Happy March. Spring is in the air I can just feel it. March came in like a lamb this morning. Do you ever think of that. If the weather is calm in like a lamb and if it’s windy like a lion. I always think of that in March at the beginning of the month and then at the end of the month because it’s usually the windiest month.
With the beginning of each month I always seem to reflect on past months and try to make a fresh start when I need to. It seems like when making a change starting at a new beginning such as a year or a month or even a week is always easier to do and hope for a change. With the coming of this new month, actually it’s been coming for awhile, I have to admit to myself that I haven’t really been taking care of myself. I think with all that has been going on in the last two years I have let things like health, weight, exercise habits and just taking care of me fall by the wayside. I tend to put on a hoodie and jeans and let that be my wardrobe every day. It’s easy to do that. Today I decided to make a change and start with my outward appearance and hope the rest will follow. I think it will. I need a new healthier me. I am not getting any younger. I am ready for a change!!!
Hello, I’m Johnny Cash. I love me some black and white I got the jacket at Kohl’s a couple of years ago. The pants are Anne Klein from Stein Mart and I freaking love them. I have worn them a million times and they still retain their shape. I have a black shirt underneath from Cato and the scarf is also Cato. Shoes I ordered from Amazon a couple of years ago. With my job tennis shoes are easy and I always keep a pair under my desk in case I am going to be walking in the cave or on the property. I think it’s an improvement from the hoodie and jeans although I will still wear that. Some days call for it. But today I feel like I am styling just a bit.It made me walk a little taller and have a bit of attitude. The good kind. LOL.
I went down to the lake this morning and took some pictures. Several of the kitties followed me down. Even with my lack of sleep I could see it was a beautiful morning. A morning to be savored and remembered.
Milo
Buster
Mama kitty loves the new spring flowers.
Molly had a terrible night she ate too much yesterday and she has such a sensitive tummy So I was up and down with her all night. I got very little sleep. And of course as soon as I get up Scruffy gets up. I am dragging today. All I could think of was getting home and into bed. I hope she has a better night tonight. She always comes to me because she knows I will try to soothe her tummy and pet on her and get her to feeling better. It’s what I do.
I hope your new month is going great and offers endless possibilities.
Wow!! here it is Sunday again and back to work tomorrow. Do you or did you, if you are not working now, ever get the Sunday Scaries? Supposedly this happens on Sunday when people get anxious about returning to work the following day. It could be any day before you return to work from time off. It doesn’t have to be a Sunday. I do get the Sunday Scaries a lot. I love my job and I really don’t hate returning to it. I think it is just the fact that I like to be home doing the things I love without interruption and plenty of time to do them. Sunday Scaries is the total emotional opposite of Thank God It’s Friday. Oh well neither of those feelings last very long anyway. So how was your week? It was a very rainy week here with wind and cold and some local flooding. Monday of course was a holiday but I had to work. Being in tourism there are very few holidays that we get off because that is when everyone else is off from work and traveling.
Wednesday I had to take our last kitty baby Sadie to get spayed. The last time she was scheduled to go with Izzy and it didn’t happen. That was just after Christmas. That particular morning we were in the garage trying to get Izzy and Sadie into the kitty crate. We got Izzy easily enough but Sadie is still scared and skittish and she darted away from us every time we got close. We finally took Izzy in by herself and rescheduled Sadie. We had to reschedule Sadie again so that I could take my sister to the doctor so it was just this past Wednesday that we finally got Sadie back in with the vet.
I was worried sick about trying to catch Sadie. I was on my own this time because Mark had to leave for work even earlier than I did. I went out early Wednesday morning and she and all the other kitties were waiting by the back step of the garage, I had closed the garage door the night before to help make it easier, and I just reached down and plucked her up. I put her in the crate until I got the kitty carrier and transferred her over. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. She however was very unhappy and let me know about it all the way to the vet. She did fine and I picked her up that afternoon on my way home from work. WHEW!!! I am so glad to have all five of the new kitties spayed and neutered.
