called to stand here

Last week we marked the beginning of the new academic school year with the University Convocation . Then Margy and I looked at the house we decided to buy --and seven or eight others later in the week! Next, we made an offer on it, and after enough negotiation, we arrived at a deal. The good Lord willing (and the creek don't rise), we'll move at the end of September. There really are lots of things to do before we close on the 15th of September. One of the issues we're up against is the fact that Margy's not going to be permitted to lift anything over 10 pounds until she's made progress toward healing--something that's not coming quickly enough for either of us. But apart from prayer and obeying the doctor's prohibitions on lifting, we're in limbo. She's not ready to give into the surgery option. Not yet. And life goes on. It's amazing how quickly things can move--despite our fear/belief that we were going to be stuck for awhile. But just like t...

Yesterday I drove home from work and saw a "SOLD" sign on the For Sale sign on our house. What an amazing transition from the discouraged place Margy and I were at only two weeks before. She was in the hospital with terrible back/neck pain, and the prospect of cleaning up the house for showings at the drop of a hat stirred up even more pain. So we agreed we'd just take the house off the market and wait until we did all those things on our "to-do" list that was nagging at us. We got the deck done (thanks to Nic), and cleared out the storage room in the basement so it wasn't wall-to-wall junk (thanks to Josh--and us!), but the list included painting, recarpeting the family room, etc. Lots of work. And now we don't have to! But we do need to find another place to live. This weekend we'll start a marathon of looking at other people's houses in the vicinity of the university. Open doors... soon one of them might be ours.

Well, Margy got out of the hospital after only three days. Not that she was well. She'd gotten rehydrated, the pain was more or less under control, and she was eating again. That's a lot to be thankful for; and we were. Today, almost two weeks after her release from the krankenhaus, she had her first real treatment of her back/neck problem. She went to Dr. Jeff, a doctor of osteopaty in Madelia, who put her on a monster machine called a DRX9000 for about 30 minutes. Her head was placed in a special molded form connected to a strap that exerted up to six pounds of pressure designed to decompress her herniated discs. When we drove home, she said she was free of pain in her left arm for the first time in three weeks. Praise God! If she continues to improve with this treatment, she'll probably be visiting Madelia twice a week for the next eight weeks. And then we hope she never has to return again!

I took Margy to the hospital this evening. Her back has been giving her trouble for the past couple months, and over the past two weeks, the pain has rachetted up to the point of unbearable. Last night we made a trip to the emergency room, a critical step toward getting the pain medications necessary to deal with what looks like a ruptured disc on a weekend. Not that the decision to get admitted to the hospital was simple. It only took an afternoon of pain past the threshhold of holding down food, water, anything. So the only alternative is to get rehydrated with an IV, which conveniently can serve as the vehicle for the pain medication and the steriod which will hopefully setting the swelling ruptured disc... Seeing my dear wife in the hospital bed in complete misery was a complex of emotions. Thank God she's in a place where she can really get the care she needs: I was completely over my head. On the other hand, she's not getting relief very quickly: the MRI that they did of...