2019 In Review

 Or, The Adventures of 2018 continued:

Merry Christmas!  Happy New Year!

This year was a tough one, with a lot of lessons learned.  But through it all, I have been supported by a host of prayers, and I thank each one who has blessed me in this way.

I don't remember much of December 2018 or January, though my son Bronson kept a journal of days when I couldn't communicate.  My recovery from the double lung transplant was slow with many complications. There were numerous tubes in my chest, a respirator in my throat, a feeding tube in my nose, IVs in my arms, a catheter, a port for dialysis because my kidneys weren't working , and I also had to take heparin and insulin in addition to the post transplant meds.  Hospital days started with 4 am chest X-rays and 6 am blood tests. And what does a person do all day when they can't eat, drink, talk, or even hold a cell phone or tablet?

Apparently one loses weight. You could say I am half the woman I used to be. Marcel joined me in Vancouver the day after the transplant, after making arrangements for the care of our house.  We had expected a few weeks in ICU, a few more in hospital, then staying in Vancouver 3 to 6 months. But I apparently am not an average patient. I had a couple months in ICU, a couple more in hospital (with a few relapses back to ICU just for fun). Milestones like having a tube taken out were special days and passing the swallowing test was fantastic, as now I could eat solid food -- even on a low sodium, reduced liquids diet, this was a real treat!

In March I was moved to GF Strong for rehabilitation of my de-conditioned muscles. I learned to drive an electric wheelchair, then advanced to a wheeled walker, and finally resumed walking without support. Dialysis was finally reduced from 3 times to 2 times a week.

Yet still we had to stay in Vancouver for pulmonary rehab exercises twice a week, transplant clinic visits once a week, and hospital visits in June and July (no one figured out what was wrong with me). We stayed at Easter Seal House which was inexpensive and convenient to VGH, but lacking air conditioning and hot water, abounding in bugs. Our 2 burner countertop stove broke down a few weeks before we left and was not replaced.

However, after the long weekend in August, we were free to go back to Vernon and only return to VGH for monthly transplant checks. Air conditioning! Hot water! No bugs! And our own king-sized bed!  We also made friends with the neighbours' cat (they had moved in while we were away), who likes to sit on our deck chairs and loves to be cuddled!

How is life after transplant?  Breathing is really great! I have to watch out for infection, rejection, and contagion. The first 2 are more subtle, and I wear a hospital mask when I'm around people with colds/coughs/potential flu. Unfortunately, it also precludes substitute teaching in schools and teaching Sunday School to preschoolers.  I still have a lot of medical appointments, especially this past month leading up to my one-year transplant anniversary.

What do I do besides appointments? I go to quilting, try to get to LungFit twice a week -- I'm supposed to exercise more. I am also knitting baby things as I will have 2 grandchildren in the spring -- Anthony & Emily are expecting in March and Katrina & Tyler in April. Quilting, knitting, crocheting, Facebooking, and reading.  Marcel is looking forward to retiring soon, so we should be able to go visit the babies regularly (in Terrace and Surrey). And I only have to see the transplant doctors once every three months.

I realize more all the time how miraculous my surgery and recovery have been and how blessed I am with family. A husband who spent 8 months in Vancouver learning to advocate for me. Bronson, who took time away from work and school during many of my health crises. He is enjoying every boy's dream of working for a video game company, and endured his dad staying with him for 5 or 6 months, as well as hosting both of us when we are in Vancouver for transplant clinic visits.  Anthony & Emily visited me in hospital from Terrace several times and I was so blessed that his boss had told him "I have a job for you -- go down and put a smile on your mother's face!" Katrina & Tyler's visits were always special, as Katrina is busy teaching high school French and Tyler has many responsibilities in his pastoral role at their church. My mom braved riding down the interior BC highways in winter with friends and family to visit me as well.  Friends came to visit me in hospital and cared for our house in our absence. My doctors in Vancouver were very caring, and I have been blessed with Christian doctors in Vernon. My church family and those of my kids upheld me in prayer and I never feared death, though there were many times that was a possibility.

