The march of time

It's been several weeks since my last post. There has been a lot going on in our life in that time. Jacqueline had 2 weeks of Band Camp in preparation for this years marching season. Band Camp began at 5:00pm and lasted until 10:00pm. This made things a little hectic for me since I work until 4:00pm and it's 30 minute drive from work to home. I would arrive home, change clothes and fly our the door again in order to get to Band Camp on time. Despite this hectic schedule, I am glad that the new Band Director kept camp at night instead of holding it during the day. With some of our daytime highs hitting triple digits, it just makes more sense to work in the cool of the evening.

Another event that has occurred during my last post is that we had to hospitalize Randy for a few days. He began having severe chest pain last Wednesday night around midnight. Since the pain was also radiating down his left arm, I thought it prudent to take him to the ER. I drove him myself rather than calling an ambulance, which allowed me to take him to the hospital that I felt could treat him the best. It is not actually the closest one to our house, but from previous experience we know it to be the better of the two choices. From the amount of pain that he was in and the description of the pain, he thought he might be having a heart attack. Thankfully that was not the case. Rather it was a case of a build up of fluid in his lungs which in turn put a lot of pressure on his heart. From the time he was admitted to the ER until 4:00pm that evening, he excreted 3 liters of fluid. He was kept in ICU from 2:00am Thursday morning until about 9:00am Friday morning. Then he was moved to a regular room. He was released from the hospital Friday evening. There have been changes made to his medicines and he is doing much better. One of the major changes in his medicine has been the increase of diuretics. This is to keep the fluid from building up. He is also supposed to weigh himself daily in order to make sure that there is no unexplained weight gain, which is a sign of fluid retention. Another change in his medicine is that he is now taking something to slow his heart beat. I am very happy about that, because his heart was beating so rapidly before. He had tachycardia, which is a heart rate of over 100 beats a minute. Now he is averaging about 89 beats a minute. Much better.

Jeremy starts back to college next week. I know he's looking forward to going back. I don't know if it's the college classes that he's looking forward to, or the chance to play pool and ping-pong during his breaks. His classes will end for the day around 2:00pm and since he will be riding home with me for a while, he will have about a 2 hour block of time that he can use to play pool and otherwise goof off.

We haven't made much progress on the house since returning from vacation. We had someone hired to come in and put up sheetrock, but that hasn't worked out, so we will try to hire someone different. We also need to get the plumber out to finish the plumbing that was started last summer. There is so much to do in the months remaining before winter, and time marches on, whether we accomplish our goals or not.