Author Archives: Dee

About Dee

I am a working wife, geek, and mother of two with opinions about just about everything which I plan to share here.

One Minute Writer – Inspiration

One Minute Writer prompt for Tuesday was  Inspiration
How have you inspired or motivated someone else?

When I think about inspiration amazing hymns, stories with impact, uplifting art all come to mind.  When I recall the times I have truly been inspired I think about times when someone has expected me to rise to their expectation without necessarily saying the words.  Isn’t that what inspire truly means?  Something or someone that breathes life into us and makes us be better than we thought we could be.  Little nudges from people along the way.  May we all pay that forward.

My Mother’s Hands

My Mother’s Hands

The writing prompt at Sunday Scribbling was Aging

Well, we’re all as old as we have ever been, and we’re all at different stages of considering the aging process. What thoughts do you have on the subject?

As I thought about the prompt, I kept seeing my mother’s hands in my mind.  My mother had the most beautiful hands in the world.  Slender fingers that tapered to small oval nails.  They were graceful and talented.  I remember those hands pinning a hem on a dress as I stood, complaining and whining about how long it was taking.  I remember them peeling and chopping whatever she was canning at the moment.  Her hands would be red and chapped from hanging clothes out on the clothesline in the winter.  It would be so cold that the clothes would freeze and when she took them off the line they would be stiff, in the shape they were in when she hung them.

Mama’s hands could feel your head and tell if you had a fever, pop you on the backside when you needed it (and there were plenty of opportunities for that) and yank the hairbrush through my tangled, fly-away hair as I fussed, telling me “you have to suffer to be beautiful”.  I should have listened.

I remember wondering one time how she could do everything she did and still have such pretty hands.  I know now, that I was seeing her hands through eyes that loved her and were in awe of her.  As I look at my own hands now, I know she saw the same things I see now.  A scar that wasn’t there, wrinkles and discolored spots, where there once was smooth, pretty skin.  My nails are chipped and short where I have broken them or, I’m ashamed to say, peeled them down to nothing when I was nervous.

Will my daughter look back and see mama’s hands?  Did mama look back and see beauty in Grandma’s hands?  So much of the good that’s in me comes down through the women in my family.  Whenever I create something special, whether it be food, or sewing, or painting, it’s mama coming through.  Whenever I do “the right thing” even when it isn’t the easy thing, it’s mama nudging me on.  Whenever I do something that is adventurous and out of my comfort zone, it’s grandma’s courage that takes me there.

If you are looking at your hands now, wondering how they got to look so old, and how they look worn, where they once were pretty as they wore a wedding ring for the first time.  Remember how your mother’s hands looked the first time they helped you guide a shoelace around the tree and through the rabbit’s hole.  Remember how your mother’s hands felt, the first time they brushed a tear away from your face when your heart was broken. Remember how they held your first baby and how you knew at last what it felt like to be her.

Aging is all about what is taken away from our outside.  Inside, more and more is added so that our hearts grow, as our bodies shrink.  We are able to hold so much more.  More love, more memories, more patience, and hopefully more wisdom.  I hope my daughter is able to look back and see what a gift the women who came before have given her.  How God shone through them, and how His hands lived in their hands.  I pray that His hands have moved mine, and that all that is good and right and beautiful in me, is Him working through the women before me to make me who I am to be mama’s hands for her.

One Minute Writing

I discovered several blogs today that give a daily or weekly writing prompt and then let you either post in comments or post on your blog and link back.  I thought I’d play a bit at OneMinuteWriter and I found out just how little I can write in one minute!

There is a timer on the site – you Just click and start writing.  These are the instructions:

1. Read the daily writing prompt.
2. Push “Play” on the timer on the right side of the screen.
3. Spend 60 seconds or less writing a response to the daily prompt.

The prompt?

Friday Fiction: Time
Write a brief, creative, fictional piece about time travel.