So, I am looking forward to 2020 and all of the mysteries it holds in store. "Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow" could be my motto (taken from the Thanksgiving hymn Great is Thy Faithfulness).  Coming through Vernon? Come and see us!

2018 - Good News, Bad News

 

This has been a year of “good news/bad news.” We’ll start out at the end of 2017, when I got a substitute teaching assignment working afternoons for a teacher at Open Door (mainly on-line learning, with a lot of marking for me to do). The students were grade 11 and 12, taking English or Communications classes. This was definitely good news, especially when I was officially hired to the job posting on February 14.

Bad news: about the time I started the job, I started feeling ill. By Christmas, I couldn’t even manage to do any baking. January and February continued this downhill slide, as I couldn’t even keep food down until noon, and I was getting Marcel to drive me to and from work. I was at the doctor’s office on Feb. 23 and was sick to my stomach, so he shipped me off to the hospital and I was admitted. Good news: I got in quickly and had several Christian doctors on my team. Bad news: It took awhile to get a diagnosis of a staph infection gone septic, and I was in the hospital for 18 days.

Spring break was over, and I was not needed at the teaching job, but I couldn’t return to the classroom because I was on oxygen full-time and in no condition to go from school to school, dragging tanks and hoses around. Good news: I was able to receive disability benefits through the BCTF. Bad news: I was also unable to return to work at O’Keefe Ranch.

In March, Mom and I flew WestJet to Vancouver for my visits to my specialist doctors for pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and pulmonary hypertension (PAH). We stayed with Bronson and had a good time with him and his cat as well as visiting Katrina and Tyler. Bronson lives about 5 minutes from Renfrew Baptist Church, so we went there twice. He felt very “at home” there and also enjoyed their weekly potluck after the service.

April was Anthony’s month. Travelling with oxygen on Air Canada was not as simple as expected and we were let down repeatedly by poor communication and customer service. Marcel and I and my mom did arrive safely in Terrace and had a few days to recover and get ready to celebrate Anthony’s marriage to Emily Holubowski. Being in Terrace so special, as our family had spent 10 years there, and now Anthony was getting married in the church I had attended from Grade 6 until my third year of university.

May and June were relatively quiet. I wasn’t getting stronger or “bouncing back” but I could still get myself to appointments. Mom and I started to go to Pulmonary Function classes, which turned into LungFit sessions in July, enjoying music and exercise.

August was wonderful, as I was able to “road trip” with Pam and Tom Morgan to the 40 year reunion of our high school class. Everyone was so kind and welcoming and I was glad to be there. I stayed with Anthony and Emily in the house they had bought and moved into in July. And then it wasn’t, as I was back in the hospital at the end of the month. The verdict was double pneumonia – no wonder I was feeling so tired.

Marcel and I drove down to Vancouver in September and stayed with Bronson for a week. I met with the lung transplant team, and had an angiogram. Based on the results of that test, the doctor wouldn’t let me leave Vancouver General Hospital. A day turned to two or three, then a week, and ...September, October, November, and December. I was put through a battery of tests in preparation for being put on the transplant list mid-October.

Good news, bad news. Despite many health issues, I have been in the best place with specialist doctors analyzing every issue. I was able to celebrate Thanksgiving with all my kids and my mom, and was able to watch Katrina’s graduation from SFU with her education degree (streamed live on YouTube). The kids prepared the Thanksgiving meal with loving care, making sure nothing contained salt (I was on a reduced sodium diet).

Tuesday, December 4th: after 12 weeks in hospital, it was Transplant Day. I was shipped into surgery at about 9 pm, after saying goodbye to Bronson and Anthony (who had flown down and got to the hospital as I was getting on the stretcher to go to the operating room). After that, I received my double lung transplant and spent the rest of December sedated, mainly unconscious, and often confused about what was actually going on in my life. Stay tuned for the Christmas letter of 2019, coming soon.

2017 - Moving and Changing

 It’s been said that there are 2 kinds of stress – good stress and bad stress.  We are more familiar with bad stress that causes insomnia and illness.  Good stress is the kind that strengthens muscles and bones, and perhaps our mental states as well. We have had a lot of stress this year – involving moves for our whole family.

