March 5 - March 12, 2009 - An Interesting Week

What a week!!!!

First I will start with the good stuff…

On Friday (6th) Andy and I were in the parade at North Ranch - he with the veterans and me with the Red Hats. It was a beautiful day for a walk in the park and we met so many great people. Such fun!! And some pictures:

On Friday night, my computer crashed!! So on Saturday, we went to the Wal-Mart in Prescott to get a new one. The drive was incredible. I only have a few pictures and will be going back on the drive again (I hope).

On Saturday night, we went to the Fiesta dinner and show - wonderful.

Our neighbor, Steve, is an amateur astronomer and Saturday night he set up his telescope and the sights, oh my. We were able to see Saturn and the craters of the moon and others. It reminded us of Cherry Springs State Park and the Star nights. What a wonderful night - Thanks, Steve.

And first I will talk about Elliot. We took him to the vets on Thursday. He drew blood and gave him an exam. He was able to tell us that he did not have diabetes. On Friday morning, I went early to take a urine sample and the vet met me with the blood results. He has the start of kidney disease. There is no cure - we can only manage at this time. Elliot, in people years, is over 100 and it is not unusual for this to happen at his age. I spent some time talking with the vet on what we could do and what to look for… On Saturday when we were at Prescott, we got another call from the vet, Dr. Rick, that the urine test showed that Elliot also had a bladder infection so we turned around and headed back to pick up antibiotics for him. I am trying not to think about this any further, just enjoy each day with Elliot!!!

The next thing is my Andy. He also had not been feeling well so on Monday, he called his doctor who told him to go to the emergency room. And he was in the hospital until yesterday. (My apologies to family and friends - he did not want me to say anything!) It turns out that the Plavix and aspirin that he has been on caused an ulcer that started to bleed. His blood numbers were all out of whack and they gave him 4 pints of blood. So our next steps are to see a gastroenterologist next week and then his doctor (oh yes, we got a doctor here!!) at the end of the week. There will be more tests to be done but we don’t have a date yet so we may be here for a little while longer.

My neighbors have been great and have offered any help we need. And, thank God, we are at a good place - Phoenix is about 70 miles away if we need any more specialties and I know if I need anything here, there are people who can help. I told Andy, we could have been in the desert with no services for 100 miles….

So that has been our week and why I did not update the blog. Hopefully things will be calmer and we will be able to do more and update you more - :-))