This is what I wrote

I kept my eyes shut for a moment until the nausea passed. It didn’t seem as bad this trip so maybe I’m finally getting used to it. After a moment, I open my eyes to the light and as I look around I know instantly where I am. I’ve been here before. I glance at the clock and as the hands click I run, knowing I have only moments….

Either I type slowly or some people don’t actually limit themselves to one minute 🙂

It seems like a good way to get ideas and practice.

The actual post is here

Just Another Day

This has been a very. long. day.  I stopped and got a Caramel Macchiatto (with skim milk of course) and listened to “Lost” and “Fix You” by Coldplay on the way to work.

I started out standing on the side of the road leading to the back of the school.  People who know me would stop and ask if I needed a ride.  “nope, just waiting for a truck driver from the prison” I said.  If I had been holding a can of beer, wearing a tube top, and sporting a tattoo, I would say that I had turned into a bad country song, but no – I was waiting on delivery of 50 computers and monitors from the prison computer recovery program.

(I can hear David Allen Coe singing “You Never Even Called Me By My Name” playing in the background)

Next I had to run to Central Office for a tech meeting where we learned all about upcoming changes.  The meeting only lasted an hour and ten minutes which was better than the last one.  (Cue Elton John singing “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” – well not really, it wasn’t that bad.  That’s the only song I could think of for meetings)

Then I wolfed down a part of my lunch and picked up Dale to go to the Texas Scholars Awards ceremony.  This was my second year in a row to have a child there – and my last.

Background music “Another Brick In The Wall”

Went back to work and made sure we had everything ready for online testing tomorrow.  Answered some email, got some phone messages, installed Adobe Flash Player on some computers that needed it for the class in the lab, and the storm started move in (Eric Clapton singing Let It Rain)

By then it was time to go home, eat a few leftovers, and head to church which was great as usual but also interesting because the lesson was in Ephesians at the point that Paul decides to go to Jerusalem and despite warnings from everywhere he stops, he goes anyway.  Paul has always had a heart for the Jews.  He was born and raised and educated a Jew and even though he wants so badly to go to the Jews, God has always sent him to the gentiles.  He ends up taken out of Jerusalem in chains and with 400 soldiers guarding him and then spends years in trial after trial.  The question was raised, was Paul right to go despite the warnings – did he know that it was God’s will?  Or was he just being hard-headed.  It isn’t clear but an argument could be made that he was not in God’s will.  Of all the churches talked about in the epistles, Jerusalem was not mentioned as a key church where hundreds, even thousands were brought to Christ.  I don’t know the answer but a possible point was made that when we are not in the will of God, there is no fruit.

We sang Hillsong’s Mighty To Save.

Does your day ever have a soundtrack?

Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry,
Go to sleepy little baby,
When you awake, you will have cake,
And all the pretty little horses.

A Birthday, A Rebirth, and a Goal Reached

I used to write.  Before blogs, before the internet, before I knew what a computer was. In high school and just after, I wrote poetry.  I had a notebook that I kept it in.  I once wrote a long…long…long poem about peace (it was 1972 remember) and translated the whole thing into Latin.  Yes, I am that old.  It was the last class ever to be taught Latin in my high school and hey – it got me an A!

I had a friend in a band that read some of my poems and asked if they could try to make some into songs.  One of the guys in their band, Jim, wrote music.  they worked with it for awhile and invited me to a rehearsal session to work on some of them.  Just poetry is a little different than having a chorus or a bridge and we worked on that.

A week later Jim was dead.  He told his wife he was going hunting and went out to the woods with his gun, sat down on a log, and shot himself.

In all of my eighteen year old arrogance, I was more angry than anything else.  At that age your friends are EVERYTHING. You know all about them – every minute detail of every day.  Who they love, what music they like, what kind of trouble they are having with their parental units (because at that age we all did – let’s face it), their moods, and what ticks them off.  Jim was older and at the time I didn’t understand that as you get older, friendships change.  They are still important of course, but not as all consuming.  Other things in your life become important.  A confused girl grieved for you Jim and barely knew you.  I know now, the faces we show others often have nothing to do with our insides.

