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Lebanon, Oregon, United States
We are Terry & Cathye Kinkelaar. If you've followed my blog in the past, you know that Lydia, my beautiful wife of 52 years, and I made the lifestyle choice to move to Oregon in 2017. You've seen my posts about losing her in May 2020 to cancer. Although I was left alone, I am pleased to say that I have found happiness again. In April 2021, I met Cathye, who also lost her longtime husband in 2020. Well, we fell in love and were married in April 2022. So, if folks are still interested, I will continue to post here as we move forward with our lives and adventures!

Wednesday, February 6, 2019

Oregon Living 2019 – Blog #12 – Super Bowl, A Surgery Consult, and Baby’s First Snow!



Sunday, February 3rd., 2019…...   SUPER BOWL SUNDAY! I am rooting for the Rams. Not that I like the Rams (I’m a Broncos fan), but I don’t like New England and they should lose to everybody! Also, Brandon Cooks, who plays for the Rams, is an Oregon State graduate. My neighbor, Lou, knows him pretty well. I think NE will dominate the game but I have a little hope. We’ll see…. They have a couple of the bars and pizza parlors here in town having parties, and the Elks in Sweet Home will do one too, but I always try to stay at home for the Super Bowl so I can watch it without any interruptions. Lydia made steak sandwiches out of the tri-tip so dinner was easy and good.
The game went about the way I thought it would go, except that scoring was tough for both teams. The Rams held tough for the first half but couldn’t score. You can’t keep the Patriots at bay for an entire game. The trio of Brady, Gronkowski, and Edelman just were too much for the Rams to defend. I guess they now all get to go to Disney World!   
  

Monday, February 4th., 2019……  We had a pretty good rain last night. And it was cold. But it didn’t snow - at least not on us. There is a hill back of our house, I’m guessing about a mile away that was covered with snow this morning when I took Rylee out for our walk.  We are supposed to have a few days of colder weather. Cold for us, but not near as bad as the Midwest, so I consider us lucky.
I spent some time online this morning looking for towel bars for our master bath. We have some we can buy from Home Depot but before we do that, we want to see what else is out there.  Lydia also found a wall clock for the dining room at Fred Meyer that we can buy on Amazon for way cheaper, so we looked at those while we were online.   
Today was Lydia’s consult. We liked Hanna, the physician’s assistant, who met with us and she reviewed Lydia’s history and asked all the right questions. Then she explained all of the possible scenarios for the future. After talking with her, the best plan as it stands today is to go ahead and fill out the necessary forms for surgery for the future.  But they want to wait until they can consult with their Samaritan kidney transplant team specialist for advice on possible alternatives, one of which might be a temporary reduction in dosage of the anti-rejection meds she has been taking for years. The gastro doctors seem to think that those meds are blocking the effectiveness of the antibiotics to treat the diverticulitis. If that is an option, it might avoid surgery. If that is not advised, then it is likely that the surgery for a colon re-section will take place. They said it would be probably in March sometime. Recovery is 6-8 weeks so, that means any travel plans we were contemplating can’t be made until the recovery is complete. Lydia is good with either option – she wants this to go away!
We got back home and relaxed for a while, then heated up leftovers for dinner and then watched our taped AGT until bedtime.    
       
Tuesday, February 5th., 2019…... I got up around 3:30am to pee and Rylee wanted out. Guess what? It was snowing! Baby’s first snow!  Once I got back to bed, I wasn’t in any hurry to get up. When we did, Rylee ventured out slowly at first, then decided it was one big ice cube to lick!  But thankfully that stopped after a bit. It had dropped about one inch on the ground overnight. Although it had stopped snowing (nothing in the forecast today) it wasn’t going anywhere. So, I waited until around 11:30am to take pooper dog out for her walk. We found out that Rylee is really NOT a white dog! Compared to snow that is. You can actually see her in the snow.



After about 12:30pm the sun peeked out through the clouds and it warmed up enough to melt it slowly away. By 3:30pm it was gone! We saw on tv (on our Portland feed) that they were having tons of trouble up there. They had way more snow and colder temps than we did and they had black ice during rush hour. They just kept getting more and more reports of accidents. You’d think folks up there would have learned to drive in it by now! Back here at home, we had no place to go so we just waited it out and watched tv and worked the jigsaw puzzle for a while.  Later, Lydia got a call from her dr. They want her to do a new round of labs so she had to drive to the hospital to do that. But she said the roads to and from were dried out and she had no issues. I helped her with the defrosting of the pork chops (yeah, I know – big job!) and when she got home, they were thawed. She did get a call from her Nephrologist. Turns out she was the first call the surgeon’s office made on her behalf. After conferring, the decision right now is to reduce the dosage on her anti-rejection meds. Dr. Leonard agrees that it might be blocking the antibiotics. She’s called in a prescription for the lessor medication.  Lydia fixed the pork chops with mushroom gravy and the rest of our smashed potatoes from the other night.  After dinner Walgreens called and she went to the drive-thru and picked it up. Once she got back, we relaxed, watched tv and then called it a night.    

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