Belated January Christmas Letter

It has been many years since one of those self aggrandizing family update Christmas letters has come to our mailbox. You know the type letter I am referring to: how the friend has received yet another Important Promotion, with each child in the family excelling in his own way via achieving Most Grand PooPah of academic excellence or athletic acumen. People must have caught on that type letter is in bad form as none has graced our mailbox in a long while.

Narrowing down a Christmas letter to include only the month of December, I will give an update. Let's see if I can win the prize for celebrating the month with sickness, then an upturn. I will merely report the facts, you can determine if we win the Most Miserable December award. To add drama to the following diatribe, Christmas Day was spent in bed with fever and chills with several forays to the bathroom requiring a fortitude of strength expended in merely crawling to the other room. You get the picture.

Three times in the course of three weeks in December and sloughing over into January, I was taken either by husband or friend to the hospital Emergency Room or Infusion Center with severe flu like conditions, more baffling symptoms than straightforward flu, however. At each ER visit, two weeks apart, a gambit of tests were performed on my heart, kidneys, lungs, etc. Upon discharge, no diagnosis of flu could be typed into the diagnosis tine on hospital forms. "Virus" and "Mutated Virus" were guesses as to why I was ill. Several Bad Bugs have been noted as living on the western slope of Colorado, and my immune system was at an all time low from the Ibrance/Letrozole combo of cancer fighting drugs already on board my system. My body was a petri dish of germs and that perfect storm created a hellish holiday for us, while viruses and bacteria had a hay day.

But after last month, I come to you "healed" and much thinner, still eschewing any meat protein because it tastes and smells so awful. Thanks to friend Beth who has made various grocery runs and provided soups, I can enjoy Ensure and be grateful for it. Other friends have also called to assist, and I do appreciate it. The palliative cancer treatments were put on hold until February, giving time for the body to heal before assault with more CA fighters brought on board.

And now is the time in the Christmas letter update to tell you about Gene. Instead of talking about myself first, I should have led off with him, but I had to give you the background of the Bug/Bugs in order for Gene's own round of issues to be addressed. Gene came down with this virus about two weeks ago. When he was feeling a little better, last week he was trying to provide a pasta dinner for us and was leaning over a pot of hot water on the stove waiting for a rolling boil before throwing in the spaghetti. I was in the recliner and heard a cracking noise, thinking he had dropped something, but no expected expletives after the strange sound. Not even turning around I called out "Gene, are you OK?" In a weakened voice calling from the floor he replied "no." And I found him crumpled on the floor where he had fainted. He hurt his back. And it is still giving him fits (he also has ankylosing spondylitis which exacerbates the problem). But between his coughing and his aching back, he, too, is on the mend.

Now for Julie: she caught an upper respiratory infection last week, and the manor staff has been on top of it all along. Breathing treatments, oxygen 24/7 and three doses of prednisone have helped her over the weekend. She hopes to be out of her bed and back in the Activity Room tomorrow playing cards, with less than a week confined to her bed.

Jolly times. But we are all getting better and I am back to getting outside and driving again, so the month of December was just a hiccup in the year of 2016.