Life is Good

Our life is back to normal, in all senses of the word.  Kaleb is back to his old school routine, Kory is back volunteering here there and everywhere and I am back to cleaning up after them both.

My only angst lately has been trying to come up with something to write about for my weekly column on Norway.  I actually chewed off my fingernails last week it a fit of worry that I wouldn’t make the deadline.  It’s getting harder and harder to come up with something to write about – or else my brain is just getting slower and slower to work.  Could be both.

We are so thankful Kory is doing as well as he is and each day we realize more than ever, is a gift.  My prayer is that he’ll live long enough to meet his grandchildren, but God has His own plans and I’m sure we’ll all be just fine, no matter what.  But it is nice to have a warm body cuddling me at night and Kaleb sure enjoys racing Kory around the house – so we hope he’s around for years to come.  He came a little too close to death for all of us, including Kory, so finally his attitude has shifted about how he takes care of his body.

Before, when I’d get after him for unhealthy choices he’d roll his eyes and scoff at me, but now he smiles and says, “Thanks for caring.”  I have all along, but it’s just now that he realizes it and accepts it for what it is.  He hasn’t even complained once about being vegan, but I’m not sure he notices all that much.

I have a chalkboard I write what I’m planning to make for dinner each night. I wiped the slate clean last week, and before I could put my plans on it, Kory just wrote “Veggies” on each and every line.  Ha ha, but it has been kinda true.  I’ve tried not to make any weird “healthy” dinners – I’m just making what I’d normally make but without chicken or fish thrown in the mix.  I’ve found it’s a lot easier than I thought.  I use soy milk, olive oil and a little tofu here and there as substitutes for things – even a banana substitutes for an egg in muffins, so it’s been pretty easy.  The main thing is that Kory’s not been hungry, like he thought he’d be, and there’s always food in the house that he can eat, so he’s happy.  We even had friends over on Saturday for dinner and I roasted a chicken but Kory and I didn’t eat any of it.  Small sacrifice for now.  He’s telling people we are “trying this out for a few months to see how it goes.”  One day at a time is all I think about.

The funniest thing is that we’ve had chickens show up in our yard everyday (see top photo) since we went vegan.  They belong to the neighbors down below us but they’ve never ventured up the hill before.  I guess they know it’s now safe.  One of them even tried to fly in out living room window the other day.  I might need to hang out the other frozen chicken I have in the freezer as a warning.

Kory finished building the mantle for our new fireplace redo (see before and after photos below) and I couldn’t be happier with how the whole thing looks.  He didn't carve the face of it - we had that done by a Norwegian living in Wisconsin, but he built around it. We are so enjoying the wood burning insert and the heat it produces – over having the diesel furnace blasting air through the house.  The timing couldn’t have been better with all the snow we’ve had.  We have plenty of wood for the winter and a cozy fire in the fireplace never feels better than when there’s snow on the ground outside.

We’ve been out enjoying the snow, playing with Kaleb and throwing snowballs at each other.  We don’t have any hills around steep enough for Kaleb to go sledding on so he launches off the top of the deck.  We went up to the cemetery but the slope there wasn’t drastic enough either so Kory put chains on our van and pulled Kaleb behind it – round and around and around.  Kaleb loved it, and it got Kory off the hook for being too old of a father that he can’t keep up with his son.

We’ve had a few days off school with the snow keeping us home, and canceling our normal school week this week, but it’s been great to play games together, sit by the fire and read and have homemade soup in the pot.  God is good and we continue to live in a state of thankfulness for all He’s done and continues to do.  Hallelujahs never felt so good.

End of the Year Miracles

My gift to Jesus this past Christmas season was to not be stressed out about anything.  I hope he’s pleased -  I didn’t stress.  A lot of things didn’t get done and no one seemed to notice.  Some cards are yet to be mailed, the Christmas decorations didn’t all get out and even now, aren’t all tucked back in the attic.  Life just clicked along one day after the next and before I knew it, it was Christmas and I’m pretty sure I didn’t lose my cool even once, not even when I thought Kory was having a heart attack.

Every day for months now I felt like something was going to happen.  Each night when I laid my head on the pillow I thanked God for another day of normal and that Kory was still with us.  He’s been very careless with his health and I knew it was just a matter of time.  I couldn’t fight the battle anymore with him, so I prayed that God would get through to him somehow before it was too late.

Last Thursday at 5am he woke me up crawling back in bed.  I asked why he was up and he said he’d just taken a shower.  I asked why he would shower at such an odd hour.  He said he was sweating so much he couldn’t stand himself.  I asked if he had anything else going on and he said he had a bad pain in his shoulder and hadn’t slept much all night because of it.  I told him to get in the car; I was taking him to the ER.  I called my favorite prayer warrior before I even left the driveway.

We have a volunteer fire department and I didn’t want to wait for them to arrive so I didn’t call 911, and I didn’t want them to take him to the nearest hospital since his cardiologist is in Everett.  I drove at least 80mph all the way to Providence.  The doctor later told me it was a good thing I got him in as soon as I did.