Katrina and Tyler moved from a 3 bedroom apartment to a 2 bedroom main floor suite; Anthony moved from a 2 bedroom basement suite to a 3 bedroom main floor of a house; Bronson moved from our home to a basement suite in Vancouver; and after 17 years, we sold the house we had built on Middleton Way in Coldstream and downsized in Vernon.  The amount of stress in our move cannot even be measured: months of sorting, packing, discarding, donating, recycling, and talking to realtors.

Our move took place on the hottest day (July 6) to that point of the summer,  breaking records from decades before.  Friends helped us pack up moving trucks two nights before the move, and dear friends and angels helped us unload.  Unpacking is taking longer, as there were some upgrades we made to the 33-year old “new” house. The first and most necessary change was to move the laundry area from the basement to the main floor, and that took about 3 months!

Aside from that stress, we enjoyed good celebrations as our family achieved milestones.  Tyler graduated with his Associate of Arts degree in April and began working with a church in Cloverdale in May overseeing worship and youth. Katrina graduated from SFU with her Bachelor of Arts in French, so we made a quick trip to the coast in June, and an even quicker trip back home. Bronson’s graduation from UBCO was the morning after Katrina’s grad, so we watched him receive his Bachelor of Science (in Computer Science) and then got to unwind.  Anthony was back and forth between Terrace and Newfoundland during the summer months and also wound up the practical requirements of his AME-M (Aircraft Maintenance Engineer) license.

In the work world, Bronson had a quick “break” to attend a computer conference in San Jose, CA, and then began a job as a programmer for Vizzion in mid-May.  He couch-surfed at Katrina’s for a couple months, while he looked for a pet-friendly apartment in Vancouver, and eventually found a ground floor suite. Travelling with his white furry cat was challenging, but Bronson and Snowball are now settled in.  Bronson is enjoying big city life.  In addition to his job, he also takes a couple courses at UBC toward his Masters degree.  It is exciting to see him doing what he loves to do.

Katrina continued tutoring until the end of summer and has resumed her studies at SFU. She is working toward becoming a high school French teacher, and will probably have no trouble finding a job next fall.

Anthony made a job change this year and began working for White River, another helicopter company. He is still in Terrace, but doesn’t have to do the weeks or months away from home in camps or on distant projects. He has had many adventures with his job and a lot of travel, but he is looking forward to settling down.  He proposed to his girlfriend, Emily Holubowski, on the Thanksgiving weekend, and they are looking forward to getting married in April 2018.

On the home front in Vernon, Marcel gets questioned about when he will retire from the mill.  He turned 60 this year, so retirement is a possibility, but he plans to continue until he finds the job too hard.

Karen’s work time is split 3 ways, between substitute teaching, secretarial work for a non-profit and working as a historical interpreter and school program coordinator at the Historic O’Keefe Ranch.  The ranch celebrated its 150^th birthday this year, so there was a lot of excitement there. On the health front, Karen made a couple visits to Vancouver to specialists, rode out a flare-up of polymyositis, and has been waiting for a hole in her foot (from a plantar wart) to heal. Some days are better than others in terms of the energy needed to accomplish things.

Becoming empty-nesters has been an interesting transition for us:  for example, we sometimes eat out for no reason except that we don’t feel like cooking!  There is no one else to talk to so we have to talk to each other (especially the two weeks after our move when we were without phone, internet, or television service). There are a lot of decisions to make and a whole lot of discussion has to happen before we are ready to get going on any particular project.

We have had visits from all of our kids since we moved, but we are really looking forward to having them all home for Christmas break.  Bronson will get home first, then Katrina and Tyler after their Christmas Eve services in Cloverdale, and finally Anthony and Emily will fly in on Boxing Day. Our big event at church, Bethlehem Star, took place last weekend. Our tree is up and presents are getting wrapped.  So as we look forward to another Christmas season, we wish you all a blessed Christmas and health and happiness in the New Year.

Back to the Blog

 Here I am in late 2020, wondering what has happened in the last few years.

