Shoshanna gets to race
Well, it has been two weeks since the notorious bat incident (see last post). I was going to start blogging regularly, but it seems that, at least for me, those rabies shots made me feel pretty punky, sickly feeling, and downright wore out. I did not do much of anything at all other than work and sleep. And this in spring when everything is getting so nice.
Well last night I got to go out and have a lot of fun with my girls that are still at home. (for those that don't know, I have 6 daughters - 3 are married) We all got a chance to go to a West Michigan Whitecaps game. My work was one of the sponsors of last nights game and so they had a contest at work for people for several of the different events they run between innings and in the middle of the innings. I put Shoshanna in to do the Crash Dash, and she was chosen. When I found out she won I went home and asked her if she would like to race a 6 foot raccoon around a baseball diamond? She thought I was pulling her leg at first, but then said it would be lots of fun. So, I got 4 free tickets as part of it and decided it was girls night out with dad. Actually it was princess night out with the king. I have started telling them stories recently about princess Carolyn, and princess Melody, and princess Shoshanna, and the king (me) and such.
Well long story short I did get video and, true to what I do, put it on YouTube. Sometimes my wife thinks I am totally wacked putting our lives in video on YouTube for all the world to see. I think it is pretty cool. Who knows, one of these days we might be famous. Shoshanna was to race Crash around the bases, but in true fun fashion Frankie the giant pig had "stolen" Crash's jersey and came out to race her. She tore it up against the pig!
The interesting thing is when Shoshanna gets to third base Crash chases Frankie off. Shoshanna does not know exactly what to do now that her race partner is not around any more. After a moment one of the helpers comes and guides her all the way home.
Now one other amazing thing about this race. Shoshanna was diagnosed with leukemia two years ago. At that time she could not even walk for the most part. As you watch the video notice how she is totally tearing it up! YEAH!
Back up now....
I have not used this blog in ages. But I decided that I needed somewhere to just write and vent my life. I have been told I have a pretty wild and funny life and that I tell it well. And we all know life is all about the stories. So I decided to just start putting some of those stories up here.
Just a little background. My daughter Shoshanna (age 6) was diagnosed about 2 years ago with Leukemia. So we have had a pretty crazy life for the last two years. We have been in the ER a number of times. She also just got a blood disorder called ITP about 5 weeks ago to make things more complicated. My wife Karen also has hypertension, a heart arrythmia, and diabetes. She had some crazy challenges with that over the last couple weeks when she got the flu or something. So life has been pretty crazy already.
OK, now with that said, we move to the rest of the story (which gets progressively better) by starting with a paraphrase from Tevye (Fiddler on the roof). "Dear Lord, sometimes I wonder when it gets quiet up there you think 'I wonder what little bit of mischief I can play on the Yonkers'". Here is the deal. To start with, Karen had something like a flu or something recently. That like wiped her out. That was why we were in the ER with her one night. Then shortly after that she got these really weird hives. Don't know why. Took her into the doctor and he put her on Benadryl and steroids. So I got to deal with a wiggy wife for a little over a week. Talk about wired totally!
Well we are just getting done with both Karen and Shoshanna on steroids yesterday when our life just stays exciting with another event. Carolyn and Caleb had a band concert last night. They did really good by the way. Well we get home, have worship, and send the kids to bed. Karen and I are talking about a couple things then I was going to post on here about Shoshanna. Suddenly we hear John and David screaming upstairs. I go running up and there is a bat in the room.
OK, I consider myself a pretty macho guy that can handle most anything. One thing that does tend to freak me out though is flying things, especially flying mammals. But, of course, being the man of the house it is my job to take care of the thing. I close the bedroom door and take a few minutes for a think. First I try to hit the thing (it was hanging on the wall) with a soccer ball. Well I suppose if I was not so nervous and such I might have at least come close, but I missed by a mile. So now it is flying again. It lands right above the door this time.
During all of this my 15 year old daughter Carolyn is terrorizing David and John (it is their room) that the bat has rabies and lots of relatives in the attic. And that later tonight the other bats are going to come down and bite them in their sleep. This puts John, who was already quite scared, into an absolute terror fit. He locks himself in the younger girl’s room. If I was not so busy with the bat I would take care of Carolyn, but the bat comes first.
Now for plan two. I grab a broom, slide open the door, and then thrust the broom up and trap the bat under it. Wonderful!!! It is not able to fly around the room. But now I am simply holding the bat in one place. Not what I really had in mind. I hollar for Caleb to bring me a hammer. I figure one or two good wacks on the broom will take care of the problem pretty well. But David starts to hollar not to kill the bat. "It is not his fault, he is innocent". I am telling David to get a grip, sometimes critters must die, but Karen comes in for a bat reprieve carrying a coffee can. "On the Internet it says to capture bats in a can", she says. "OK, you get up here and do it", I reply. No such luck. Women’s rights do not extend to bat capturing (insert choice words here). So I ask for a towel. I try to catch the bat in the towel but he flops out on the floor and starts hopping across the floor. Oh, by the way, did I tell you I was on a ladder by this time?
