July 5, 2015 Lorraine’s report
Happy 4th of July. Hope you all enjoyed our holiday. I know we did and we so thank all the service men and women who helped keep our country safe and sound. It has been a nice week here. Hope all is well. Take care…Hugs,
Lorraine
7/5/15 Chuck’s report
Hope everyone had a great 4th of July yesterday and are still enjoying the holiday weekend. I know we did.
Just a short update here. Lorraine is still doing just fine, tomorrow will be a week since her procedure to repair the brain aneurysm. After her stroke she was sent to a specialist who checked her brain to see if there was any problems. He found she had two aneurysms in two different places which just happened to correspond to the areas in her brain where she had both this stroke and a prior one in 2012.
We elected to have him repair the aneurysms by working inside her veins vs through her skull. He makes a small incision in her leg to gain access to her veins so he can run a camera and other tools all the way up to her brain. The repair was to put a coil inside, lots of coil, enough to basically fill the whole thing. Then he would inject a cement type solution inside to finish the job.
She had two different type of aneurysms, one was like a balloon with a small “neck”. This one was only required the above treatment. The other was more like a box or large “neck” type. The difference with this one was if he filled it with the coil and cement, it could fall out later and block the main artery, not a good thing. For this one, he would need to put a stent in the main artery, allow it to become firmly attached and then later, in her case 6 weeks later, go back in and put the coil and cement solution.
When he repaired the first one, he also inserted the stent for the second. This procedure when well and now we only had to wait the 6 weeks for the second one. Last Monday she had the second one filled and once again everything went well, no problems. We have to see 4 of her doctors this month for follow-ups and we are going to try to get permission from each for us to travel afterwards.
Susy is also continuing to recover from her surgery. She had two disks removed and three vertebras fuse in her neck. She is still wearing a neck brace, mostly just when she is in the car and when she is laying down. But she doesn’t have permission from her doctor to drive yet so she has to rely on someone else to pick her up and bring her back. We try to be there for her as much as we can and she either spends the day at our place or we spend our day at hers. I know she is really wanting to get her independence back as soon as possible! Only good thing is she hasn’t been able to go back to work but that’s just a view from an old retired fart.
Katie is on summer vacation from school and is busy doing lots of activities. For example, yesterday she and her dad went to a 4th of July parade in the morning, an amusement park in the afternoon and watched a fireworks display even later. She had a busy day but then, most of her days are filled with lots of activities.
We were at Susy’s place yesterday where we had a very nice BBQ pork rib dinner with fruits, potato salad, Costco Apple pie (yea Dave, that one) and a cake decorated up for the 4th. For sure no one was hungry after all that. Thanks for a very good day Susy!
We are hoping to get back up to Washington in August, leaving here after Lorraine’s last doctor visit. Lorraine’s sister Thelma’s birthday is two days before Lorraine’s (August 6th) and Lorraine would like to celebrate together once again. Thelma and her husband John will also have been married 50 years this August and we would like to be there for that occasion as well.
We are also having work done on our house we still own back home. We had a fire inside one of the bedroom in April and the insurance repair folks are still doing repairs. We are getting the house ready for sale and will get it on the market as soon as possible. Even though I have a good guy helping out up there, I would like to be around too.
This guy has replaced both of the decks and will be doing more work on the outside of the house to get it in better shape. The house is on the water and gets lots of storm/wind/sun exposure and even though the siding is vinyl, the exposed wood on the eves, window and door frames and such needs to be cleaned and painted. Plus he is going to wash all the vinyl, I guess it’s pretty dirty too.
After renting out our house for the past 7 years, there is some work that also needs to be done on the inside too. We aren’t sure of the scope of work for that just yet but the realtor and the contractor will be doing a walk-thru, checking everything out and will make a list of items needing work on Tuesday.
We also have a large shop that we have been storing some stuff in since we’ve been on the road. We are going to attempt to go through all the stuff and get rid of most of it. We are thinking of hiring an auction company to handle it once we pick out the things we want to keep. We will probably buy one of those POD storage units or something to keep our remaining items somewhere until we find a place to settle down someday.
So if you know of someone who would like to have a nice house and shop right on the salt water on Bellingham Bay, let us know. Here’s hoping we have it sold by Labor day!! It really is in a good location, just South of Ferndale, not too far from Bellingham and a nice, no traffic drive to work at the refinery or aluminum plant.
The weather has once again been really nice here over the past week, high 80s even a couple of 90s. Like I’ve said before, this area would be on our short list of places to settle down except for three things, 1. Way too many people and all the problems from that 2. Its California and comes with all the high taxes and fees they have imposed and 3. The prices for everything, especially houses, is just too high. But it is a nice area and we like being close to Susy and Katie.
I didn’t check to see if we have any pictures so will just finish up and get this posted now.
Thanks Chuck
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