My previous Blog, also called Karebout Thoughts, was not touched all that time and, like everything in the tech world, became inaccessible.  The link to it is https://kareabout.blogspot.com/ if anyone wants to go back and see what I was doing before mid-July 2017. (The original blog before 2011 was Kareabou Thoughts and I can't even find that on Google!)

In the past 3 years, we have moved from our home of 17 years and downsized to a house that was built the year we were married.  As you might imagine, a 36 year old house has a lot of things that you don't see on the surface when you are looking in a hot real estate market! But it had a lot of things that were on our list of needs and wants:  not too big but still room for the adult kids to visit, a smaller yard, laundry room on the main floor, potentially a fireplace, level entry. My husband has been discouraged by sloppy workmanship in the previous owner's upgrades. We had to do rewiring and replumbing to move the laundry machines upstairs, and nothing else we have had to do has been easy.

We actually haven't been in this house for three years straight, because I was away from home for 11 months.  I think I will post a couple of other Christmas letters to bring 2017, 2018, and 2019 up to date. The short story is that I was admitted to hospital three times in 2018, and the third time in Vancouver, I had a double lung transplant and between waiting, recovery, rehab, and getting stable, I was away from home for 11 months. I could barely find anything when we returned home in August 2019.

That may be enough for now, a reintroduction of sorts. "Be calm, be kind, be safe," as Dr. Bonnie Henry says.

Christmas letter 2020

 

Skipping all the cliches about 2020 and world events of this year saves a great deal of rehashing.  I feel a little like a spectator on the lives of everyone else in the world.  I had already started wearing a mask during flu season at the beginning of the year and missed a week or two of church before the pandemic began. While everyone was complaining about restrictions, I continued my post-transplant safe life and kept doing what I was doing, but not going very many places. My knitting, crocheting, sewing/quilting projects have mounted up over the months, although I keep giving them away as new babies have been born in our family and church.

First grandchild: Cecilia Suzanne Bouchard, born to Anthony and Emily in Terrace on March 14. We had originally planned to fly to Terrace, but weren’t able to do so. We met her when her parents (and uncle Bronson) came to Vernon in May/June and stayed with us for a couple of weeks.  Anthony was out of work at the time, but has started work for Great Slave Helicopters. He works in Terrace with occasional trips to Whitehorse and camps in the Yukon. Emily is on maternity leave from daycare.

Second grandchild: Elliot Timothy Young, born to Katrina and Tyler in Surrey on April 15 (10 days early). We met him when his parents came to Vernon at the end of June. Katrina is on maternity leave from teaching high school French and Tyler continues in ministry at SonRise Church as assistant pastor.

The grand cat: Snowball is now about 6 years old. He lives with Bronson in Vancouver, though he has had a couple of extended visits at our house.  Bronson works for Hothead Games and has been working at home, which makes him very isolated. He enjoyed being able to take his work with him and drive to Terrace to spend time with his niece when she was very tiny, as well as coming to Vernon in May/June and Sept/Oct.

Marcel and I are staying well, staying isolated, and mostly staying calm.  At the beginning of Covid, he took time off to keep me safe from the germs he would come into contact with at work.  By June, he was looking forward to retirement, so he went back to work at the mill for a couple of months and officially retired at the beginning of August. While he was back at work, I stayed with my mother and we worked like Canadian beavers on many baby blankets and quilt projects. We felt very fortunate to have the time together at this point in our lives, though we missed getting out to shop.  She has a neighbour who picks up her weekly groceries, and Mom and I maintain our bubble with each other as the only social person in our homes.

I was happy to see friends this summer (outdoors and social distanced) but the people I see most in person are doctors, lab technicians, nurses, and medical receptionists. We grocery shop online and Marcel picks up our order outside the store.  I attend a Zoom LungFit exercise class twice a week via my computer screen and it has been a lot of fun talking to that group. I also have an exercise bike in my basement and get some exercise that way. I haven’t had to see my Vancouver specialists, except on the computer as well.

We wish you all the blessings of the Lord at Christmas and through the year. May we all be safely reunited in the near future!