At that time I just could not see how someone could get to the point where they would kill themselves without someone who KNEW them for heaven’s sake, stepping in and doing something to help them.  Back then we believed you could fix anything by just talking about it.  Depression was not a medical problem – it was a counseling problem, we thought.

A week after Jim died, Paul brought my notebook back to me.  I never looked at it again.  I have no idea what happened to it.  I never wrote poetry again.  The band fell apart and I hope that somewhere, somehow, Paul forgives me for not being more compassionate about what he must have been going through instead of being so full of my adolescent, self-involved drama. I remember and forgive me.

When I was a girl
An old woman lived inside
She looked out through my eyes
She saw when I lied

But now I am older
The girl lives on still
Her heart is within me
My faith and her will

We’ve lived far apart
Through years and through living
Often at odds
My holding, her giving

I reach out before me
To meet her halfway
Will we now become friends
Keeping demons at bay

The past and the present
Now finally to wed
Hanging on to the best
Turning loose of what’s dead

We still are becoming
That young girl and I
The door has been opened
Her secrets are mine

The child and the woman
Hand stretching to hand
Our history stays with us
While futures are planned

The circle turns slowly
And life marches on
Fears are laid down
And the night becomes dawn

When we stop being so grown-up
When we love the young soul
When we heal them together
We again become whole

My blog is three years old today.  I reached my goal of losing thirty pounds.  I wrote a poem.

I think I will set some new goals.  Hello world.

Now You’re Cooking!

There is an interesting take on tutorials from Guy Kawaski (and a recipe and demonstration for making his world famous Teriyaki sauce)  It is worth the visit just for that! Show how to do something in about two minutes!

His cooking demonstration is an episode at StartCooking.com There are plenty of videos as well as recipes in text form.  I don’t know about you but there are plenty of times I have read a recipe and felt a little nervous about parts of it.  A demonstration would have been great!  Now you can have one and you can even subscribe in your feed reader or through iTunes and for those of you that do not like rss, you can subscribe to the email updates.

There are other resources as well, including reference charts for safe cooking temperatures, conversion and measurement charts, explanations on equipment and how to use it, and general how-tos for anything and everything around the kitchen.  I’ll be sending the link for this to number one son!

This will go great with my new ab lounger 🙂

Did You Buy The DVD?

Last night my daughter and friends attended the “Forks Prom” Twilight DVD release party at Hastings.  She told me that there were not near as many people there as she expected and while there was some dressing up  (prom dresses and twilight moms in there Twilight t- shirts), there were no drinks named after the movie characters as had been rumored.  They had free something that looked like fruit punch which daughter declined – going for a purchased frappe instead.  They also served CiCi’s pizza and pimento cheese roll-up somethings with veggie chips. “Alice Cullen” would have been appalled (it’s a Twilight thing).  I don’t know if all parties across the country were as lame as this one or if it os just here.

I still love the series and the movie but what I love more is the whole story of a Mormon mom having a dream and then writing a story from that dream.  The story becomes a book, the book becomes a series and a series of movies and a cult following grows.  There are at the very least, forty blogs that follow anything and everything Twilight series.  There are forums, fanfiction sites devoted to nothing but variations on Twilight, merchandise related to Twilight, and a huge and strongly opinionated fan base.  Stephenie Meyer is even in the 100 finalists for Time magazine’s most influential people of 2009 – she beat out Oprah!

If Kristen Stewart says something in an interview that can be taken out of context – the twilighters will start duking it out, completely polarized into a love/hate group.  If Robert Pattinson buys a microwave and nukes hot pockets, it’s hot and everyone wants pictures and if there is video?  It’s feeding frenzy time.  There is secrecy and security at filming locations or they will be mobbed by teens who will travel across the country to get a peep and swoon over Rob Pattz.

When there were rumors that Taylor Lautner would not be cast as Jacob in New Moon, the fans went crazy writing letters, blogging, and basically pitching media fits and the next thing you know the kid is working out and bulking up to better fit the part of a larger than life, more mature Jacob.