We have had so much rain that schools have been closed, buses couldn’t get through a lot of the back roads. I have seen some of the fields near our house flooded like I have never seen before. It’s crazy!!
We have a little car that belongs to my mother in law. It is literally the car that the little lady only drove to church and back. When she moved into the assisted living center and could no longer drive we kept the car for awhile. But we really didn’t need it and she needed the money from the sale of the car so we decided to sell it. It sold really fast and we were supposed to sign the car over on Friday. I called a local car cleaning service and they came on Thursday and picked the car up while I was at work. They washed and waxed the car and shampooed the interior and brought it back to me. It looked fabulous. I had had the oil changed on Tuesday morning. Mark delivered the car on Friday and now it is no longer sitting in my driveway taking up space. I do love that.
We still haven’t gotten the new gate painted. It does look much better. If you missed the story on our new gate you can check it out here: The Gate Story. I was very unhappy about it to start with but after some tweaking and taking away some of the board work It looks much better. I think it will look great when it is painted and shrubs are put around it.
Friday was a long day. I had lunch with my friend Lorie, we were craving Mexican and it was so good. But the best part was just catching up with each other. We realized we had not seen each other since just before Christmas!!! That is crazy and we will definitely have to work on that. I stayed late at work so that I could be in town for a funeral that night. I took some extra clothes with me to work and changed into those. Usually my work clothes are pretty casual and I can wear a sweatshirt or hoodie with our attractions’ name on it. I do this especially in the winter when the crowds are down. I didn’t get home until about 8:00 so that made for a long and tiring day. I think I was in bed by 9:00. I have been watching Ozark and I watched one episode of that before getting into bed.
Saturday was grocery day so I bought groceries and did a few things around the house. I bought another Orchid. I may be slightly obsessed with them. I have been wanting a yellow one and I found one that I loved. I brought it home and introduced it to the two others. I can neither confirm nor deny that I have named all three of them. I KNOW!!!! Mark and I went to visit his mother and take her some groceries. We got take out from our favorite Chinese restaurant in Sweetwater and headed home to feed and walk all the babies. I watched a couple of episodes of Ozark and worked on the temperature blanket I am crocheting. I can’t wait to show you what it looks like so far. I am only two months in and you do a row a day with the color depending on the temperature.
Sunday, today, it was cold and rainy a good day to just stay in and read, knit, or crochet since I am working on the temperature blanket, watch Ozark and chill with the family. I made blueberry muffins. I forgot to drain the blueberries before dumping them in the batter so I wasn’t sure how they would turn out but they were sooooo good. I will have plenty for the rest of the week. We had cheeseburgers for dinner with sweet potato fries, easy and yummy. How was your week?
It was a Thursday exactly eleven years ago on this date February 24th 2011. It was 3:00 AM. My husband and I were about four hours from home in a hotel room in Downtown Nashville, TN. We had been awake most of the night. Several of our family members were staying in nearby rooms. At 5:00 AM we would all drive the short distance to Vanderbilt Medical Center and check in for surgery. My husband Mark was getting a new kidney and I would be the donor.
This picture was taken as we were leaving the hospital on the Sunday following the surgery. We were headed to a local hotel that would be our home for a couple of weeks.
My husband discovered he needed a kidney in the summer of 2010. He didn’t even know he was in kidney failure. A routine blood work-up revealed that he had a really high creatinine level. Many many more tests were done that summer into the fall and in October of 2010 he was put on the donor list to receive a new kidney. His doctors told us he could possibly be on the waiting list for several years and that we should look for a living donor.
Fortunately he did not have to wait long. I knew that we were the same blood type and I wanted to be tested to see if I might be a match. The doctors told us not to be too hopeful because the chances would only be about 15% that I would be a match. One test after another was given to me and I kept being compatible. The doctors decided not to test anyone else until I was ruled out as a donor match. We had to go through counseling and lots of the same tests but with different doctors. Each doctor had to make a separate ruling on whether I would be eligible. Then when that decision was made by the individual doctors the results went before an entire panel of doctors at Vanderbilt.
