...Please continue to pray for

...Please continue to pray for all of us and each of us.

Please.
peace.

I did PT this AM

I did PT this AM and feel pretty weak from it. When shes done at the chiro we are heading to the lab for my numbers.
Bleh.

CC had to work yesterday

CC had to work yesterday but came home early due to feeling sick and she called in sick this morning too.
:-o(
Pray 4 wife

I took the kids to

I took the kids to Cap Christian Cntr yesterday for the first time in like, 3 months. They really enjoyed it. I did too.

David is spending a year

David is spending a year in the US with my sister's family as an exchange student and he was Kirsten's Hungarian brother.

...as Joshy played soccer. It

...as Joshy played soccer. It was a really neat time with them, although far too short, as always. We also met David...

This past weekend... was a

This past weekend...
was a good weekend. We got to see my sister and almost her whole family Sat and they watched Josh...

Post number 200! September 19, 2007

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

God is good.
Once again, another week goes by and once again, I have pretty good health to hold culpable for not writing more, sooner. Not that Good health is a bad thing, by NO means, but having felt so much better, I have remained as busy as I could which meant not sitting at the computer or lying in bed with the computer to vent on or better said, vent into.
Worthy of note at the beginning, God is good regardless of how I feel. I know that. I just happen to write it in parallel of feeling better. God is good, regardless.

I'm uncertain if I noted in my last entry that this past weekend was not only a celebration of Missy's 13th birthday, but also on the 16th, CC's and my 18th wedding anniversary. Unable to really celebrate, we spent the day actually relaxing. CC actually watched some TV and laid on the couch for part of the day. I'm so glad she was able to relax and rest in this turbulent time of life. I'm blessed to have a wife, let alone her. Truly, a gift of God for the rest of my life.

Rain is supposed to be coming tonight and tomorrow and then again on Saturday and we are looking forward to its return. It says thunder storms, but we seldom ever get those, though that would be so cool if we did, however the temps have been changing from the 90’s and 100’s now down to yesterday’s high of 82 and today should get up to the low 70’s. I’m uncertain how my body will handle and react to the cold weather, but I guess we’ll find out soon enough, yes? Bring on the thunder showers. (Less yard watering on our part…)

Yesterday had a price though; I went with CC to Costco which I normally do whenever I can and typically I use one of their electric carts, but this time I felt good enough to walk with her and even without the cane. Very cool. End of the trip we were both hungry and their little food court holds few options, so I decided to try their hot dog, something I have greatly enjoyed in my past but have discontinued because of concern for the salt. Well, I should have stuck to my train of thought because within minutes of eating the hot dog, I began to sweat and feel very poorly; an instantaneous reminder of what it feels like to feel badly. My stomach began to cramp and my head started getting light. We both drove our respective vehicles home and I went right in to the couch and laid down. I remained down for the next couple hours but the sweats came and went a few times and I felt very yucky.
CC went and picked up the kids and brought our two back home in hopes of picking me up to join them in visiting one of Missy’s friends who landed in the hospital the night before from a car accident (Leah). Leah’s alright, all things considered, she’s got a gash in her right arm that may take some surgery to fix up, so she will be hospitalized for the next few days anyway and CC wanted us to go see her and I didn’t want to stay home by myself, so I made up my mind to go with them and hoped that my body would settle down. The cane became necessary again for the remainder of the evening which was a let down. I had gotten used to walking around without it.
We got to the hospital and things went reasonably well and though I didn’t feel good, it wasn’t terribly obvious other than me wearing my sweatshirt hood to keep my head from getting cold because of the sweating (think Uni-Bomber with less of a beard and such). We visited for about half an hour then we left to go get dinner for the four of us at Fresh Choice in Roseville. This place beats the other franchise locations by a mile in cleanliness, set up and even menu selection and lay out. Turns out that I can eat most things there without any real issue, though I tempted fate again by having a small amount of apple cobbler for dessert, for which I suffered more sweating but that, thankfully, was all I noticed.

---------
Moment of reality: I am the parent of a teenager. Whoa. Things have and are changing before my eyes. What a trip.
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This coming weekend is a Christian leadership conference at Bayside Church and I have been given admission to the conference and Friday night concert for my family and I’m really hopeful that I’ll hold up for the two days involved. My buddy Craig thinks he may be able to go as well, so we can keep one another company if, indeed, he can attend. Prayers for this weekend are sought and coveted. Ordinarily, I would not choose to spend time away from CC and the kids but this opportunity is unusual and could be enriching for me from a number of aspects and directions. Plus it should be rainy if the forecast is correct and unhindered.

I’ve been keeping a symptom and meal log for the past few weeks now and my Primary Doc okay’d me emailing it to him for him to take a look at such. Thanks to Carl and his fellows at his work as well as my cousin Rob in North Carolina, the chart is working out very well as long as I stay up with it and don’t get far behind on it.

