I apologize for my absence, but this has been a very hectic year for me and my family. I have been busy with a sick husband, Warren. My daughter Olivia had a major job on her hands after the death of her father, Doug.

Warren has a disease called Neurofibromatosis. This is a disease that causes small tumors on nerves and also causes chronic pain. He has spent as much as eleven hours in the ER to just get a pain shot once. Usually it is a five hour visit because our insurance covers blood analysis for his visits….that takes about three hours to process.

In the beginning of our marriage, I knew that Warren had Neurofibroma-tosis, heart disease, had recently had a cancer tumor removed (now cancer free for ten years) and that he was on blood thinners. Warren had also been getting small tumors (about the size of a dried split pea) removed from under his scalp that caused him pain if they were touched.

He nearly died from blood loss several months before we got married. His blood was so thin that several days after a scalp surgery, he decided to wash his hair and he bumped the surgery site. It started bleeding. This was just before he was to meet me and a friend for dinner. He was late and I was about to go check on him at home that Friday night, when just then, he walked in and told us what happened. I told him to call his doctor on Monday morning.

On Monday, before I went to work, I called Warren to remind him to call his doctor. Normally I would have called after I did a two hour health care visit, but I was worried. He answered the phone, but he rushed the phone call and we hung up.

Later he told me that he had fallen asleep in his recliner and had started bleeding again. He did not know about the blood until he stood up to get to the phone. He saw the blood spurting onto the kitchen floor. After he hung up with me, he immediately called 911 and was rushed to the hospital to make the bleeding stop.

Later that day he called me and told me all about the mess and his daughter coming to take him home and help him clean up the floors and his chair. If I had not called early, he could have continued to sleep until he had lost too much blood.

Since then he has changed from Coumadin to another blood thinner while he was in the hospital for his first kidney stone. His heart doctor happened to to be on duty so we requested the medication change while he was in hospital for observation. Perfect timing! We thank God for all the blessings he gives us daily that lead to more abundant life!

This last year he has had kidney stones several times, a pace maker and stents put in his arteries. 7-10 day stays at the hospital with IVs for hydration each time and new medications after each visit. This is why I postponed knee replacement surgery twice, trying to wait until he was better. The third time my general practitioner insisted I get someone to stay with him if I needed to, but that I could not wait again to have my surgery, which went very well. I was only in the hospital over night. I thank two wonderful ladies from my church that took me to my appointment and my friend that I worked with in the schools that brought me home. The deacons from the Presbyterian church brought meals every other day so I didn’t have to cook for more than a week counting the leftovers.

**night

Some time at the end of July, Doug passed away in his home, alone. He was a person that wouldn’t answer the phone or return messages to friends and family for long periods of time. Once he had ignored calls from our daughter and me for over a month. Finally, I called the local police to do a wellness check on him. When they came, they tried knocking on the front door, found the back yard gate open and they continued around the house to the kitchen and bathroom. There they finally got an answer. He had to yell back to them why he couldn’t answer the front or back door for anyone right then.

A bit later he called me and was kind of indignant that I got the police involved. I simply told him that if he had bothered at any time during that month to return a call, text or email, there would have been no embarrassment! After all, he could not have been indisposed for all that time.

Again, over a year later, Doug had not been returning calls, texts or anything. Several friends started asking each other when was the last time you saw or heard from Doug? It had been a couple of weeks for each of them. The police were called again for a wellness check. When they got the owner to open the house, the police opened the door and immediately called the coroner. He had died in bed of natural causes. A heart attack was determined to be the cause of death. We later found out that he had discontinued all of his medications.

Olivia, our daughter received the news about her father by phone from the local police. She and her fiancee flew into town and stayed three weeks with a friend (they knew from high school, and his parents.

It took almost three weeks to do the best they could at cleaning out whatever was worth keeping and getting rid of all soft furniture that had absorbed an unpleasant odor of death.

This same friend, got help from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. There were many days all day long, that these young men moved, sorted and boxed Doug’s stuff to be put in storage until Olivia can retun and make final decisions on what to keep or toss out.

These young men worked in the heat not asking to be paid as this was considered part of the service they put in for the Church. I thank you one and all.

*****

Most recently, Warren was suffering with pain on a Friday night (the eleven hour visit) and had to go back again on Wednesday, during the day (five hours) to find he had an infection and another kidney stone.

Over the years with me, he has learned to deal with pain in a different manner. Now he lets me know he is hurting so I might be able to help him with the right medication, instead of loudly expressing his pain in mean spirited words that could cause me to cringe and shut down emotionally. Once I let him how his behavior was affecting me (by setting boundaries to help me cope), he started to make better choices so I could be of more help.

Boundaries can be very helpful in building communication. Because I asked for what I needed and told him why I needed it, he saw the benefits for him. We had a new Win-Win solution. Therefore, he also had permission to ask for what he needed from me, allowing me to understand him better.

Olivia is also planning her wedding long distance and has asked me to create her Wedding Cake. It is going to be an interesting challenge for me, intertwining Fairyland (spice cake) and Steam Punk (chocolate cake). It has been fun learning to work with fondant and gum paste to create the needed elements for the cake layers. She is thinking of an autumn wedding and only some of the decorations can be made ahead of time.

I have also made Fairy ears of beads and wire for the ladies in the wedding.

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