December 7

I thought that I should write a few words before Krista reminds me that I'm a slacker, again.

Tonight is Miss Paige's Christmas program in Highland. Jerry and I will be attending, and hopefully will find a seat. Austin's school had their Christmas program at our last Advent service and the Sunday School is having their this Wednesday, but we won't be attending. The last one was so crowded that we had to park in the street, and I can just imagine where they'll be parking people for this service.

Jerry fell down the basement steps last night and hurt his toes, leg, back and head. He was pretty sore this morning. Hopefully he's doing better by now.

Our church's directory is on-line, but we haven't received our copy. Krista pointed out that our picture is the first one in the new directory. I don't know what happened to the people who were in front of us in the last one.

Is this enough Krista?

Blog slacker

Krista just wrote and said Monica and I are both blog slackers, so I thought that I should write a few words. My life is very boring, so I really don't have anything to say.

I went back to work part-time Oct 12 - 4 hrs per day, and went back full-time Oct. 26. My days are long, and nights are short. It's dark when I get home from work, and since I'm gone 10 1/2 hrs, I'm tired, so I have been going to bed shortly after I get home. I hate driving at SIUE after dark. You never know when a deer will dart out in front of you. Tonight Jerry and I are meeting at Bully's, so I won't have to drive down the SIUE hills. Just watch, a deer will dart out in front of me on 157.

Barb came home for her sister-in-law's funeral. I didn't get to spend too much time with her - it was rainy the entire time, she had a headache and I had an awful sinus infection. My darling grandchildren were all at my house Oct 30. That was very nice, but with my sinus infection, I wasn't too warm to them. I hope they understood, but they probably didn't even notice. They were all excited about going trick or treating.

That's all for now. I'll try to write more often, Krista.

Home Again

I was able to come home from the hospital yesterday, for the second time. When I went to Dr. Penn's office on Wednesday, Aug. 12 to get my staples out, they removed the stitches and my leg started leaking cereus. He was concerned that I had infection, so he sent me straight to the hospital for surgery the next afternoon. It was very depressing. My first night in the hospital was so-so, but went down hill from there. The nurses on the 3rd floor weren’t used to ortho. patients, so weren’t nearly as good for me as the nurses on the 2nd floor. Actually, they weren’t nearly as good of nurses in general as the ones on the 2nd floor. I don’t believe any of the RN’s I had, had there BA or BS. They either graduated from St. Louis Comm College, Kaskaskia, or Lewis and Clark. The nurse I had the night after surgery was the worse. She was next to abusive. I don’t know if she thought I was still out of it, but she was very rough. I called Jerry and he called and talked to the head nurse and reported her. My entire stay, they nurses didn’t answer the calls in a timely manner, they left my IV in 2 days longer than they were supposed to and my drain wasn’t removed until a day late. They didn’t change my bedding, or my bloody socks, I wore from the doctor’s office. They didn’t put my ice bags on, as they were supposed to, didn’t read, or misread the orders from the doctor. This was a horrible experience. I have bruises up and down my arms from the IV’s they kept changing. It took one nurse 5 tries and she didn’t even apologize. There were a couple of nice nurses, but out of the number of nurses that I had, the odds were not good.

29 minutes

29 minutes and counting. I will be away from here for at least 2 months. I'm getting a little nervous. Surgery isn't until noon tomorrow, or I would go home and go to bed to stop thinking about it. Lori Klosterman, the secretary in Athletics and a member of Trinity, called me a few hours ago and told me that she had both of her knees replaced earlier this year. (Both at the same time) Dr. Corvallis said that I'm pretty young to have my knees replaced, but I think that Lori is much younger than I am, so that made me feel a little better. I just hope that I do as well as she did. She's feeling much better than she did prior to her surgery.

Nothing new

Now I remember why I was so bad at writing in my diary when I was growing up. I have always had a boring life - get up, go to work, go home, make dinner, watch TV, and go to bed.

We are going to Austin's baseball game at 7:15 tonight, and Saturday we're going to the race track with Donna and Stan, after we go out to eat. Pretty exciting.

My knee surgery is scheduled for August 4. I got the results from my nasal swab test today and good news, I don't have MRSA. I thought for sure I did, and they would cancel my surgery. It's not that I'm looking forward to surgery, but I have already made my arrangements with work, and I've looked high and low for a new chair that I will be able to get out of.

Maybe after my stay in the hospital I'll have more to say, or maybe not. Is this better, Krista? You'll have to give me some helpful hints.

Trip to St Pete Beach 2009

Jerry, Monica, Austin and I went to St. Pete Beach June 6 - 10, 2009. We all had a pretty good time. Austin couldn't wait to get there to see the ocean, so we didn't tell him that St Pete was not on the ocean. Once he got into the Gulf, he decided he didn't care too much for it - he got a mouth full of salt water. Jerry talked him into going back in a little later and that time he had a good time. We visited Busch Gardens in Tampa one day, but it was a lot different than it was in 1970 when Mom, Dad, Todd and I were there. There were a couple of kid's areas with rides, so we spent much of the day there. We also rode the train a couple of times. Jerry and Austin were in line waiting to go on the log ride when it started raining. All rides were shut down at that time, they waited for a while, but then we decided to leave. I was ready, because my knees just can't take all the walking.

We had a hard time finding good places to eat. A few of the places we checked out were very expensive, so most of our meals were at Denny's or McDonalds. Austin's favorite place is McDonalds anyway.

Our resort, TradeWinds, had a huge inflated slide on the beach. Monica bought Austin an all-day pass for it and he had a great time.

We had to fly in to and out of Tampa and there was road construction all around, so Jerry wanted to leave for the airport early on the 10th. Well, it didn't take long at all to get there, so we had to spend several hours in Tampa's airport. All and all, we had a good time.