I don’t remember if I noted in here that I bought some D&D dice and am borrowing my nephew’s books in order to see about playing some D&D with Missy and Joshy. I was holding off on it due to a skeptical spirit, I guess, but after talking at length with my buddy and very good friend Pastor Josh, I feel much better about playing with them, given their creative minds for role playing as it stands now and the Warrior books Missy has been reading for school which are about animals that from clans and fight medieval style in a take off of knights and such but having animals play the parts of the characters. I didn’t get into D&D until I was in high school, but then the games came out at that time so I was involved in the beginning times of the role playing games of the early eighties and I loved it. Of all the games and friends that played it, I had only one friend who took it a little too far and got kinda weird about it, but all the rest of us identified him as that and supported one another in knowing where our grounding was and not getting caught up in the game but remembering that it is “just a game” and that you get out of it what you put into it, pretty much. Not long ago, I showed Missy and Joshy the drawings that Harry had drawn for me of my D&D characters and they were very excited and inspired by Harry’s incredible talent with a pencil and parchment. I wish that I could find my original character sheets which I know I kept, but that they are in one of the nameless boxes STILL in the garage…sigh. For the time being, those drawings are wrapped up in my bedroom where they are safe. Come to think of it, I should unwrap them and take a digital photo of them and then post them here for you guys to see. For the most of you they won’t matter much, but for those of you from “back in the day”, who remember playing the games and playing with Harry, the pics might spark some good thoughts and who knows what else? We used to play single days of 5 to 8 hour games up to our 72 hour marathons (Fri-Sun) fueled by caffeine, adrenalin and sugar. They were very fun times that involved no computers…remember those times? It was just our imaginations with paper, pencils and dice. Now the kids have access to D&D games that are computer based and the imagination is used quite differently from the earlier days where what you saw in your mind was corporate with other players shaping the imaginary journey with their character’s input. I hope I can do the game justice and make the time fun for the kids. I’ve drawn up a couple maps of mazes/dungeons and need to fill the created rooms with beasties for them to battle and outwit.

A topic of prayer need is for next month’s Periodic Paralysis Convention in Orlando, Florida. I had set up room reservations and some extended time there to see family and local sights, but the more we know about what I’m dealing with, the less we understand and I’m uncertain if I should take my family across the United Stated to attend a conference that may or may not focus on my needs and situation, let alone the kids being out of school for that amount of time and coverage for our animals, etc. My prayer is to know confidently whether or not to attend and to know this soon since it requires the necessary planning and such. I guess it’s possible that it may be happening at a time that is possibly very unfortunate for us as a family, timing-wise as well, but to understand that more, you’ll have to read this next small paragraph that follows…

Our home situation still needs your fervent prayers. I cannot go into much detail, but we are waiting on God to learn whether or not He wills us to stay put or move to a rental. We’ve been riding a roller coaster of thoughts and directions, but the bottom line is what does He want us to do and how can we do it. Waiting on God is by far the hardest thing I know to do, yet I know He answers in His timing. Problem is that my timing and His timing seldom are aligned and calibrated, know what I mean? Please be praying for His continuing handling and holding of us and that we will quickly and surely see His direction in this time of high stress and monumental, pivotal decisions. I’m not sure how else to phrase it. We are living kinda scary right now and, like the child who needs the comfort of the parent’s touch when they are afraid of the unknown darkness of the familiar closet, we need to feel His touch right now as well as we face uncertainty.

peace-

Behind, Once Again...rats.

September 12, 2007

So I've fallen behind by a week again...what's the deal?
This time, it's actually because of better days than because of bad days and I haven’t stopped to write and catch up. The past week has been pretty good, numbers-wise in that my Potassium has been near and around 5.0 which leaves me feeling like I’m nearly normal. The negative to that is that I have been taking 40 Meq of K+ each morning in order to keep my numbers elevated and if I was to cut out the Potassium supplements, my numbers would change towards the lower 4’s then 3’s and I would feel worse and worse. I’m still very sensitive to sodium in my diet and I go through complete body sweats when I have much salt.

Yesterday I was to take a Nuclear Stress Test where a chemical is intravenously put into my system and then I eat and allow my body’s blood to work on the stomach and then they monitor my heart and veins to make certain everything is working properly there. They called the night before to let me know what the fasting guidelines were and I let then know then that I have an intolerance to IV saline but they wouldn’t take me seriously about it and said to just let the RN know in the morning, so…when we (CC and I) got to Radiology the next morning and fasting and all, we told them that saline is an issue and showed them a printed document from my doctor stating such, and they had to call off the test because the medicine has nearly 10% saline, and though there is another medicine that is D5 based, they didn’t plan for that, regardless of my chart notices and such. Pretty frustrating, especially when we forecast that outcome the night before. We have to wait now for another appointment with another medicine.

