September Song

I'm leaving the title of this post blank until I finish- then maybe I'll know what to call it. I see that it has been 2 weeks again. You know, after living with personal computers for 22 years, since I began selling them in 1987, I have been very reluctant to even turn one on. I can't really figure it out, but most of it has to do with my physical weakness- my new laptop that I picked out and Entre gave me when I retired- it is a wonderful unit, but it weighs about 6 lbs. and for me to go get it from the charging station using my walker and return to either the chair or bed is usually more than I can undertake. I can also sit in my home office at the desktop and do it- that requires that I move from wherever I am. This slug-like existence is below what I characterize as life, but it is what I have to deal with now, and I am determined to do so with grace, using humor as my weapon against self-pity. So many amazingly wonderful things are happening to me that I refuse to allow them to go by unrecorded. Since I have 2 weeks to go back through, I think I will do it in reverse, beginning with this morning, but first a word about my cousin Susan. Cullen wrote yesterday that she is making tremendous strides in her recovery at TIRR. He has located quarters for himself to stay over there, so he will be splitting his time since he will be doing Susan's job of running the ranch business until she is recovered. (Their son lives there in Devers on the ranch & manages the dailies, but Susan & her mother are the owners of the ranch, and Susan is the Business Manager.) So the fact that Susan is on the mend is wonderful news for our entire family.

OK- this morning we all slept in. Steve is on call, but he didn't get his first call-out that required he leave the house didn't until 11:00, although he got up at 6:30 to locate some pipe in Houston for one of his Exxon Mobil contractors. I've always kidded Steve that he just thought he managed to escape working in the "family business" (referring to his dad's 30+ years as an employee there). Instead, Mobil has been Steve's account through 3 different jobs he has had in the PVF industry. So once he got up to leave, the phone rang, and I heard him answer & tell Stratton that it was Betty Lebus for him. I think I've noted here before the bond that formed almost immediately between the two of them over gardening. Betty was once again bringing a meal to our house, but I fell back to sleep & entirely missed her visit. (That was probably OK with her & Stratton- they got to talk to each other.) Bless her heart, she mended some clothes that he had brought down for me to fix- simple chores that I could have done in a couple of hours in the past- they sat, unrepaired, until Betty picked up the bag they were in & took it home & fixed them herself. Once I woke up (we're talking after noon here)and turned my oxygen up a notch, I devoured a plateful of the best home-cooked food you can imagine. Baked chicken, succotash, sweet potato pie, garlic bread, a potato casserole of sorts- and Stratton said there is dessert but no one has brought me any yet, nor do I even know what it is, but I'm sure it is good. Sated and pilled (I have meds for before and after almost all my meals, and I am told that the amount of medication doubles after transplant!)I decided to blog.

OK- back to yesterday- it was one of those Red Letter Days of this entire experience. I think I have mentioned (but maybe not) that Steve and I have been Season Ticket holders for the Broadway Show Series, which is a touring group of musicals (and an occasional play)that have been on Broadway in recent seasons, including most Tony Award winners. Bob & Margaret Harris were our partners for 15 years, and it made for a really fun Saturday, about 6-7 times per year. Once they retired & moved to League City, they began their new lives as part-time RVers, and that meant that they would always miss 2 or more performances, so they decided to stop purchasing their 2 seats. The BSS works like many other venues- your loyalty is rewarded by better seats each season so long as better seats exist. After about our 12th year, we had reached 6th row center orchestra, and they don't come much better than that. So we set about finding two people who wanted to commit the time & money to the new season, and it ended up being Bettie Nixon & Patty Edwardsen. Yesterday was our first play of the 2010-11 season, and it was the annual children's musical, which was SHREK this time. Of course Steve & I had been hoping that I would be in the hospital by this time, so we had decided that if this turned out to be the case, then we would justr give Betty & Patty our tickets because they each have a middle-school aged granddaughter, and this turned out to be a great show for ALL ages. However, I wasn't called, so it was going to be the 4 of us, and then Steve realized that he was on call this weekend. Stratton had said he was ready to come back down, so he did, arriving as usual in the middle of the night Friday along with Lucy, his pound puppy who is now 18 months old and is sporting a cast on her front left leg where she was hit by a car. (Their yard is fenced- but she was in the front with Stratton and just took a wild moment & dashed into the street, probably after a squirrel, at the wrong moment. Amazingly, the tire ran over her paw but didn't fracture any of her bones! She's a darling dog, extremely affectionate, and finally, after several weekends of exposure, Bo Peep is beginning to warm up to her and play. In her doggy mind, I'm sure she has always been afraid that Lucy was here to stay or to replace her or something- she has never been aggressive, because Bo is a totally non-confrontational dog, but she has not wanted to be around Lucy. So Steve got to stay home with 2 dogs and a cat and telecommute while we went to see SHREK. After the play, we met Bob & Margaret and Kathy & Alexandra Richardson at Kim Son for dinner. All of this activity was made possible by very careful planning. I can make it on 5 liters per hour oxygen flow if I am sitting down and quiet, but I cannot walk anywhere at all, nor talk and walk, because I desaturate immediately. So we took the wheelchair that Bettie's mother has but never uses and 2 of the large canisters of oxygen plus my little liquid portable. The Hobby Center also has wheelchairs. We valet parked, so Stratton drove up in front of the theater, got out & told the valet that we needed a wheelchair, one was retrieved, and Bettie Nixon pushed me inside the lobby while she, Patty & I attempted to keep the oxygen on track in its little carriage on wheels. We looked for all the world like the Three Elderly Female Stooges! Once inside, Bettie had to surrender her driver's license as collateral until they got their wheelchair back! After that, an usher took me to my seat and kept the chair in the wings, returning to get me for intermission & after the show. It all went quite well. We had a great time with Bob, Margaret, Kathy & Alex and ate wonderfully prepared Vietnamese food amid great fellowship.