Well I hop off the ladder with the broom and start trying to wack the bat to stun it before it achieves flight or crawls under something. I break the broom, making me mad now. I get the bat under the broom again, this time on the floor. I ask for the can and get the bat in it. Now I am holding a bat on the floor in a coffee can. Hmmmm. I ask for a piece of cardboard. I get it slid under the can and am able to lift it up, bat squeaking inside.
I now head down the stairs and outside (making sure that David can hear the squeaking bat so he knows it is alive still) to release it. Karen says, "Just take it far away from the house, set the can down and lift the cover, that is what the Internet says". Yeah right! I take it way far away, but instead I whip it far away from me. I am not going to let some pissed off bat decide to go after the jailer.
Well now as I am walking in the house I notice blood all over my hands (insert more choice words here). I go into the bathroom and wash off my hands. I have a puncture wound just below the ring finger on my left hand. Karen says right away "You need to go get rabies shots, that is what it says on the Internet". I try to argue that it could have been the breaking of the broom. She shows me on the Internet thought "Untreated rabies is 100% fatal and if you wait for symptoms it is to late". She then asks me to make sure the will is updated and the life insurance lists her as beneficiary.
So I call the urgent care nurse and after a bit of a chat am told I need to go to the ER, at 10:30 at night! Well, of course I know how to get there really well. Karen says, "have a nice night, I am going to bed, oh and take your computer for something to do, it will probably take a while". Thanks a lot. I grab my computer and head out.
The ER is absolutely packed, and half the people have masks on their faces, either because they have the flu or are scared of the flu. Well I might be afraid of a bat, but not of a silly flu, so I don't get a mask (we will know in a week if that was a stupid move). They take my information and ask me to sit. My computer decides not to connect to the Internet for some reason. So I watch an episode of Keeping up appearances that I have with. I then put things away and just go to sleep. I finally go back to a room about 1:30 or so and go back to sleep on the bed. At least it is a bit more comfortable.
The doc comes in (along with a cute lady nurse) and we have a chat. She then says I need both rabies and tetanus shots. Fun. I go back to sleep to wait. The nurse comes in and asks my weight, 300 lbs. She comes back in a few minutes later to ask my height, 6'6". I just want to sleep. About 2:30 the doc comes back in with two nurses, male nurses! She says "Wow you are a really big guy, you are going to have to get a lot of shots"! "I hate to make you a pin cushion, but the pharmacy says you need all this", she tries to comfort me with. This does not sound good.
To spare you the gory details, I got a shot in the palm of the hand right next to the cut/puncture wound. I got a shot in each arm, two shots in each butt cheek, and a shot in each thigh (that makes 9 total for those who struggle with math). The doc then offers me vicodin for the pain the next day. Oh great, what is this going to feel like. Well I have some still at home so I skip the prescription. Besides it is not as fun to take at home, or when you have male nurses. Not like when I got it for my foot and started chasing nurses in a wheel chair, with my wife right there (vicodin and I have a really good time together).
When I get home I see that Shoshanna (who can never sleep all night in her bed when on steroids), and John (totally freaked by the evenings events), are sleeping in the bed with Karen. I have no room in my own bed to sleep. So I just head off to the little girls room and curl up exhausted in Shoshanna’s bed.
Well today I am a little sore, but not as bad as I expected. Oh, did I tell you I get to go in for more shots this Saturday and the next two or three after this one? And the nurse was so funny (haha). He let me know that if I don't want to wait long to come between 5 and 7 AM because that is when the fewest people are there. Maybe only an hour wait compared to many hours other times of the day. I guess being their pet pin cushion does not rank very high in the triage list.
Labels: bat rabies leukemia hospital emergency room er family crazy shot kids children
Forever since my last post
Well it has been forever since my last post. There is a lot of stuff that has gone on since then. I guess that I am looking now at what I can do to be able to focus this a little more and make it more meaningful to people other than me. So here is the story. I am going to put stuff up here primarily about cooking, well and my really big family (11 kids). The other thing is that I am going to post my efforts to get scholarships for the Masters program that I want to take. It is really funny that if I were a woman or a minority or disabled it would be really easy for me to get loads of money. Since I am a middle aged man of English and Dutch ancestry I am kinda out of luck. Funny how that happens.
I have a different blog I setup a long time ago for geeky computer stuff that I am going to continue to use for that type of stuff.... Maybe I might start a different one for White Male trying to get college funding. Maybe even come up with a cool acronym like WMTTCF. Hmmm that does not mean anything. Well something like that. Something that might even go on a T-Shirt.