I had lunch today with my good friend and pastor Josh from FOPC and the minutes just flew and before we knew it, we had been talking for two and a half hours and I was over due to be back home. Oops. It was so good to have time with him and catch up; he has been given such a refreshing point of view that I learn multiple things each time we hook up and talk and I always walk away being blessed and waiting for another opportunity to talk and share.

Tomorrow is Missy’s 13th birthday and she could not be more excited. We are definitely living out a change of person in Missy as she gets older and changes, which has its pros and cons, needless to say. She challenges CC but doesn’t challenge me. Hopefully that will remain and she will back off challenging her mom too. I don’t know what the future holds but I’m hopeful that we have raised her as God wanted us to and that she has been trained in righteous ways. That’s really our main job for these years; to raise Missy and Joshua in the ways of God and prepare them to become God believing and God fearing adults in time.

That being said, I’ll let this go for now so I can finish getting the kids ready for bed…actually see to Joshy finishing his homework and then getting them both to bed. Due to This being a birthday weekend, CC has been cleaning house like crazy and working herself thin. Looking forward to resting sometime, but not yet. Your prayers are coveted continuously for health, safety and His divine touch in and on our lives. If we don’t have Him, we have nothing.

Peace-

It's been a week plus...catching up

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Well, I’ve let my written accounting go for another week; sorry about that. I seem to suffer attacks nearly every other day, though they are not what we consider “big” or critical attacks, they still knock me down for hours at a time and shift all home responsibilities to CC and the kids each time they hit. Missy has become very familiar with how to care for me once the attack hits. I don’t think it is fair that she has had to learn this, but it takes the solitary stress off of CC from time to time when it does hit.
Worthy of note though, is that I’ve had some really decent days in the past week in spite of having caught some kind of bug that CC and Missy caught and have been contending with. Sore throat, head ache, lots of congestion. My version has not been as bad as theirs, but it seems that the simplest symptoms became exaggerated in effect.

We’ve learned that the long term disability that we’ve had, is actually hinging on our receiving Social Security which they expect to be repaid through. In other words, even though we’ve lost two petitions to Social Security and we are now on our third appeal, should we succeed in receiving Social Security, the company who is paying out for the long term disability expects to be repaid in full through the award of our Social Security claim; i.e. they get paid back through the award for all they money they paid us. We had no clue until recently when we were being “encouraged” by the Long Term Dis. Company to win our appeals case with Social Security and then we read the fine print in one of the letters we had received months ago. They have been, in a sense, simply “loaning” us the money until Social Security goes through then they get their money back through our award. We had been looking forward to winning our case with Social Security so that we could get our feet back under us far better, but apparently that’s not what the future holds at this point. More stress.

CC has connected with a Chiropractor up in Roseville and our united prayer there is that he can help bring relief to her back pain and migraines. She had seen one back when we lived in the Bay Area and it had worked out well for her as far as relief was concerned, so that is our prayer now as well.

I’ve been working with some of the symptom charts that some of you sent me and I’m beginning to get the hang of it now, though it is more challenging than I had thought it would be to keep up with. It’s my hope that these charts will better illuminate what is happening with me and can be sufficient data for whichever medical care we see. Currently, we’re still with Kaiser, fighting away. My last appointment was with another Endocrinologist, but this one from Kaiser San Francisco. She did a thorough exam and concluded our appointment with her saying she has absolutely no clue as to what is plaguing me but she will be digging into it over the following series of weeks.
The last series of labs I’ve had done (on my own) have shown possible liver issues which we think might be explaining why I feel as crappy as I do, like today, but so far, it is just our research and assumptions based on the data we see from liver lab tests that have come back abnormal. I’m going to email my doc today and see if he will investigate this avenue more thoroughly. Symptoms are/have been; over-all malaise, nausea, increased tiredness, abdominal and lower back pain, some stomach cramping, light-headedness. “Hurry up and wait” syndrome, I’m much too familiar with.

Due to how I was feeling since I awoke this morning, I took a long, few hours nap this afternoon and accomplished so very little. When I feel like I'm dancing slowly with my symptoms, all I want to end up doing is trying ot sleep it off, which is frustrating in and of itself.

Plus note:
Missy and Josh are doing really well in school even though Joshy doesn’t have as many friends in this class make up as he did in last year’s class make up. That’s hard for him, but we have been really proud of both of their efforts in class so far. Joshy has done great in his spelling and writing and Missy is 130% in her reading expectations. Considering the stresses we are swimming in as a family right now, it is a true blessing to see them succeeding in their efforts at school.

That’s all for now.