Ethan’s Journey

 Happy birthday to my Mom!  She turned 25 again this year. ❤️🥰 We are always trying to eat healthy, but we do each chips, ice cream, unhealthy snacks and more. So I cleaned out my fridge of all the healthy foods and blended them together for a healthy soup. This is going to be considered my meal prep.  Turkey vegetable soup with protien pasta. No salt. Sounds gross, but I have added fresh rosemary and parsley for flavor and will add in no salt spices and seasonings. I even added avacado to the soup. Sounds gross. But it is blended into a puree and will be undetectable. It will silently lower everyone’s cholesterol. I had my trusty floor patrol waiting silently for anything to hit the ground. He also was trying to look extra cute and may have gotten a piece of turkey because of it. I am a sucker for puppy eyes. My soup looked a little bit like vomit. But I know it will taste good and will be low in calories. We headed over to the in-laws to visit. We gathered for lunch. W...

Our power went out for a bit this morning, which made me start working on Plan B for the turkey cooking. Luckily it came back on within minutes and we were all set for the rest of the day. The festivities started at 2:00.  Avery came over a litter sooner. I was not upset by this. We spent the morning joking with one another as we prepared our meal. The turkey was divine! It was cooked perfectly and fell off the bone. It sat in a brine for 24 hours and was funny hydrated prior to cooking. It was fun sharing a laugh with one another. We were victim to the prank war. My cousin Andy, planted an intermittent noise device in our house. Every so often it would make a crazy cat screaming noise. Maybe like once every 12 minutes. Definitely difficult to locate. After everyone left, I went through my shoes, coat pockets, hats and gloves to find the device. I got down on the floor to look under our shoe rack and glanced up. It was stuck to the bottom of one of the shelves on the shoe rack. Ha!...

 Today I went on YouTube and pulled up a live bird feeder cam. It was quite an active bird feeder. I had it on in the background as I worked feverishly to catch up.  Early this morning I gave our turkey a bath. I cleaned out the orifices with 7 eyeballs watching me, hoping I would just drop a turkey neck. I did not. Next on to the turkey brine. I am soaking this bird for at least 24 hours. Yum!  I put together my potatoes, chopped up my ingredients and prepared as much food as I could tonight to make tgings easy peasy while the bird is cooking. As I was winding down from work, I received an unlikely video call for help from one of my practices. It is a practice I don’t know that well. I hopped on the call and talked this person through their scenario. We then got chatting about how her daughter was at the Emergency Room last night due to a concussion. She shared how the injury was making her daughter act very differently.  Luckily her daughter is going to be fine. Th...

 I am finally getting some help with my work load. While I am not able to give up one of my regions, I am able to heavily off load it. To put it in perspective, another person on my team has 30 positions to fill and I have 94. I am thankful that our small team is so willing to help. I have been feeling especially snarky this week. I let it come out in spurts around my safe people.  Lucky them!  The ultrasound was inconclusive. I saw that coming from a mile away. I am annoyed because they want us to schedule more imaging! That is what I pushed for originally. Grrrr!   I wonder if it would be out of line to say “we will do it your way, but if we end up doing it my way because your way didn’t work….you owe me $1000.” I sometimes say this to Paul. He owes me A LOT of money. He even has a shirt that says “if at first you don’t succeed,  try doing Patti told you to do the first time.” Here’s the kicker….i didn’t buy him that shirt! Note to self. Find that shirt so Pau...

 The responsibility I carry around regarding Ethan’s medical treatment is borderline unhealthy. I am aware of it. The heart team wants to switch one of Ethan’s medication. I did a deep dive of side effects, drug interactions and found that one of Ethan’s needed supplements can lower the efficacy of this new drug and possibly the history of rejection medications. I reached out to the heart team and asked if we should be worried about this or take a “wait and see” approach. I then felt like a jerk questioning this even though I couldn’t in good conscience not ask. I asked out of curiosity instead of judgement, which helps diffuse any potential for someone to become defensive and focus more on that than the issue at hand. I did put in my communication “if I am worrying too much about this, it is ok to tell me to take a hike!” To poke fun at my anxiety. We have come too far . I just can’t stop. I love the heart team. I think they do a phenomenal job. But…..I need to read and dive into ...

 Today was supposed to be a day of cleaning and preparation for the Thanksgiving festivities. I was able to complete a few things but the day was mostly spent outside. Today was wire/electricity day for the barn. Paul rented a trencher to dig the trench for the wire to sit. My cousin, Andy, graciously donated his time doing not so fun things. It was cold, it sprinkled a little and the work did not make the body feel good. Ethan, myself, Andy and Paul were able to get it done. Tomorrow is the inspection. The trencher got stuck at one point, so Paul had to hook it up to the tracker and use the tractor to keep things moving. I was running the trencher. I couldn’t go too fast or it would good up the depth of the trench and possible impede us passing inspection tomorrow. Ethan was a trooper. He stayed out the whole time as well. He was exerting himself. He was VERY tired at the end. I took about 5 hours of bending, lifting, pushing and pulling. I also was exhausted.  Paul stayed ou...

 I look back on the past 5 years and am thankful. Things have come a long way. We are in a stable place today. Tomorrow is a whole new day and we will deal with it then. I think of Colie’s family. While we are celebrating Ethan’s success, they are longing for their daughter, sister, friend…wishing they could give one last hug to her. Without Colie, there would be no Ethan. She is the engine of Ethan’s body.  I made a special dinner and cake for Ethan. Fun-getting cake with lemon frosting. Yum. Ethan spent the evening online with a couple buddies playing a game together. I could hear them laughing and “yucking it up”. He is doing 22 year old activities and is normalish. It feels good to hear that. I had an adult sleep over last night. This should be a normalized activity for adults. We had so much fun. We both wake up early so we chatted over coffee for a few hours this morning. Then I was off to pick up my groceries. I stopped at 5 stores and was done in less than an hour. Eth...