My tests were finished in December of 2010. Mark did not have to spend one minute on dialysis and for this we are so very grateful. But we knew dialysis could happen if he got the flu or pneumonia or anything that could compromise his health and cause his kidney function to decline rapidly.
So we waited and waited for the results. It seemed like forever but it wasn’t only a few weeks. In mid January of 2011 we got the answer we had prayed for, I was a match!!!I would be the donor!!! The surgery was scheduled for February 24th 2011. We had a lot of work to do before that day. We made arrangements to take time off from work. I would need to be out two to four weeks and Mark probably six weeks. We made arrangements to board our baby Patches our basset hound. We had to get a living will and a medical power of attorney. Normally I would have been Mark’s medical power of attorney, to make a medical decision about him if needed, and he would have been mine. But because we would both be having surgery at the same time we had to pick someone else. We chose my sister Sandy who was with us through the entire adventure.
At 7:00 AM on the morning of the surgery date I was taken down first to the operating room and my kidney was prepared for the removal. We could each have one person with us. I chose my sister Sandy and Mark picked his dad. His dad was a Korean War Veteran and one of the strongest men I have ever seen but when he came to wish me good luck, just before the surgery, there were tears in his eyes. At approximately 9:00 AM Mark was brought down to an adjoining room beside me and he was prepped for his surgery. They took the kidney from me, walked through the adjoining room and placed it into Mark’s abdomen. I guess if this had been Grey’s Anatomy this is where they would have dropped it HA!!!! I was really surprised that it was put in the abdomen but that is much simpler than putting it back in the original spot. So technically Mark had three kidneys for a short while. The other two have long quit working.
My surgery was done laparoscopically so my recovery time was very short. Mark’s recovery took a little longer. We spent three days in the hospital and left on Sunday. Since we had doctor visits three times a week to keep a check on the kidney we had to stay at the hotel in Nashville to be close to the hospital. If we had had the transplant closer to home we could have stayed at home and gone to the doctor visits from home. My two sisters, Sandy and Pat stayed there with us at the hospital for almost two weeks. We had adjoining rooms. They took care of us, took us to our appointments, did our laundry and brought us take out. They were and still are angels and we will never ever forget them for the time they took out of their lives and their other family members to be with us.
We don’t have children so we named the kidney Baby Kay. We celebrate every year and this year Baby Kay is eleven years old. Mark takes anti rejection meds every day and will for his entire life. He has done great. He works full time, works out and we travel with no problems. He sees his doctor three times a year. I am on no meds and I sometimes forget I only have one kidney. I can’t tell the difference. Of course Covid scared the crap out of us because it is so much harder for Mark to fight off any disease because of all the immunosuppressants that he takes. So far we have been very fortunate. Mark did have a scary bout with the shingles virus a couple of years ago and had to be out in the hospital for a few days. But other than that it has been uneventful.
There are 93,000 people on the kidney transplant list. Over 3,000 new patients are added to the kidney waiting list each month. 13 people die each day while waiting for a life-saving kidney transplant. Every 14 minutes someone is added to the kidney transplant list. The average wait time for an individual’s first kidney transplant is 3.6 years and can vary depending on health, compatibility and availability of organs.
Mark and I have been truly blessed with the path his transplant took. But there are so many many people needing a kidney to live. If you are ever faced with the decision to donate for someone I would encourage you to really consider it. At the very least I would encourage you to sign your driver’s license and discuss it with your family if you choose to be a donor. I would be happy to share more of our experience with you.
So Happy Birthday to Baby Kay. And many many many more. Giving my kidney to my husband is the best thing I have ever done. I would do it a million times again if I could.
Southern Patches 