Gratitude is Me For Carl

It's been an awful year for Carl and his health.  He has been the picture of health all his life,  so this has not been easy for him or for me.  i don't know what I'd do without him either so I'll hang on as you see me doing here.

The above picture was taken by our good friend and ward member, Kimball Ungerman, a couple of weeks ago.  Thought you'd like to see it.

Carl's Good!

And here’s to the best news I’ve posted in a long, long time.  Carl’s cancer, it would appear, is gone.

They did the PSA blood test on Monday, and reported today the results was -.004 -- virtually undetectable.  It would appear that even good old water itself doesn’t get a perfect .000000 on the PSA test for prostate cancer.  

I hate to think what would have happened had Carl not had his kidney stone and met up with the good Dr. Dan Hibbert, the sneaky urologist who chances a check on the adjacent prostate while calming a raging kidney stone.  Fortunately an additional plus for Dr. Hibbert is he is unique in the area in his ability to perform the prostatectomy via robotics enabling Carl to recover considerably faster than he otherwise would have.  Further, the precision is much better than a manual surgery so damage is less likely.

Carl has always cursed his kidney stones and his propensity to create them and yet it turns out that they were blessings in disguise.  Isn’t that the way of things?  

How often we complain of the very things that ultimately we find make us strong and even save our lives.  

I thank God for this.  I am a firm believer than we will realize that there has not been a wasted moment, experience, pain, loss, or ache that has not “come together for our good.”  I believe in that kind of great economy of our God.  For example, I would have never believed that I could have loved Carl more.  But here I am, loving him more than I could have ever imagined before. 

Dedicated to Carl Aukschun as of Late

Thanks to Greg Olsen

Carl's Off The Table And Recovery Ensues

Carl is home from the hospital at last.  

He has never really had quite the assault upon his person that he has had the last five days in his whole life.  

He had stents put in his heart arteries -- a couple in the early nineties and three last July, but his insides were never quite so abused as this.  

I feel, though, that he was so blessed to have his kidney stones a couple of months ago so that Dr. Daniel Hibbert, a 6 ft. 9 in. giant could check out his prostate and PSA count and find that Carl indeed did have prostate cancer.  It’s just a little like my brother, Brent having kidney stones about this time last year and finding he had kidney cancer.  I think it’s God’s way of putting on a little sticky note to say “I don’t want you home quite yet.  Do something now right about right here.”  

Thank you, God, for both of them.

But there are some inconveniences.  

As I said in a previous blog, Carl doesn’t swear, but he does get to wear a little catheter bag for a couple of weeks and he almost cussed out the length of tubing, clamps and bag as he tried to figure the whole mess out his first day with it at home.  I wasn’t laughing to be sure as he commented that anyone who thinks catheters are funny doesn’t know what funny is.  It’s not that we think they’re funny.  We just are mighty glad it’s not us.  He's more used to it now, but he still doesn't like it.  

He hurts pretty bad still.  Not as bad as he did yesterday and not as bad as he did the days before.  I presume tomorrow will be even better.  

His surgery was the robotic laproscopic prostectomy which is much less common than the usual wide open hands-on job, but has far less hacking and hewing on the outside and is far more precise on the inside, but it still requires lots of cutting through the muscles of the stomach and still hurts like a son-of-a-gun.  

He will have a total of two weeks with the catheter and some recovery besides, including another four weeks of getting better and better, according to the good Dr. Hibbert and then after that he should feel pretty good.  Who knows how long before he's "back to normal" whatever that is.

I did mention to Dr. Hibbert that a "Dr. Hibbert" is also on the Simpsons and wondered if he gets teased a lot.  He said that those in the circles he travels in don’t watch the Simpsons much.  What?  You’d think patients of Urologists would gravitate right to the Simpsons.  I’ll let you provide the punchline yourselves.  

We Have Squatters on the Premises

They're here.  We've got four baby barn swallows in a nest on our front porch who own two frantic parents  that are desperate for a little sleep, time to themselves and peace and quiet.

We've been watching the nest from construction to today for about four weeks now, from tiny eggs to the gaping maws you see in the picture.  And isn't the nest a beautiful thing to behold?

Carl has cleverly jury-rigged his camera with his computer, chairs, valuable antique table, wrench, twisties and other stuff to shoot the pictures you see, proving that sometimes the simplest of things make for the most significant moments in our lives.  It has been beautiful.

We have also learned a thing or two.  Barn swallows fly around as a pair during the day when the eggs are in the nest checking back on the eggs from time to time and swoop about when someone is too close to the eggs, i.e. on our porch.  They sleep with the eggs and later, with the babies, at night.

Also, when sitting on the eggs, (and you can't tell if it's the male or the female because they look just alike,) they stick their little bottoms over the edge of the nest to poop to keep things neat and tidy in there and as a result, make a mess on our porch.  (I do understand, however.  We were young parents once and remember how stressful the situation was.  We'll take care of it later.)

Also, common as they are, they are Federally protected.  You can knock the nest away before the eggs are laid and can clear it out after the babies are gone, but in between, expect the Federales to come and take you away if you mess with the little guys while they have habitation.

But who would want to?  They are the cutest things ever.  We feel kind of "chosen" this year, even though we haven't been able to sit on our front porch at the peril of getting our eyes pecked out.