Sunday, April 22, 2012

A little hitch in our get-a-long

Hello, and time to catch up a bit on who, what, where, when and how we are doing.

My last post left us with the loss of Poppy, our son's German Shepard. His passing has been something of a wakeup call for the whole family and most of us have made some adjustments to our life assumptions, goals and lifestyles.  Nothing major or magnificent but positive results have already begun to surface.

First of all, I have intentionally lost 20 lbs since Christmas. 295lbs is still too much and I am no longer comfortable in calling it my playing weight so 230lbs will be a lot better on several levels.

Our plans to leave for the northwestern US territories is on hold for the moment.  This 2cm kidney stone has shifted to a point that it is intermittently blocking outflow from that kidney. A completely blocked kidney can fail within 6 hours or so of becoming completely blocked off.  I certainly don't want to be in the vast spaces of the west and have it get plugged so I am getting it blasted by a lithotripsy this coming Thursday.  I have found a couple of really great doctors in St Augustine and feel I am in very good hands.

My new GP here is also a full cardiologist and has gotten my blood pressure under control for the first time, ever. I assure you that failure to this point has not been due to lack of vigilance or trying.  Meds just do different things to me than they are supposed to do so nothing has worked before now.  Although 150/80 isn't really scary bad, my urologist would not proceed until a cardiologist would pass me so getting my bp down is a prerequisite to having the lithotripsy.

Mer is doing very well, getting in a lot of reading (her passion) and has been able to improve her BP and glucose with significantly less meds.   We are very happy here, but really miss being nearer to our kids.

Katie the Poo is doing very well, too. Her seizures seem to be much less frequent. She is on day 80 since her last one and that one and the one before it are the only two seizures that she has had in the past year that happened in less than 70 days. Compared to having them every 15-25 days for most of her life, this has been a real gift for her.

On the less positive side, I forgot to pull the power plug for the trailer tail light converter and have not started Clifford since January.  The batteries are stone dead (maybe 6volts but not much more). It was always one of those TODO things that I never did.... My Bad. I usually try to leave a maintenance charger on them when I can but that got left in Raleigh at Thanksgiving along with the air compressor and a few other non-essential "essentials".

Today, we are having rain in the campground. This is only the second rain we have had this year and it has been so dry that a lot of fires have sprung up all around north Florida. One of the worst is north of us and when the winds come from that direction it is hard to see across the campground. Fortunately, the breezes rarely come from the north.

It's been a big gap in this journal and I will try to keep it a little tighter from now on.

ttfn
Budd