Sitting at the fire
Ok, I am sitting at the fire that we have outside our house next to our sukkah. The sukkah is decorated with lots of lights. It is pretty cold out though, 49 degrees right now. Sparky and I went on a motorcycle ride with my daughter and her husband tonight. It was loads of fun.
A couple of weeks ago we went to Tony Lin's down on Alpine. It was pretty good. The food was really good and the waitress was outstanding. She said that she was brand new and please be patient but she was great. The only thing that was disappointing was my dessert. I ordered the Key Lime pie. I had one bite and it was sooooo bad that was were I stopped.
The service was way better than the service that we had at Olive Garden a few nights later. Sparky and I went with my parents to Olive Garden. We had aweful service. I actually got up and complained to the manager about it. Well we will see how it goes next time there.
Very soon I am going to be doing a video podcast with a friend of mine. I will put more about it on this blog. It will be a podcast about politics and life. It should be really interesting.
Well my fingers are freezing so I am going to end and post this. More later.
People don't prepare anymore
Well here we are a couple of weeks past the hurricane. First thing is that it is fully apparent that people did not take seriously the need for speed and decisiveness in the response. Chertoff is at least as culpable as Brown for the delays. It also shows that we need to take seriously disaster response. A troop of Boy Scouts could have done a better job. I know because I used to be a Boy Scout.
In the aftermath now we have some hard questions to answer. It is imperative for the federal, state and local governments to step in during an emergency like this. Now we have the rebuilding though. This is the point where what I am about to say will probably anger many. Most people are calling for massive amounts of money to be poured into the area to rebuild what has been destroyed. Money, I assume, that is suppose to come from the tax payers. In the old days people, usually, would save up money for a rainy day (hehe interesting irony in that pun). The idea was that you never knew what was coming so you needed to be prepared. Well now we have a big government that will "take care of us all" so we do not need to save.
It is one thing for people in a local community to voluntarily band together and help their neighbors. In this case it is even great that people from across the country are moving in to volunteer time and effort to help out. What is maddening is when people build in a flood plain in a town that is below sea level, and do not plan for the disaster that will inevitably come. That is just stupidity and childishness.
Now I know that I am not perfect and that I have not always had savings either, however I try to be self sufficient. I also would like others to try to. We need to foster an attitude change in this country back to the more self-sufficent mindset that people used to have. I can tell you why I know this is true. Many people reading this will say that I am insensitive to expect people to prepare, that I just do not understand thier plight. Well my wife and I have been through a number of hard times and we have struggled hard to get through them. There were times we got help from family, friends, and church members, but we also worked hard to move out of the problems and toward better days. Without that deep desire to do that we would never be out of the problem times.
Well now we will see tons of money going to help out down there, and to top it off the libs in congress will tell me how we cannot "afford" any tax cuts and will even have to increase the tax burden on the rest of us. Yeah right. Any excuse to take more of my money away from me. And to think that at one time the income tax rate was like a lowly 4%.
Well there you go.... some thoughts to chew on.
Hmmmm what title?!?!?!
OK, this is just a ramble. I first want to congratulate Larry on his progress on his diet and encourage him to keep up!! You are inspiration to others that need to diet by sticking with it.
Second, I am glad to see that the head of FEMA is now gone! I did not know until later on that this was a person that should never have been given the position. It is two totally different things to manage a regular business and to manage something like a relief agency. Not too many people can handle the pressure of the suddenly fast paced world of a relief agency. It is somewhat similar to the stuff I do in computers. There are times that we have to react fast and are under a lot of pressure to perform and to do it quickly. I have seen a lot of people make big mistakes hwen under pressure and get all nerved up and such. Bush replaced him with what sounds like a good choice, time will tell.
Well I am falling asleep writing this so I am going to make this short and try to write tomorrow night. I should be able to get on a little earlier tomorrow night.
Whatever happened ot saving up for a rainy day???
I was listening to one of the two financial gurus this morning that I regularly listen to (Clark Howard and Dave Ramsey) and I started thinking more about this hurricane thing. In the past my wife and I lived like most other Americans. If we wanted it we got it. We lived for the moment. We recently started to change our financial habits and become what most would call "old fashioned". We are trying to put money in savings, pay off all our debts, save for retirement, and live debt-free. It is a more disciplined life but also one that says "I will take responsibility for myself".
As we listened for the last week plus, one of the big things we heard was that many of the people that were stuck could not get out and now they HAD to rely on the government to get them out of trouble. Well if they would have saved, and lived more disciplined then they would not be in this position. I mentioned it to others this morning and they said that these people were poor. Well I was talking to a financial advisor early this week and he mentioned a couple that made a combined income of like $36,000 a year. Over the course of their lives they managed to save $1.7 Million for retirement. That is a lot of coin! And these people would be considered poor.
Well it is about time that we start following the lead of smart people like Dave Ramsey, Clark Howard, and others that are saying to save up and to live responsibly and not rely on others to bail us out all the time!