How did Stephenie Meyer get here?  It fascinates me that a story became such a THING!  How does a person begin a story that ends up spanning four books and leave people wanting more.  The movie came out in theaters in November and tonight there are parties all over the country to celebrate the release of a dvd of a movie that everyone has already seen  The dvd is supposed to have extra scenes, most of which have already been leaked on the internet.  There is the soundtrack which is already available on cd.  Not much new here but still – there is all this excitement.

Did her husband ever yell at her  “quit sticking your head in that darn computer and just come to bed already?”  She says music was a big inspiration when she was writing – did she listen using head phones or ear buds?  I don’t see the family sleeping through Muse playing “Massive Black Hole” and if I didn’t have a teenager I’m not sure I would even know who Paramore is.  Just for the record the best music in the movie is the soundtrack composed by Carter Burwell.  I would go see the next movie just for the soundtrack if he is the composer for it as well.  We were watching another movie recently and I said “doesn’t that music sound like…” and daughter and I said Carter Burwell? at the same time.  As always, at our house, someone was  on the computer and googled it, and sure enough, he had done the soundtrack for that movie as well.  Beautiful!  He is also the composer for the score for two of my favorite movies – Serenity and The Band Played On. Did the book inspire the music?

Where did all the words come from?  I often have trouble getting a decent blog post written!  Would I have the commitment and imagination to write an entire book or even one chapter?  Would I have a story in me that would be compelling enough that someone would actually want to hang around long enough to read the whole thing, never mind care enough to have an opinion about it?  Did Stephenie ever dream that her life would change so much?  I’d love to just sit down with her and talk over a cup of coffee.

Do I Really Need More Exercise?

Yesterday while we were out running errands we stopped at a garage sale.  We got a deal on a stationary bike and an ab lounger – dirt cheap.  If you know me you know that I have been dieting and walking since the first of November and I am very near my goal.  The weather and time has been a big factor in walking.  Since I started this in November I walked through the coldest part of the winter and there were some times that it hurt to breath the cold air.  I walked anyway.  Rain is another story altogether.  I’m determined but not crazy.  Well, at least not crazy about walking in the rain.

At any rate, I had been watching for a treadmill or something that would allow me to get the exercise on bad weather days.  I was already loading up the bike and hubby asked if I wanted the ab lounger too.  He showed me how you use it and the price was right so we loaded it up too.

I didn’t think I had any “abs”.  Well at least not muscle… too much information, I know.  This morning, I find that I not only have them but they and my shoulders are yelling at me!  I don’t think the ab lounger and I will ever be BFFs but I will allow it to torture me if it helps me get to my goal and even set a new one.  Ouch – the yelling just hurt my ears!  My “abs’ and shoulders want to know if I have lost what little mind I had! They want to know what they have ever done to deserve this punishment?

I have promised them an oreo later if they will just shut up for now…

Email Hoaxes Now Come To Texting

My daughter was one who had a message forwarded to her on her cell phone today, about the rumor of a gang initiation at Walmart involving killing three women.  I had an email bulletin from the local newpaper warning about the rumor and then on kten news tonight they talked about it saying that it was probably a rumor but they even had a poll asking people if a text message could make them change their plans.

It took one search to come up with past occurrences of this rumor on email, going back as far as 2005 – you can check it on Snopes.com

Evidently the Paris News, Walmart, and Kten, don’t know about google…

Spring Break Midpoint

Yikes – can’t believe it is half over!  We drove number one son back to Tyler today and got back in time to have supper (spaghetti and garlic bread cooked by number one daughter – yum) and go to church (awesomeness) and tomorrow we go to Minden so tomorrow night I will probably curl up with a book and crash.

The weather was gorgeous today and I didn’t have to drive at all on the way there so while dad and son took turns driving and talking I listened to music and read.  Wonderful, relaxing, mini-vacation.  What a luxury!

Blink by Ted Dekker

What if your I.Q. was greater than Einstein’s was?  What is you believe in God because your intellect proves God’s existence to you?.  What if your logic tells you that God knows the future and so the future is already set?

