Home In Time for the New Year!

After much waiting around and miscommunication with various members of the health care profession, we finally got mom home yesterday evening. She is using a walker for stability, and she is very easily tired, but she is home in her own bed and feeling very pleased about it! We will be in close communication with the dialysis clinic over the next few weeks, as we need to avoid a repeat of this episode and we need to make sure that peritoneal dialysis will actually work for her. We sincerely hope the changes that were made to her cycle plan will be enough to make it effective, as we are very reluctant to have to return to hemodialysis.

It's really "warm" here in AK right now, as snow drips from the eaves. Hoping to find time for a workout at Body Renew today, as we have switched over to this health club. I'm not sure if we will be able to, but we are going to try...

Katie is busy making Sculpey clay creations to sell. She has decided that proceeds are going to the animal shelter, and she has raised almost $20. :-)

Mom Feeling Better!

Couldn't think of a better post title than this; creative juices are not flowing! ;-)

Mom is sounding much more like herself, and is expecting to come home tomorrow afternoon. We are buying a walker for her and a physical therapist will be visiting two or three times a week to help her regain leg strength.

I'm just relieved that she sounds like Ingrid again, and the tremors and feeling of misery is gone. She is complaining bitterly about the food, feeding herself, and scolding the nurse and the doctor. It's safe to say that my mom is back to herself.

Kirk, Katie and I had a lovely time at Stacy and Rees Miller's home last night. Rees, a science teacher who is also a chef, cooked us the most incredible four course meal. We laughed and ate and the kids played happily. It was a lovely small crowd of guests and we can't wait to do it again!

Post Christmas Update...

It's been hectic around here during the Christmas season.

Mom's tremors and leg weakness got worse and worse, and by the afternoon of the 23rd, we decided to hit the Emergency Room. After not being taken very seriously for quite a while, blood tests revealed that her potassium levels were through the roof (critical levels) and she was uremic. This means that the home dialysis was not working, and toxins had been building in her blood. She was immediately hospitalized. For the past 4 days the doctors have tried to celan her blood with the peritoneal dialysis, but it just isn't doing the trick. SO this morning they put the heart catheter back into place that was removed just over a week ago...and they did hemodialysis. We are praying this cleans her blood faster and more efficiently. Once she is stable again, we will see what happens next. OVerall she is feeling really crummy. Being uremic causes your muscles to jerk around, and makes your brain fuzzy and makes it very difficult to form words and speak.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we had a lovely toned down Christmas with our three lovely kids. We ate our traditional monkey bread for breakfast and opened presents together. We had a lazy day at home. My big Christmas gift had not arrives, but I am blogging on it right this minute. Kirk got me my dream technology wish: a Macbook Air! I LOVE it, but have not got it set up completely yet. SO no pictures in this post. Soon.

One gift I got Kirk was HIS dream fitness wish: switching to Body Renew from the Alaska Club. A lot less expensive. He is eager to try it out...

I will post more later, including a little picture of mom.

Mom Update...and Katie Too!

Katie had a lovely holiday concert the week before Christmas Break. She loves singing in the school choir. Her teacher captured a wonderful picture ofher during the afternoon concert. I just love it:

Mom had an interesting day today. The arm and hand tremors she developed recently were really, really pronounced and bothering her a lot, from the moment she woke up. She also felt that her legs were very weak and shaking. We got to go to Costco and do the final fitting of her new hearing aids, and she was quite pleased to be able to hear everything going on around her again!

Unfortunately, her leg weakness was really pronounced by evening, and she as unable to walk into the house when we returned home. Very frustrating and scary for her... We need to talk with her doc about these symptoms.

I still have lots of Christmas shopping to do... as usual!

Testing Blogger...

Since it's been a while since I used Blogger, I need to re-familiarize myself a bit with how things work around here.

So, I need to post a picture to see what I can do, and how the theme I chose works...

Here's a pic from Jake's recent soccer tournament:

Back on the horse...

I'd like to use this blog a bit more. Although Facebook is nice for quick updates, I would like to spend a bit more time getting news to family that lives away, especially news about mom. She lurks at Facebook, but I can't get her to post much there, and family always is looking to know more about what's going on. I think this might also be a good way for me to gather thoughts about my other endeavors: crafting, reading, etc.

So, although I know there's no one out there reading, I am going to give this a shot. At the very least I'll have a journal of sorts that I can look back upon. (I found it interesting to look back at some of my past posts...)

December has been hectic and muddled for me. One reason for that is that I was out of state for the last two weeks of November for a professional conference and a soccer tournament. Then I came back to work for a little over a week, and suddenly I needed to go to training for at-home dialysis. We originally had thought that mom could do the training and I would just come in for a day or so as back-up, but mom felt very uncomfortable with how the training was going. The nurse needed someone else to do the dialysis at home, so I quickly rearranged my schedule and headed over for 7 days of training at the dialysis unit.

I'm glad I did. the process is pretty complex, and mom's increasing hand/arm tremors make her very shaky. Although it was and is time intensive, I am glad that she's not trying to handle it.

We have now been doing at home dialysis for about 10 days or so. Mom is feeling a lot better as a result, as the hemodialysis was really making her feel terrible. Of course, now she has all kinds of free time on her hands, so she will need to come up with something to fill her time. I set up her computer with Stumble Upon; this seems to give her some web browsing options. She also loves to lurk on Facebook. Unfortunately she's not in great condition to drive right now, for several reasons. This severely cramps her style, understandably so!

Katie is semi-enjoying the Christmas break. She's a little isolated here and gets pretty bored. It's not like when the boys were little and they had each other to play with. Poor Katie!

Martin finished his first semester at UAA with a 3.6 GPA! He is feeling mighty proud of himself. He is majoring in Psychology, and greatly enjoys his use of the little apartment downtown. A million thanks to his grandparents for that perk!

Well, I guess that's enough for now... Hopefully this won't be a one time event....