Moving backwards, on Tuesday (I think- I was writing everything down & quit because it was too far to the wall calendar- now I'm wishing I had made the effort) Kathy Crawford from Entre and Joel McBride came & brought Schlotsky's lunch. Joel & I are the 2 longest-serving people in the history of the Entre payroll: he started in April of 1987 and left in April 2009 to work for a large company called Heico, but his office is inside Bo-Mac, so he has continued to be a familiar face at Entre. I started in September 1987 and retired Dec. 31, 2009. Kathy turned around and came back that afternoon with a potful of taco soup and a bag of tortilla chips- another superb meal made more memorable by great conversation.

I'm going to post this because I'm about to fall asleep- but I will begin next time with the wonderful visit I had with our oldest daughter Brittany & our niece Summer which occured a couple of weeks ago- the visit I was about to describe when I fell asleep the last time- hence I know that I have caught up-! And now I know what to call this chapter......................

Oh, it's a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach September
When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
One hasn't got time for the waiting game

Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days I'll spend with you
These precious days I'll spend with you

THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES- PART II OF Adventure at Baylor

I decided not to make this an entirely new blog. Being a total novice at Blogging, I wasn't sure what that would do to the people who have book-marked the other title. So it is just a technicality- after all, my doctors in Houston, for the most part, are on the faculty of the Baylor College of Medicine, which is the Medical School. It is very confusing, as I was myself TOTALLY confused at the beginning, because I made an assumption that if I was approved in Dallas under the auspices of Baylor Medical Center, that would automatically transfer to Houston. NOT. They are two entirely different institutions, and NEITHER ONE has any connection with the University in Waco. It is an interesting diversion, but not one I'm particularly interested in investigating right now- basically it gets down to Southern Baptist theology vs.21st century science. Enough said.

Well, I have yet another wonderful visit to report. Steve & I have lamented upon the fact that since the death of his dad, which was just a year after the death of his mom, the family produced by these two people has pretty much fallen apart in terms of getting toether for birthdays, Christmas, etc. We see our children and grandchildren (for the most part) and Steve's sister Sherri sees hers. However, we no longer gather as a group for someone's birthday, or on Christmas Eve following church. So I just decided to do something about it while I still could. Our oldest grandchild is the only one we never see- it is simply because she was raised by her father, and when she visited her mother, it was usually in the home of her maternal grandmother- that would be Steve's first wife. Basically, no one made it easy for her to see us when she was a young child, so we had to wait until she grew up. She was 25 last month, and we did see her a year ago, when she was married here at St John's Lutheran. In fact, because we were the only family members who lived in Beaumont who owned a freezer, we were selected (again, by Steve's ex-wife) to take the bottom layer of the wedding cake home and take care of it while the kids were on their honeymoon. That turned out to be until this week! That cake occupied an entire shelf in our freezer- but in truth, we didn't have all that much stuff to put there. Our beautiful granddaughter's name is Brittany Brinkley (her married name). She & Brannen had, like many young people today, observed a different order when it came to creating a family. They moved in together & had a son 3 years ago, His name is Braden, and he is just darling. Then a year ago, they made it all legal, and we watched as the three of them danced at the wedding- Brittany & Brannen holding Braden. (They are big on the "Br" combination, since it was a given when they met. They are working on selecting a name for a second child that starts with Br). Well, we also have a 25-year-old niece, Summer Ramirez. She & her husband Eddie have 2 little boys- Brody & Braxton- so they are into the Br combo as well. I called Summer, because we have seen a lot more of her than we have of Brittany, and I just told her that I really didn't want the next occasion that brought the Garrett family together to be my funeral, because I wouldn't be there to enjoy it, so could we work on engineering it to happen sooner. I asked her to call Brittany and find a time when the daddies could babysit the boys, since I really wanted to visit the girls, and am not supposed to be around young children right now. (They carry the biggest chance of infecting me with an upper respiratory infection, AKA a "common cold", except that with a pre or post transplant patient, there is nothing simple or "common" about a cold. Anyway, it turned out to be amazingly simple, and the girls were at our house yesterday at 3:00!

