About three O’clock this afternoon Dale put his finger to his lips and said “shhh – I’m not hurting”!  For the first time since Friday morning he is not in pain so maybe we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. God is good – all the time!

All is not well. We are hopeful that tomorrow will be better. Dale has been in severe pain all day. We got more antibiotics and pain medication but it hasn’t helped much. I got on a peritoneal dialysis forum and posted and got several replies. It seems to be the consensus that he should start showing some improvement tomorrow. If not we may be going back to the hospital. His pain was so bad last night that we got little sleep. We would doze off and I would wake up hearing him gasping trying to breath through the pain. He finally ended up getting a little sleep in the recliner. Since he is more comfortable there than lying down flat I have moved his dialysis machine to the living room and he is going to see if he will rest a little better there tonight. I will be up pretty late anyway since Kinsey is at his prom tonight and I will stay up til he gets home. He looked so good in his tux and Becky was just gorgeous.
I’m glad I am off work Monday since it is evident that he won’t be going to work that day. At least the center will be open and his kidney doc will back in town.

I thought I would be doing a follow up on staff development tonight but life had other plans. Dale has been on peritoneal dialysis for two years now with no problems. He has been able to work and with a few exceptions live a fairly normal life. The biggest danger for P.D patients is peritonitis because the dialysis access is basically an opening directly into your peritoneal cavity and we thought we had dodged that bullet but it caught up with us tonight. When I got home from work he told me he had had abdominal pain all day and he was doing a dialysis exchange and the fluid was cloudy. Those two symptoms together are pretty much a done deal for peritonitis. I paged his P.D nurse who happened to be on a bus somewhere.  She told me to get him to the emergency room. After bloodwork, x-rays, and a fluid culture plus two I.V.s of super-dooper antibiotics we are home a little after nine. His white count was 17 and I just learned tonight that normal is 8 so ordinarily they would have admitted a patient in his shape. At least he didn’t have to stay over-night. He gets pretty cranky even near hospitals but at least this experience wasn’t too bad. The doctors and nurses listened to us and seemed to accept that we know what we are doing. So often that is NOT the case and other times when he has had to be hospitalized we have had to just dig in our heels and insist that they listen. I’m sure there is a secret file somewhere that flags us as “un-cooperative” but it is hard to argue with two years of success. Dale is the only working P.D. patient in this area and we have gotten good at self-adjusting his dialysis according to how hot the weather gets which means he sweats and loses more fluid and needs more salt or if it is cool and he isn’t moving around too much, changing to a little stronger fluid solution to pull off more fluid. It’s a balancing act and I am proud that we have gotten damn good at keeping all the balls in the air. Hopefully this one round of antibiotics will do the trick. We got our packet of forms to fill out on his medical history and insurance information to send back to Baylor which will be the first step towards kidney transplant so we need to get infection free and as healthy as possible. It was a long day and a longer evening but a little glass of Bailey’s Irish Cream, a couple of cookies, a hot bath, and a good book and all will be well.

Have you ever noticed how every time you get a little extra money together something big breaks? It is tax time and after we dropped off the documentation and asked our tax guy to just leave a message on the answering machine if we needed to leave the country; we found that we were actually going to get a little money back from the government. We started thinking about what we should do with the money. This morning my husband called home five minutes after leaving for work and I had to run around waking up kids and throwing on clothes so that I could pick him up at six thirty (yes – a.m.) without getting arrested for ugly pajamas. The short form of the story is that instead of the problem being the radiator (which was sixty-five dollars worth of the problem) we found that the head gasket is leaking and the solution is either another engine or a repair, either of which comes to about twelve hundred dollars which is surprise! : slightly more that the tax return will be. This also means that hubby will be without his truck for several weeks and I will be playing school chauffer for the kids again. Now we have an easy decision about what to do with the tax return.

I sure hope we never win the lottery!

Life overlaps, or at least mine does.  I would like to keep work, home, and church all in their own little boxes but they don’t seem to want to stay there.  Not only do parts of my life squish around into areas they don’t belong but they are never in proportion.  My life has boundary issues.

Some days I have too much to do at home but I’m at work where I have too little.  Somedays I have too much work stuff to do and home stuff interferes.  Today was one of those days.  I had unexpected things to do at work – a computer that I spent way more time trying to fix than I thought I would and then still had to call for help which always frustrates me.  I had to leave work on time because I had committed to picking up some files from the church for their website.  I thought I had plenty of time to do that and still make it on time to pick up my daughter from school not knowing that the pastor’s laptop is having troubles too.  Then there is the debacle of the miracle communication tool of our time (said skeptically)  – the cell phone.  I rarely use mine and only for keeping in contact with my kids when they need me to pick them up from various activities.  I tried every cell number I had and got nothing but voicemail boxes, then tried our home number and got the internet answering machine.  I was late picking up my daughter and when we got home my son had already left to pick her up.  It was a Chinese firedrill day.  I accomplished very little of what I started out to do this morning but in the end we all had dinner together and I’ll start over tomorrow.

I read about someone turning 100 years old the other day and thought about all the changes they have seen in their lives. New inventions certainly, but I’m thinking about cultural changes. I’m a part of the generation that still remembers when married couples in tv shows had to have single beds and romantic displays of affection were limited and pretty chaste. My generation loved “Saturday Night Live” (back at the beginning when it was FUNNY) partly because it pushed the envelope with language, sexual references, and the irreverancy of it all. It seems to me we have pushed the envelope all the way off the cliff. I guess I could be stuck in “the good old days” rut but I think it is more than that. It is hard to find value these days, whether it be music, movies, or books. The media is owned by a few major companies who compete for our attention with what they think the public wants to hear. I would prefer to get objective news, and stories (whatever the media) that lift humanity up or educate us, or make us think.

Cecelia Weckstrom on her blog http://www.digitaldigressions.net said this about technology: “To me the prospect that all this technological development is resulting in one thing dominating it all – porn everywhere, is a sad reflection on the state of our society. If all the various forms of expression (humour, satire, prose, poetry, music, painting, photography etc.) are all eclipsed by this subject, then I am inclined to think that civilisation truly is an oxymoron. Spam too – whoever thinks it works? I mean, who is the nitwit who thought that sending loads of rubbish to people’s inboxes would result in sales rather than uncontrolled fury?” Amen sister!