Initially they said Kory was having a heart attack, but the EKG didn’t show any signs of it.  They did the blood enzyme test and that didn’t show a heart attack either but they said it often takes 12 hours before it shows up so he needed to hang out for the day.  The heart monitor showed his heart beating at 85, then it would drop to 40 for several beats.  It was erratic and crazy.  They gave him aspirin and nitro glycerin as his pain worsened once we arrived.  He had a bad reaction to the nitro as his blood pressure dropped to 30 and they had to put him on an IV and oxygen after that.  I wasn’t fearful at all.  I felt the peace that passes all understanding, but I also called a few more people to pray.  I knew it was serious.

I left Kaleb at home since we were dog-sitting a puppy.  I called my neighbor to go get the dog and a friend from our home fellowship group got Kaleb for the day.  A friend that lives near the hospital was by my side before I even knew what was happening.  She stayed until three other women from our home group, plus another prayer warrior, showed up to be with me the bulk of the day.  Kory was prayed over and prayed for all the way from Norway.  He’d grabbed his I-pad before we left so I was able to post notices on Facebook and it was amazing how quickly people started praying.  It was a powerful experience.

Because of where Kory’s pain was, and that no tests showed he was having a heart attack, the doctor thought he might have a blood clot going to his lung, so they ordered up a CT scan to rule that out.  Fortunately, there was no clot, but they did discover from that test, he has an aneurism on his aorta that worried them a great deal.  They said he’d need surgery on it (open heart!) because of how large it was.  More prayers went up.

The doctor wasn’t sure if the aneurism was a new thing or an old thing.  She felt his pain could be caused by that, but to rule out he didn’t have any blockages in his arteries, she wanted to do an angiogram and go in with the camera to check things out.  We agreed it was a good idea.  More prayers while we waited and especially when he was in surgery.  My “homies” were right there with me, took me to coffee and tried to get me to eat something.  I couldn’t, my stomach was in knots, but I wasn’t afraid.

The angiogram revealed that Kory was 100% blocked in his Right Coronary artery – an artery that last year was hardly blocked at all.  Something in his body isn’t dealing with cholesterol very well, even though his cholesterol count has always been low, as has his blood pressure.  Go figure.

They measured the aneurism when they were in there, and were surprised to see the size was much smaller.  The doctor was confused, as they don’t ever shrink in size.  She ordered a specialist to come in and look at the first CT scan and the new information from the angiogram.  Medically, it was a mystery.  The second test showed the aneurism to be “insignificant” in size and not needing surgery.  I told the doctor that many people were praying for him and this was a miracle.  She responded with, “It’s good to have happy thoughts.”  I knew better.

The doctor told me several times that day Kory had had a heart attack.  Later that night I asked the nurse if it was “mild or medium.” He looked up Kory’s medical record and said, “Well, that’s strange, they aren’t calling this a heart attack at all.  They just say he had a blockage that was repaired.”  He later asked the doctor about it and she confided to him (but never to us) that he “came as close to having a heart attack as a person could, within 1%, but never had one,” and there is no damage to his heart whatsoever.  Another miracle. 

Kory couldn’t leave the hospital for a whole extra day because of the discrepancies in the tests for his aneurism.  They wanted to know more – so he had to stay 24 hours until the iodine got out of his body and they could order another CT test.  They couldn’t believe it could go down in size, but it did.  The third test confirmed it, so they sent him home late Friday night.  Saturday night he was at a New Year’s Eve party and Sunday we all went to church.  Miracles all the way around.

Kory’s recovering well and taking it easy.  He’s been watching You Tube videos on how to draw faces, since that’s the latest challenge he’s taken up – trying to learn how to draw people.  He’s been sitting at the dining room table and practicing for hours on end.  I love it.  He knows not to be physical, like the last time he had stents put in. 

We were able to have our annual “business meeting” on Sunday night, since Kaleb wasn't home and has been bounced around from house to house while Kory recovered.  We talked about the plans for the year, house projects to get done, where we’ll go on vacation.  Kory has his 2012 to-do list all ready to go.  He likes to quote some ancient Chinese proverb that says, “house done when man die” and he realized he can’t die yet because there’s still stuff to do on the house. 

Our trip to Disneyworld in Florida has been indefinitely postponed until we can figure out a week in our lives that we can fit it in again.  Prior to all this, I was joking that I’d rather have surgery than go to a theme park, and I guess I shouldn’t have said that because it ended up being Kory that had the surgery, but still, I’m thrilled we aren’t going – Kaleb – not so much.  He understands though and that place isn’t going anywhere so we’ll get there when we get there.

We are happy to be back to normal, to have Kory with us, and to have this new year all mapped out, but just in case things don’t turn out exactly like we’d planned, we most definitely know that God has our back, no matter what.  Hallelujah!