Avoidance

Sorry it's been such a crazy long time with no posts. I really like to post good stuff! :)

Maria went through what I think was months of treatments for her kidney rejection that really took it out of her and after some illnesses this Spring it was determined it didn't really work and they can't do anything more for her rejection. We cancelled our dream trip to Alaska that was planned for early August. It's our 15th anniversary since exchanging vows coming up in August. Her nephrologist said no-go on the trip.

Now she's having to jump a million hoops to try to get qualified for another transplant. I'd say she's 9-24 months from another transplant and we're hunkering down. She starts hemodialysis on Tuesday. The hope is to get her on peritoneal dialysis but she has a surgery she needs soon and we thought it would be silly to put in the PD catheter, then remove it for the other surgery to happen, and then put it in again.

We wound up losing 4 of our kitties in about 9 months. That was sure something we didn't think about when we got so many of them so close together. The crazy thing is we still have a kitty left!

We did legally tie the knot and are thrilled to be legal in all 50 states!

We looked and saw we were spending more money on gas than groceries and decided it was time to move closer to everything so we worked hard to get our house sale-able, wound up selling it before it listed, and we moved to Sharonville on July 1. That puts us 30 minutes closer to Maria's hospital, to Gus's therapy in Covington, KY, and to most of our friends and family who jump in and help us out.

Since there are boxes everywhere we have been applying every avoidance technique in the book to keep from working on the house. It seems it's all we've been doing for months is getting ready for this move.

So, we took Gus to Cass Scenic Railroad State Park in WV and had a great time! Gus had a week off in between therapy sessions and by the time the next session ends Maria will be on dialysis so carpe diem!

Gus is truly doing so well in so many areas. He is able to eat just about anything now without choking on different consistencies. He can self feed nearly everything, which we know is HUGE. He can even drink from a regular cup with minimal spillage. We're still perfecting that skill. He is weight bearing really well and with support will move his legs. His army crawling has gotten better and in therapy they have him working on all 4's. He's been doing 5 days a week of Conductive Education from 9 AM to 2:30 PM. It's quite a challenging workout for him and we're so proud of how hard he works.

I had this idea that if we got a pool at just the right depth, it would help take some gravity off and he could get some therapy in that way and not even know it. He has taken to the pool like crazy and loves that he can "swim" by himself! The pool I got turned out to be about 5 inches more shallow than I was hoping but we're all still loving it.

Hope you are all enjoying your summer and keeping cool!