Mea Culpa But I'm Not Lazy!

I had to go back and read the date and the content of my last entry- it has been so long. I will be brief in my explanation: I have not had a good attitude for the past 2 weeks plus. I have been getting sicker and I de-saturate so quickly that I really cannot stay on my feet for any length of time. I have learned SO MUCH about how our bodies work during this disease- it takes what I'll call "blood oxygen" for every thing we do, such as: eat, stand up, talk, bend over (that's a big one), and finally, urinary continence. You have to have a high-enough level of oxygen in your bloodstream to accomplish any of those things- and they differ in terms of which one takes more. But the underlying marvel of it all is that our body compensates to keep us alive for as long as possible. All those things mentioned above are not crucial to survival, so when it gets critical, they just fall away. Before you die, you lose consciousness so that you can no longer steal the precious resource (oxygen) for something as non-essential as holding your water! Anyway, all kinds of things have happened since I wrote last, chief among them being the two strokes my cousin Susan suffered shortly after I wrote. Of course we were all just devastated when it happened, but as of now it looks like she is not only going to survive, but the doctors say she can indeed recover- but like all recoveries, it will take its own time. Susan is so smart- and she demonstrated not only her intelligence but also her love when the first little TIA occurred. She had her 5-year-old granddaughter Haidyn in the car with her, and they were going by McDonald's for a snack. All of a sudden, after she had ordered the snack at the first window, when she drove up to the "pay and get your stuff" window, she realized that she couldn't speak. She was thinking just fine (and apparently has never been anything but normal, mentally), but she couldn't form any words. She managed to give the clerk the correct change & take the snack, and she drove home without incident. She got Haidyn in the house & sitting down with her snack, and after that she quickly got everything together that she knew she would need- ID, insurance cards, etc., and she made 2 phone calls. The first one was to 911 and the second one was to Cullen. Neither one of them could understand what she was saying, but they both knew that she was in trouble and responded. Apparently, the 911 dispatcher totally misunderstood whatever it was that Susan was trying to say, because when Cullen got home, there were 7 police cars in his drive- I told him it's a good thing he has what amounts to a parking lot behind his house, because it was full! It turns out that the police were told that there were men in the house and one was armed. (Not that Susan said anything of the kind, but it went through a dispatcher who was extremely creative, I guess). Cullen said that when Susan called him, all he understood was the word "Help!" As I indicated earlier, this was a very minor "incident" compared to what happened the next day. Before she had the 2nd stroke, she actually began recovering from the first one- she could then speak, but nouns escaped her. Cullen said she could describe something all day long- with adjectives galore, but she could not think of the noun she needed. They even laughed about it. Well, it is good that she was in the hospital when she had the second one, and of course it was right after he had gone home after seeing her- did I mention that she was in Neuro ICU? And Cullen has a habit of not obeying hospital rules when the patient is a member of his family. Susan has already had 3 major "incidents" that required surgery and follow-up time in ICU, but those were all related to her heart. Anyway, when I asked him if he was getting to see her on the every-4-hour schedule, he said "Oh you know me, Eileen. I break the rules." He & one nurse were really at odds over this, and so Cullen just told her- "You girls are divided up & each of you has a few patients. I've noticed that. Just swap me out with someone else that one of the other nurses is working with, and that way, we won't have to put up with each other any more." So she did! Some nurses are real sticklers on things like that rule- and some husbands are very hard-headed and aren't going to leave because the clock says to. Once a different nurse was taking care of Susan, there was no longer an issue, because Cullen wasn't bothering anyone- just sitting where he was not in the way. Well, that all happened over a week ago, and the second stroke, as I said, was pretty bad- it left her paralyzed on the right side and totally mute. She was immediately intubated and put on a ventilator as a precaution, and a feeding tube was put in place. Things rocked along like that until at least Thursday of last week, because that is the last time I had direct contact with Cullen- he came by here to visit. He got to see Bob & Margaret Harris, our dear friends who are very enthusiastic RV-ers and who had spent the entire summer until after Labor Day "hosting" at a "primitive" campsite in Colorado. It was a paying job- minimum wage for each of them, 30 hours per week- but it turned out to be a lot more work than they first thought. So it is an experience about which they will probably say "Been there, done that". (Although it was indeed "Primitive" for the guests, as the hosts, Bob & Margaret did have hook-ups.) This is the couple with whom we attended the Broadway Show Series in Houston for over 15 years as season-ticket holders. They move you up towards front & center whenever they can if you renew, so we are now 5th row Center Orchestra- deemed among the "best seats in the house". Bob & I worked together at Entre beginning in 1987, and then they had moved to League City from Groves shortly after they retired because they have a son, daughter-in-law & 2 grandchildren there, so we already missed them & didn't see them as often as before, but this was like 4 months, and I was so happy to see them. Margaret is an RN, and they are going to work together as my Caregivers during part of the time I'm having to "live" in Houston. Oh- and on that score- we are back to selecting a hotel or apartment from the ones on the list, because if Cullen's former employer has one available, he is going to need it! I didn't finish my story while ago about Susan- she was taken off the ventilator last Thursday with no trouble and is breathing on her own, so once they determined is she could swallow, they were going to remove the feeding tube. And after that, even though she remains partially paralyzed & still cannot speak, she will be considered medically stable and can be moved to a rehabilitation facility. I think Cullen wants to take her to Houston to the TIRR that is associated with Memorial Hermann. Anyway, he & Steve will both be in Houston as chief Caregivers to their wives. As I've said before, in the Paxton Family (my dad & his six siblings, one of whom was Cullen's mother), everyone is very close-knit, and Susan is on everyone's prayer list. For those of you who put people on your church's prayer list, her name is Susan Ramsey, and in addition to your continued prayers for me, I will appreciate it very much if you will also pray for Susan.