What if all of a sudden you are given a gift that allows you to see multiple possible futures dependent on multiple factors that allow you to choose actions that keep you and another person alive?  Is God still God? How do you reconcile what is happening to you with what you have always believed? This is what happens to Seth as he tried to keep Miriam from being killed or taken back to Saudi Arabia to be forced into a marriage that she considers a living death.

Those are the questions (and more) that are asked in Ted Dekker’s “Blink”.  The story is fast-paced with plenty of suspense.  I found myself stopping several times for a “whoa” moment as I reread something to make sure I had caught it.  I don’t want to give anything away because this one kept me up late a few nights – I didn’t want to put it down.  I will definitely be reading more of Mr. Dekker’s books

Six Degrees of Separation

Wikipedia defines Six degrees of Separation

(also referred to as the “Human Web”) refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is on average six steps away from each person on Earth. It was popularised by a play written by John Guare.

A few days ago I joined a group on FaceBook started by people who went to my high school in Michigan.  Today I got a friend request from Lori who is the sister of someone I went to school with.  She lives in Jacksonville Florida (which happens to be where one of my brothers lives) and has a bar there.

I found a name (Patrick) on her friends list that turned out to be the son of someone I hung out with when we were barely past being toddlers.  Both our parents and grandparents lived on the same dead end street and we made our little trek over the course of the day stopping at each house for cookies.  By the time we got back to the first place quite a bit of time had passed so we would get cookies again.  It worked well for us so we kept it up until the silly grownups talked and figured our little plan out!

Patrick’s older brother is Lori’s nephew. I haven’t talked to my brother yet (I have to actually call him since he isn’t on the internet as much as I am) but it wouldn’t surprise me to find he has been to Lori’s bar or at least knows of it.

I haven’t been back to Michigan in nearly thirty years and don’t know when and if I will ever get back so these were connections that would never have happened if I hadn’t been on FaceBook.

It used to be that if you wanted to get together with friends you had to physically get in your car and all drive somewhere.  Now I see my kids texting on their phone while chatting online and checking email all at the same time.  The connections are different than face to face.  I still miss the nuances of tone of voice and facial expression which are the things that give us emotional cues and smiley faces while helpful do not really replace those things.  The upside is that there is time to think about what you are going to say and you can always back up and delete and edit before you hit the send button.  In real life I tend to say too many words and not say enough about what I’m really thinking.

Will relationships in the future change because of this way that we communicate now?  In the last few months many of my friends have appeared on FaceBook.  This used to be the almost exclusive venue of the younger crowd but there are a lot of us  more “mature” folks showing up.  There are groups for everything you can think of and places like FaceBook give us a place to “play” without clogging up our inboxes.  It also becomes a tool for communicating with groups and I can already see several of my groups overlapping with others.

The world becomes smaller in some ways but if we can connect so easily on the net, will face to face connections happen less?  When I was growing up my mother communicated with her family through letters on a regular basis and the rare phone call. We alternated years visiting. Gas prices and phone bills dictated how often and in what way you connected.  With the present economy concerns, will sites like FaceBook and Twitter become the new letter?  Instead of traveling to visit, will we meet as a group online?  We already have the capability to video chat and most computers now come with webcams.  We can easily create online presentations with pics of the kids and create an audio file to go along with it so grandparents can see and hear the grandkids.

Interesting things to think about.  Do you think we are more or less connected to people because of the internet?  Do you have a special way you connect using the internet? Has FaceBook ever surprised you?

Role Reversal?

It’s spring break and the sun is out – number one daughter and I plugged in our mp3 players and went for a walk.

Now she is in her room playing Guitar Hero and I’m getting irritated because I’m trying to listen to Trembling Blue Stars, a British Indie band and her game is a bit loud – rocking it out to  Gimme Shelter.

