In late August I wrote what I thought was the final report on my husband's two bouts of sepsis (blood infection). He was doing great - walking without anymore difficulty, eating well again, and even getting to the point of driving his car and going places on his own. Unfortunately, he had a third recurrence of sepsis that started on September 26 and he's been in the hospital ever since. The good news this time is that the doctors found the bacteria and the source of the infection. The bad news is it will take my husband much longer to recover than it did the first two times. In week four of his hospitalization he still is not walking, he needs to be fed through a tube in his nose, and his mental ability is still not back to normal. Because the risk of sepsis is higher in seniors, I thought I'd provide all my senior friends who read this website with some information about this potentially life-threatening disease. I certainly knew nothing about it until if affected my husband. … [Read more...]
Now, there’s a poem
If you've been here a time or two, you know I’ve always believed there is a poem out there everywhere. So many of my ideas for poems come from people I see and places I go that I’m really never at a loss for something to write about. I’m constantly saying, “Now, there’s a poem.” Still I like to work with prompts. I keep a list of them that I get from the Writer’s Digest’s poetry editor, Robert Lee Brewer and his Poetic Asides blog. He posts a prompt every Wednesday. Sometimes he’ll combine it with a request that we write in a specific poetry form, e.g., Haiku, Nonet, Luc Bat, Tanka, Ekphrastic, Quatern, Tritina. So I get a prompt, but a poetry lesson as well. Robert writes about things he knows and loves. The words are simple, homey, about his wife and children. I relate to that. He also conducts two poem-a-day challenges a year in April and November. I’ve participated for the last several years. At the end of the month he asks us to submit a chapbook of our best few poems … [Read more...]
A progress report
In John Lennon's song, Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy), he sings: Life is what happens when you're making other plans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_j-tpmdPlI My mother always said something similar: Man plans, and God laughs. Well, life was sure happening to me last week. I worked diligently on my book, as I said I would do in my previous blog post, for the first three days, and I actually made some great progress. Then boom! It all fell apart. My husband, Bob, woke up early last Thursday morning with shortness of breath. I took him to urgent care and he got an EKG. With those results the doctor there said take him to emergency at our local hospital. And we were off and running. Two and a half days later and tests to rule out a heart attack, pneumonia, blood clots in his lungs, and congestive heart failure, he was feeling better. So they sent him home. Less than 24 hours later, he was short of breath again even worse. This time we called his own doctor (who had … [Read more...]
