Football...the true fan

Me: Are yall watching the bama game?

Mom: Yes we r. U?

Me: Yup thanks to ESPN3.com

Mom: I gave up and added ESPN back to our cable today. I couldn't stand it.

Me: Push over. What them [dad and adam] complaining or u not being able to watch football?

Mom: Me not getting Bama football. Who care about them complaining.

See Anything Interesting?

8:00 pm Tuesday, waiting on my friend to get out of class...

Me: Well this man just got done bathing himself in the fountain while I sat and watched from afar.

Mom: C anything interesting?

Me: Well, I consider a 50+ year old man walking up in a bathing suit, jumping in the water with out any hesitation, shampooing his hair and soaping his air pits, then flopping down to rinse himself, jump out of the water and walking away dripping wet, pretty interesting. But if you are asking if I saw his “manhood”? The answer is no, I did not.

My life be like...

On Tuesday March 19, 1991 at 2:32pm, Arlen and Amanda Hunt welcomed me, their 6 pound 15 ounces, “Bundle of Joy” into the world. After tears of confusion and shock that I was in fact a girl, they named their miracle Allison Renee Hunt. We had the perfect little family. Living in a suburb of Chicago the three of us couldn’t be any happier, at least that’s the way I saw it. My parents, however, thought adding a brother to the family would be a great idea. March 23, 1993 our family of three welcomed our 4^th member, Austin Ryan Hunt. Fast-forward to the year 1994 when our family of four pack up and move to Memphis Tennessee where we would soon welcome the 5^th and final member of our family. December 6, 1994, Adam Ray Hunt, joins the world and makes this a family of five. A few years later the Hunt family packs up again and heads to Chicago land again where we will stay put for 2 years. After 2 years in Chicago we head to Pennsylvania for a record-breaking stay of 6 months. After the short-lived stay in PA we head back to the homeland of Chicago where I will be starting the 3^rd grade.

It’s a pretty normal life for our family of five. I am very athletic and always want to hang with the boys. I take after my mother, a natural basketball player. When 5^th grade rolls around our life suddenly is no longer normal. This year my dad is diagnosed with a brain disease called Multiple Scleroses. I took this news very hard, and over the next 3 years experienced some seasons of depression. Not only did my dad have a brain disease I knew nothing about, but I was also about to start middle school.

School and I have never been friends; I don’t like it, it doesn’t seem to like me. The 3 years I spent in middle school were the worst years of my life. I had no friends, I hated my teachers, and my dad lost his job. The only thing I had going for me at that time in my life was basketball. When I played ball I was free, nothing else mattered. The loss of my dad’s job was hard on our family. Weeks, months and soon years went by and he was still out of work. I was struggling even more because high school was soon approaching, how was I going to like high school if I didn’t like middle school? I remember going to orientation night at the public high school and just crying saying “I can’t do this”. After a few answered prayers I didn’t even know I prayed, I was taking a tour of Wheaton Academy; 48 hours later I was the happiest freshman in the building. How could an ordinary 14-year-old girl attend a private Christian school that her parents couldn’t afford? I am still looking for the answer, and all I can come up with is a thing called grace. Going to Wheaton Academy changed my life forever. I had teachers who actually read a name off the role sheet, not a number. I had teachers who wanted to eat lunch with me just so they could know how to better teach me. I had teachers who cared about me, not the letter grade I was getting. I was an athlete all during high school, played on the basketball team until my senior year and played softball all 4 years. I was the captain of the basketball team my freshman and sophomore year, and the captain of the softball team all 4 years. My best memories of high school come from the softball field. The attitude my coaches carried with them has inspired me to get my degree in physical education so that I can one day change the lives of high school girls the way they changed mine.

Ever since I can remember I have wanted to go to David Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee. But God seemed to have a bigger and better plan. So here I am at University of North Alabama. Living with my sweet grandmother, working for family, going to a school I can afford to pay for on my own, coaching at Mars Hill Bible school, life couldn’t get any better as far as I’m concerned.

Who I am today has everything to do with my mother. She has been the rock of our family and my up bringing. Anyone who can work 40+ hours a week, raise 3 kids, have a husband in and out of jobs, move 4+ times, go back to school and get her RN degree, is a special person. I could not have made it this far in my life with out her.

I love when I relize God knows what He is doing!

Sometime around the first of May I woke up with a big cramp type feeling in my calf on my left leg. I stretched and carried on with my day. As the day went on the pain increased. By the end of that day I couldn’t walk. My leg from the knee down was weak, hurt, and was tingling. Not to mention my toes were Cubbie blue (not exaggerating).