Hmmm

“A Daily Diary of Depression-Era Life, Told On Twitter”

I Twitter.  I admit it.  But I follow more than I actually tweet.  For those of you who have not been exposed to Twitter it is called a microblogging service.  You can post up to 140 characters.  You can follow other people who twitter so whenever they update their status you will see the post on your twitter homepage.  You can also set up your account so that you can update your status from your cell phone and you can also get updates from others you follow on your cell phone.  Useful and kind of fun but it just seems like one more thing to check and update online.  I don’t know about you, but my email/facebook/twitter/rss reader gets out of hand rapidly.

I recently found something to follow that gave me a glimpse of a different way to use Twitter.  Here is a link to the original site and if you twitter you can choose to follow.

The Social Path

Late last year, my family found a line-a-day diary maintained by my great-aunt from 1937 to 1941. She was in her early teens, living on a small farm in rural Illinois with her two brothers, one of which was my grandfather.

It’s a fascinating account of life in a bygone era, a time when my family’s only connections to the world were schoolhouse chatter and a neighbor’s radio.

Looking at the terse journal, my sister quipped, “This is the Twitter of the 1930s.” We glanced at each other and almost immediately began planning the Twitter account that would become Twitter.com/Genny_Spencer.

If you have run across any other diaries of this sort I would love to hear about it.  I can see this being a great creative venue as well.  Could a “diary” be created as a sort of stream of thoughts of a made of character?

If you are not into writing longer blog posts this might be a blogging outlet for you.  Have you run across creative uses for Twitter? Can you come up with some new  Twitter ideas?

Warning – Very Random Departure

Thinking, questions

To see as an artist – beauty not defined by culture?

Beauty defined by more than perspective?

Is beauty changeable?

Is truth defined by perspective?

Is truth the same thing as beauty?

Is perspective beautiful?

Sometimes…

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is the beholder transformed by beauty?

Is truth changed by perspective?

Perspective can be changed by truth

If the beholder is willing…

Perspective can be changed by culture

If perspective can be changed by culture,

And if perspective changes the beholder,

And if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then beauty CAN be changed by culture.

What is beauty’s relationship to truth?

Perspective is one person’s perception of the truth

Beauty is perceived

Truth does not change regardless of perspective – only the perception of it.

Truth is not changed by culture

Truth is beautiful – not always

I warned you it was random…

Big Bang Monday Smiles

The guys are taking a train trip because Sheldon won’t fly.

My favorite quotes (that I could type – some were too long and passed by too quickly)
Leonard: “Sheldon we’ve only been on this train for ninety seconds and you’ve already said a thousand words. Just tell us where to sit and shut up.”

Leonard: “Oh look, now he’s boring on an international scale.”

*Summer Glau is on the train with them LOL (I guess the fact that I know who she is makes me a little geeky)

Howard and then stolen by Rajesh: “It’s hot in here, it must be Summer”

Leonard: “I see, it seems that once again you are caught between a rock and a crazy place”
Sheldon: “I hate when that happens”

Penny: “Hey Leonard what’s going on with Dr. Wackadoodle?”

Sheldon: “Leonard let me tell you something – personal robots cannot get here soon enough!”

Penny : “What up moonpie ?”
Sheldon: “No one calls me moon pie but meemaw”
Sheldon: “She calls me moon pie because i’m nummy nummy and she could just eat me up”

March Is Kidney Disease Awareness Month

The Paris News has an article about someone we know.  Wesley is a dialysis patient who has been on the kidney transplant list for a long time.  He has made several trips to Dallas expecting to come home with a new kidney but hasn’t been blessed with one yet.

We were so lucky that Dale had a sister who was willing to donate and was compatible.  Living donor kidneys last longer than cadaver kidneys but if your choice is dialysis or kidney transplant, it won’t take too long on dialysis to vote for the transplant whether it is living donor or cadaver.

You can live a fairly normal life on dialysis but it keeps you alive – it does not cure you and it can’t take the place of your kidneys.  There are things that your kidneys filter that dialysis can’t.  People who have lost kidney function due to diabetes have to remain on a diabetic diet and now they have to add new restrictions.  Phosphorus and potassium have to be watched.  If you do a little research you will find that pretty much anything with flavor contains those two things.

