Walter, Blake, chimney repairs, Senior’s dinner, still Winter

As far as health updates are concerned, Walter is now fully recovered from the illness that had him in the hospital for a couple days. Maggie, on the other hand, is quite ill with ear infections and the accompanying pain and general malaises that accompanies those infections. I am sure she will recover but for the moment she is feeling very poorly. Walter is still required to have an echocardiogram some days from now, so he is not cleared fully by the doctors, but he is feeling mostly normal.

Blake, along with Cori and Nate, are continuing to adapt to the life-changing condition of Blake’s diabetes. Checking blood sugar, giving injections (shots) of insulin several times per day – at least at each meal – and ferreting out the information required to predetermine, when possible, the dose of insulin based on the carbs ingested at each meal or snack. All are in good spirits so far, but we are only in the very early phase of treatment that will affect every hour of Blake’s life for the foreseeable future. Every bite of food, every drink of beverages (except water), will require the course correction of adding - by injection - the required dose of insulin to compensate for those ingested nutrients. It is not like they can just avoid the “bad” food choices. Every bite of any food must be summed up for the carb content and an appropriate dose of insulin must be put into Blake’s body to control his blood sugar. The constant vigilance of that scope can be overwhelming, so we need to continue to keep them in our prayers as they adapt.

Plans are in the works to get Cori and Blake to an endocrinologist in the United States in the very near future so that they will be able to get prescriptions for some of the more advanced diabetic aids unavailable in Honduras. Better insulin choices and far better equipment for administering the multiple daily doses of insulin required.  Better devices for checking blood sugar. How to arrange that extra trip stateside has not been determined yet, but there is, at least for the present, no urgency. They can keep up the required regimen with what is readily available. It is costly to do so. Potentially several hundred dollars per month, but budget adjustments will be made, and all the family will participate in the ongoing treatment protocols willingly. What else can you do? When needed, God will give the increase and supply the need. A life lived for the Lord has proven that truth to me and Mama.

As scheduled, the repairs on the chimney were completed last Friday. Those repairs included placing a seal on the top of the chimney and adding an external damper to the flue (chimney pipe) so the unusable damper at the top of the firebox in the house could be cut out. That done, Mama and I are going to paint the firebox in the fireplace just to beautify is a bit.

To make the fireplace serviceable, Mama and I bought a pan to put in the fireplace to ease cleaning the ashes out when we do have a fire and we bought a grate to hold the logs as they are added to the fire once we start one. Our first fire was lit today, and Mama is enjoying it thoroughly. Most of what we have available to burn is poor quality logs, but we will exhaust that supply before I harvest more firewood from the properties dead trees and fallen limbs. It is nice to have a fire in our fireplace.  

Saturday was the warmest day of 2022 thus far. Temperatures reached the low eighties. It did not last long, but it gave me time to do some cleaning in anticipation of the cold weather that we knew was approaching. I did not tackle too much because Mama and I were attending a Senior’s dinner at the church in the late afternoon that day. That dinner provided a very relaxing and fun evening. There was so much food brought that the thirty-five or forty attendees could not possible have eaten it all, in fact we barely made dent in the sum total of the offerings. On the dessert side, the same was true. We ate slowly, some played cornhole and then dominoes, but most of us participated vicariously while we maintained long conversations in varying groupings of talkers. Mama and I had a great time. We lingered in conversations with friends. We helped clean up, said some prolonged goodbyes, and we were still home before 9 pm. My kind of party. Clearly, we are not as young as we used to be, but we can learn to enjoy the life we are now able to live.

Monday continued warm but by Tuesday evening the temperatures were below freezing and will continue to stay there until late Thursday. Just a reminder that it is still Winter. Fortunately, overnight Monday night into Tuesday we got almost two inches of rain.

That was a great blessing!