I ended the previous entry be saying "I need to tell you about by visit with Sandy Londa." OK- Sandy & I became friends through our mutual friend Kay Johnson. Kay is a United Methodist clergywoman who just retired in June and moved with her husband Ron to Ft. Worth because all three of her children live there, all three are married, and among them they have popped out six beautiful grandchildren, the last 5 in very rapid succession. So, like so many people who can do so, she has relocated in order to be nearer them as they grow up. Kay & I go back to the fall of 1962, when we met as Freshmen at Southwestern University in Georgetown, going through rush. We pledged the same sorority, became very close friends, and roomed together for the last half of our time there. So Sandy is another UMC pastor- and right before I met her, which has to have been over 10 years ago, she had begun preparations to migrate from being an associate in a large church to being a hospital chaplain. In the Methodist Church, it is necessary to obtain a special certification, or degree (I'm coming right off the top of my head here- I don't know exactly what it is called- but she had to return to seminary for a few years while she was still working at the local church). The good thing is that our primary seminary, Perkins School of Theology, now has an adjunct (or branch) in Houston. Since Perkins is located on the SMU campus in Dallas, everyone refers to the branch in Houston as "Perkins South". So now Sandy is well on the other side and has been on the staff of chaplains at Methodist Hospital for several years. I knew all this, and I knew that once I became a patient at the hospital, that Kay would alert her & she would find me, but Steve & I ran into her (literally) in the hall on Tuesday the 19th of September, when we had driven over to attend one of our six (required) Transplantation Classes.

And now, dear friends, I am going to close for this evening- hoping that I have redeemed myself somewhat, in a small way at least. I will send a short email to each of you who registered as a follower plus several others who did not register but told me you were reading it. What you will see when you log in the next time, whenever I post again, is a new blog entitled "The Adventure Continues", because it appears (and I do hope this is so) that my surgery will occur in Houston. After everything I went through, I still have not been listed in Dallas!

I began tonight by apologizing in a way for leaving you for almost 3 weeks. I feel like I have dealt with my attitude problem now to a degree that I won't come across as feeling sorry for myself. No one EVER wants to read a tale of woe from someone who seems to be saying "Poor sad me" in every sentence. If this does become a problem, please do me a favor and call me on it- OK? Nothing has changed about my status except my Lung Allocation Score, or LAS, and it is now 42. I will continue to climb assuming nothing else changes just based on the additional time I have been waiting. I've found some neat tables online that are specific to Methodist Hospital- like the number of lung transplants they have done since January 1, how many were for Blood Type A, etc. But this data has not changed since I found it in June- and I know they have been operating. So I need to ask my girl Kelley to see where I can get the "real-time" data. One thing is for sure: they do perform more lung transplants at Methodist than anywhere else in the country. That is good because it means that they have had more practice, and it also means that they have seen more of the weird complications as well. Steve is not very likely to hear "Mr. Garrett, we're sorry, but we ran into something that we have NEVER EVER SEEN before, and we just couldn't save her." Will do spell check & publish- I'm about to fall off the bed, I'm so sleepy!