Ethan’s Journey

 Paul has poison ivy. He gets it every year. It is usually bad and carries on for weeks. He tries so hard to avoid it. He showers after working outside. He wears long sleeves. He avoids touching it.  His eye is swollen and he is pissed about starting vacation with it. I can’t blame him. Avery did part of the driving so I could finish some things for work on my computer. We had Myself, Avery, Kendall, and 4 excited dogs who love riding in the car to “go camping”. At the half way point, we switched and I took over. We may have picked up some food too. Yum. I started driving and about 2 minutes in we hit a spot where I had to merge with other traffic. I put my blinker on, saw a gap in the traffic so I couldn’t scoot over and the truck I was merging in front of, sped up immediately so I couldn’t get over. It was a couple in their 60’s. I remained in my lane and had to break as the road was coming to an end and scoot over quickly as they passed. I said out loud “I hope the 0.7 seco...

 My heart broke just a little bit today as I learned of more amazing people that I had the pleasure to work with, were terminated as our company moves forward. One of the ladies was someone I met when she managed a practice. The first time I met her she was so friendly, warm and I had a great conversation with her.  I thought about how cool she was and it wasn’t until our next meeting I learned that she had lost her husband  two months earlier to suicide. She shared how in hind sight, she should have recognized the signs, but she didn’t. She was blind sided. It was around the time Ethan was struggling pretty hard and I had taken the QPR suicide prevention training. I worked with her a few months and then things got switched around and she was assigned to my coworker. I thought about her often and celebrated when I had heard she was promoted. I reached out to congratulate her. It wasn’t until months later, things switched around again. I was working with her in her new rol...

 Paul woke up mostly on the right side of the bed. Phew! We all have bad days. He had a relatively good day at work. Yay! He started working in the yard and heard a funny noise from our air conditioner. He pulled it apart and found that it was almost all the way clogged with debris. Out came the shop vac and he worked at cleaning it up. Maybe it will work a little better for us now.  My company is experiencing a merger. Today was a hard day as our leadership had to make the decisions to cut people across the board. It’s a merger and with those there is always change. As a great fraternity I know says “To change is to survive.”  One person on my team was eliminated. I feel sad about it but understand how all this works. Due to the nature of the corporate beast, casualties happen. My goal is to survive them.The corporation was kind with their severance packages. I genuinely like what I do and feel like I am helping people. I like the flexibility of my position and it allows...

I got a text message today from a guy in the Army asking if Ethan had interest in the Army Reserve or the Army. I laughed out loud. Even if Ethan had a strong passion to go this route, he would be turned away in a jiffy.  I let the man know that Ethan is a dual organ recipient on several medications with a history of epilepsy and stroke. I let them know he has multiple specialists, doesn’t have great stamina and wondered if he would still have interested in someone like that. He told me he would “remove Ethan’s name from the list”…yes sir…I think that would be best for all involved. Paul came home as a grumpy bear. I know he is feeling stressed with what is on his plate. I did not poke the bear. I played dead to avoid conflict. It worked. I had to start cutting back my mums. 4 inches by the 4 th. I was sweating my ass off and trying to keep the flower bed neat because Paul mulched and it looks so nice. The heat was humid and everything was sticky. There was no way to avoid a shower...

 Thanks Jenny, luckily for us, Avery is not hard to love. She appreciates small things. She is witty. She is kind. She makes me want to be a better person. With this heat going on today, I am certain I am not going to like Hell very much. Ha! My day started at 7:00 with interview after interview. Don’t feel too sorry for me, I make my own schedule and chose to start this early. I am taking a few days off next week and want to make sure I have people moving through my practices.  I started my marathon of meetings. In the middle, I had to hop on a call with Ethan and the cardiologists office. We were presented some options with adjusting medications to help alleviate the toll his one rejection medication is causing. There are basically five medication types that work well to suppress the immune system. One of those is pretty harsh on the kidneys as well as lowers the seizure threshold. People that have epilepsy should not use it. Ethan has what is considered post traumatic epile...

We had a WILD bout of storms go through last night. The lightening was back to back like I had never seen before. I believe it was raining sideways with gale force winds.  This morning, we assessed the damage. There were branches and sticks from healthy trees blown right off with the sheer force of the wind. Our one bench chair was blown to the next property over. We wrapped things up at camp and headed home. The heat is real. Paul mowed but it was too hot to do much of anything else outside. All the dogs got their Sunday bath and new bedding whether they needed it or not. Spoiler alert, they needed it. The fur that came out with the bath was bountiful. Everyone also got a nail trim and nail dremel to soften those sharp edges. Doggy spa day. I started to do the piles of laundry as I emptied the dog crates at camp for fresh new blankets the next time. I will be doing laundry around the clock for the next day or so. Tomorrow Ethan has his medication adjustment appointment. We will se...

 The weather was perfect today. Like so nice, I wish we could clone it. I did some planting of annuals in our garden to make it look spiffy. I really wnjoy doing this because we appreciate the flowers that bloom the rest of the season. Ethan shared that he is excited for fireworks for the 4th. He and his friend will be visiting. I am delighted our family will be together. I am feeling the stress about where everyone will stay as well as how am I going to get the dogs out without waking people up? I may not be able to pull it off but we will see! I like to have something so simple to stress about. I learned a little bit more about one of our shore neighbors. He says heat lightening doesn’t exist. Technically it does not exist.  With a little bit of influence some of the people on the shoreline agree that if you say that Hear lightening exists, you can watch his eye twitch. Challenge accepted. Paul and I were able to put the jet ski’s in at the boat launch, as well as Craig’s bo...