Our bodies are a miracle of chemical balance that is regulated to a great extent, by our kidneys.  Too much of one thing and a gland can kick in and leach something necessary out of your system.  Too much fluid and your blood pressure rises and your heart can become damaged. Kidney function can be lost due to heart disease (or it’s treatment – the dye used in heart cath is toxic to kidneys), diabetes, high blood pressure, and many other reasons.  Many medications are toxic.  Aleve is an over the counter drug that is hard on kidneys.  Most medicines (including over the counter drugs) are hard on either your kidneys or your liver.  In Dale’s case there was a problem from birth that eventually caused failure of his one functioning kidney. He took Aleve for years with his doctors blessing because it helped his knees.  Now we wonder if it didn’t hasten kidney failure.  If you are at risk or know that you have diminished function – do a little research about the medicines you take so that you can make an informed choice or at discuss alternatives with your doctor.

Dialysis isn’t painful but it isn’t comfortable either.  When Dale was going to the center there were about 25 chairs and some patients came in under their own steam while others were brought in from nursing homes on a stretcher.  Some people were able to socialize, some would moan and cry and seemed altered the whole time.  Several people would be missing legs from diabetes and several were blind.  Each chair has a television so once a patient is “hooked” up they can watch tv.  The process takes three to four hours between the time it takes to get the patient hooked up to the machine which cycles their blood through a filter gradually, and may add things like iron, and then the time it takes for them to be taken off the machine and their access to stop bleeding.

If a patient has consumed too much fluid between treatments they come in “wet” and more fluid needs to be pulled off.  Each patient weighs when they come in and before they leave.  Too much fluid (or potassium or phosphorus) and a patient may experience painful leg cramps.  Too little fluid and too much treatment and they can be pulled too “dry” and when that happened to Dale, his blood pressure would drop.  We learned that at 50/40 he goes unconscious.

If a patient is planning to travel they need to make arrangements with a dialysis center near their destination to receive treatment while they are there.

A dialysis patient has to have surgery that creates an access – usually in their arm. Some, like Dale have an access created by their own blood vessels being tied together in a way that allows blood to be removed and returned.  Others have a special kind of tubing implanted.  A dialysis patient becomes very protective of their access and if the techs at a center are contract help rather than regulars, you can’t always be certain that you will get someone who is good at “sticking” an access and an access even when well taken care of only lasts for so long.  The surgery and healing, and maturing of the access takes some time and isn’t exactly fun so it’s important to take care of it.

Dialysis has a two-fold purpose – removing fluid and removing toxins from your system.  Without it you go into congestive heart failure from the fluid and the toxins can cause multiple problems.  You will eventually die – that is a given.

When you drive by the Fresenius Dialysis center on Collegiate and Lamar this month, give a thought for the people who are inside tethered to a chair and to their lives by tubes and machines that keep them alive, three to four hours a treatment, three treatments a week, for the rest of their lives or until a kidney becomes available if they are a candidate for transplant.  Give a thought for the caregivers who bring them for treatment, often a spouse who may have driven for an hour to get here and is sitting in the waiting room for several hours each treatment day.

The numbers of people with diabetes is growing in this country and so too, are the number of people who rely on dialysis to live.  This month educate yourself and say a prayer for Wes – that he gets a kidney.

Despite ongoing health problems since 1993, if asked how he’s doing, Williams answers, “I can’t complain.”

While undergoing a dialysis treatment at Fresenius Medical Care, 110 S. Collegiate St. on Wednesday, Williams talked about his will to live and his mission to help others.
“I have got too much yet to do in my short life,” Williams said. “I believe the Lord has things yet for me to do.”

The Fresenius Medical Care Center in Paris serves more than 100 patients daily. The center also offers free seminars to inform at-risk patients and their families about chronic kidney disease and treatment. Anyone interested in attending should contact Misty Curtis at 903-784-1989.

Call.  Go visit.  Take some magazines or paperbacks for patients and caregivers.  Say a prayer.  Anyone can do that.