The following day the weakness had gone away and I was able to hobble around. I dropped Memaw off for her last round of treatment (hooray!) and went over to the health center on campus to get my leg checked out (I had a weird feeling that this was more than a pulled muscle). The nurse at the health center sent me to get an ultra sound. When the results of it came back normal I was sent over to North Alabama Bone and Joint Clinic. My lovely friend over at the insurance company informed me that they would not cover my visit to NABJC since this was a non-emergency. If I wanted to be seen I would need to visit my local PCP (primary care physician). Problem: the nearest PCP to me is a little over 1 ½ hours away. Insurance solution: go to the ER to get a referral to NABJC. So $150 later and I am on crutches and have an appointment at NABJC in a week. After x-rays, ultra sounds, and a nerve study, Bone and Joint says “your peroneal nerve is entrapped at the fibular head.” Translation: this nerve on the outside of my left leg is trapped in-between the bone and muscle somewhere around my knee area. Not good. Doc says ultimately surgery is the final answer. We wait a month and let it try and fix itself. One month passes and no change, so we wait another month and no change. We go ahead and schedule surgery for July 5th and mom plans on coming down for the surgery. In the mean time I start going to the Chiropractor for him to try this new therapy called ART (active release technology). Basically he moves around my muscles, bones, ligaments, trying to free the trapped nerve. After several visits with no change I become more and more discouraged that this is going to work. 4 days before I go to surgery mom calls; she has this mommy instinct, that feeling deep down in your gut saying this is a bad idea. So we cancelled the surgery. I have found in my 19 years that when mom says “I just don’t feel right about this” to listen cause she has yet to be wrong. We decide to try a few rounds of cortisone shots.

I go in for my first shot and the visit turns into a nightmare. Bone and Join informs me that I owe them quite a bit of money so they are no longer going to treat me. WHAT?! Come to find out my best friends at insurance are not covering my treatments. WHAT?! Before every appointment I have gone to I have called insurance and they always reassure me that they are covering my care. Bad news bears ladies and germs, bad news bears. After a phone call to nurse mommy things get worked out and I end up getting the shot. After several calls to insurance and a mom who is a miracle worker we get things paid off and get approved for an MRI! GO MOM!

Last Wednesday I got the results from my MRI and everything looks good. No growths, tumors, or anything weird that has caused this “peroneal nerve entrapment at the fibular head”. So that’s good news! I called the doctor on Thursday so we could go ahead and schedule surgery again. I don’t want to be in this pain during school. At this point I can not sit down for more than 10 or 15 minutes with out my lower leg going completely numb. The nurse called my back this morning. The soonest I can have surgery is on the 17th, school starts the 25th. While I was on the phone trying to schedule this surgery it hit me; the devil thinks he is smooth. But in the words of a good friend, “he is about as smooth as sand paper”. When I heard that surgery could not be until the 17th really brought me down. I called mom crying. I don’t want to be in pain for another month and I don’t want to be walking around school in a full knee brace for a few days. After talking to mom (which fixes pretty much everything), she assured me it would all work out. We are trying to have the surgery done sooner in Chicago now. But if that doesn’t work out I will be doing it on the 17th here in Florence.

The last few months have been really hard, emotionally and physically. But I realized today that the stinkin’ devil is just trying to bring me down. With all the trouble with getting into Bone and Joint, Insurance problems, scheduling and canceling surgery, and the ART not working, It’s just the devil trying to bring me down. But in the end everything has worked out. God took care of the insurance, and I know He will bless me with a fast recovery. It has been really hard to see that God has been in control from the start but now I can see that He knew everything before it happened.

Please pray that we can get a surgery date sooner than the 17th, and pray for the doctors hands as they go in to fix the problem. The surgery is simple. With in a month or two I will be back to running, jumping, and normal activity.

Things that make my world good

New shoes

Fall; when you can still wear shorts and flip-flops but need a sweatshirt on too

A cold Dr. Pepper out of the bottle

Gum

A new hat

Windows down, radio up

Road trips

4 wheeling

The smell of a softball field

C.S Lewis quote of the day

A good pen

Random facts

Baseball games

Cookies, when they are still gooey

Flip-flops

Watching Alabama football with the guys

Text messages from my brothers

New netflix movies

Cinnamon rolls

Getting mail

Coffee

The "ah-ha" moments in life

Picking people up from the airport

Reality TV (however fabricated it might be)

T-shirts

What makes you happy?

The selfless and the protector

Erma Bombeck describes a family so well when she says, “The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.”
The love of siblings is one that is both hard and easy. Just like Bombeck says we are “inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending…” My two younger brothers and I fight a lot. But when one of us are in trouble the other two are always the first ones there to fix the problem, defend one another, to bring a smile or a good laugh. Out of the two Austin is the easiest to love. We are the closest in age and the farthest apart in personality.
Austin is a peacemaker; I am I fighter. He is problem solver; I am a problem maker. But the characteristic I love most about Austin is that he is selfless; I am selfish. Whenever he has something I want, 90% of the time he will give it to me. The other 10% of the time, he will split it with me.
I remember when we were little; I was about 6 Austin was about 4, there was only one Little Debbie treat left. My mom unwrapped it and gave it to me with instructions that I was to share it with my brother. I sat there and ate bite after bite after bite, not once giving Austin a taste. He sat there quietly, never asking for some, never screaming to my mom that I was not sharing, he just sat there and watched the Little Debbie grow smaller and smaller with each bite I took. I kept eating, I came to the last bite and handed the little piece to Austin, he looked at me and said “thank you sissy”, and that’s when mom walked in. She soon realized that the only bite I had given my brother was that last little bit. She asked Austin if I had shared, Austin looked up at her with that last bite still in his hand and said, “yes mama” and lifted the piece up to show her. She scolded me and I knew that I had not been nice to him. Mom told me that she was going to buy Austin a whole box of treats and I was not going to get one, and I would have to sit next to him and watch him eat them each time. I screamed and cried and pitched the biggest fit. The selfless boy that he is came up to me and said, “It’s ok sissy, and I’ll share with you.” Now, 13 years later that is the same attitude he carries. He does not only have this attitude toward our family but toward every person he meets. He wakes up at 3:30am once a month to go help feed homeless people, while I stay in bed and sleep until the last possible second. He parks the car when it rains and pumps the gas when it’s cold. I have been trying for years to somehow learn this selflessness he carries and I have come nowhere near to perfecting it the way he does. But he is not the only one who looks out for me and my needs and my wants. My youngest brother looks after me too, but in a much different way. Adam plays the part of the protector.
Although he is 4 years younger than I am, Adam acts as if he is the older one. Always looking out for me, always making sure I am going to be ok. He always insists he does things first to make sure its safe for me. Even when I wish I could experience something first I know that he is just looking out for me. I know that he would much rather end up with the broken arm or busted lip that to let me go through those pains. When we built a ramp to ride our bikes over he went first, and came out with a busted mouth, bruised hands, and scrapped knees. When we ride the 4-wheeler; he goes first to make sure it’s running right. When we are eating something new for the first time, he tastes it first to see if I will like it. He is always looking out for me, always putting himself on the front line so I don’t have to.
I remember he was in Kindergarten, I was in 4th grade, and we were walking home from school. A boy from my class who caused all types of trouble rode his bike up right next to us and started poking fun at me. Still walking along Adam looks at this boy and says, “Randy, leave her alone, go home.” As you may guess this caused more poking fun and just provoked Randy to keep talking. Adam walked over to Randy, pushed him over on his bike, and yelled “I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE HER ALONE AND GO HOME!!!” he then looked at me, “SISSY! RUN!” he looked back at Randy on the ground and said, “Don’t ever talk to her again.” He ran by me grabbed my hand and we ran home as fast as we could. Panting as we ran in the house my mom asked what was going on, I started to explain, “Well, you see, Randy was annoying me and,” my brother interjected, “Nothing happened, I took care of her and he won’t talk to her ever again” then he walked off like nothing had happened. From a young age he has been the protector. He, just like I am, is a fighter. He goes looking for fights and arguments. This has caused all of our fights with one another. We rip each other down and say the worst things to one another when we fight. But I know at the end of the day, if someone is mistreating me, Adam will be the first person to put him or her in his or her place. I am not looking forward to the day that a boy really breaks by heart, because I am 100% positive that that boy will have a fun encounter with Adam.

Do you have a minute?
To tell me your still there

Do you have a minute?
To tell me you still care

Do you have a minute?
To tell me you’re proud of what I've done

Do you have a minute?
To tell me you’re amazed at who I’ve become

You have 60 in an hour
You have 1,440 in a day
You have 10,080 in a week
You have 43,829 in a month
You have 525,948 in a year

Do you have a minute?
To pick up your phone

Do you have a minute?
To realize that I feel alone

I had a minute.
I had a lot of minutes
All the minutes it took for me to trust you
All the minutes it took for me to open up to you
All the minutes I talked to you about my hopes, dreams, fears, failures
I had a minute

Do you have a minute?
For me to tell you how mad I am at you
For me to tell you I still love you
For me to tell you how hurt I am because of you
For me to tell you I still trust you.
For me to tell you how unimportant you make me feel
For me to tell you that you may be the best thing that has ever happened to me

Do you have a minute?
Cause that’s all I’m asking for

Do you have a second?
To tell me you love me.