Sadly, as life often tends to do, things kind of dumped on Glenn at a point in his life where some big changes were taking place and he wasn't able to find the right life skills to manage it all. Glenns death was a tragedy that never should have happened. He should be married now, with a couple of kids, maybe running his own business and living a good life. We'll never know what might have been for Glenn, he will stay forever a twenty something year old man in our memories, with sad eyes and a quiet smile. Miss you kiddo.
Freeze up is happening as I write. We have no snow on the ground right here but it is all around us. Winter is coming..... that phrase sounds so sinister to me, like there is more coming than just cold temps, snow and howling winds. My imagination running wild I fear.
We have had cold temperatures, with day time highs of -1, yuk, that makes it a misery to work outside, but work we must. All the things we put off while scrambling to get the crops harvested are now knocking at the door... fencing mostly, replacing posts that were broken by either the bulls fighting and pushing each other right through a plank fence or a barbed wire fence with power on it, or by Robt backing the tractor up too far and knocking over a corral fence. yikes...it happens sometimes, when he is in a rush, and his mind has jumped ahead ten or twenty jobs instead of being in the job he's doing at the time. An easy fix though, we just pound another post in the ground, the problem with doing it now though is the ground is beginning to freeze and it takes a lot of pounding....my job, to run the post driver, very noisy and repetitive, and if you already have a headache, well...
I've had a weird headache for three days now, checked my Blood pressure last night finally and it's a bit high...chest feels heavy and I am having trouble breathing without wheezing. It's almost like the last time I had pneumonia but not quite. If the BP is still high tomorrow morning I will go to outpatients...I hate going there when I'm not really ill, but the high BP worries me.
I had my last eye tests done two weeks ago, and for a change I got a bit of really good news... these tests were done once a year since I started one of the medications they had me on for Lupus. I took the drug for 4 1/2 years and the drug company insisted that anyone taking the med. for more than 1 year needed to have these eye exams done annually, because the drug could sometimes collect in the layers of the retina and cause permanent blindness.
The tests were easy enough to do, the chart, a field vision test and coloured photo's of the eyeball itself and the retinal layers, they take about 2 hours to get through and this last time it went even faster because I was able to perform the tests much faster this time. The more your vision is jeopardized the longer it takes to perform the tests because it is based on how many lights you see and how many you miss, the computer will keep going back to the ones you missed and repeating them getting brighter and brighter until you see them. I got the field vision test done in record time, never missed a light...yahoo....
So when it came time to finally have my five minute visit with my super hero eye specialist DR. Mark GREVE, he told me the vision in my left eye,(the one I had the stroke in) has improved significantly probably for a number of reasons: 1) a natural regeneration of the retina and the laser surgery he had performed. 2) the fact that I am no longer taking those three very strong and dangerous medications. and 3) the diabetic medication I am on is controlling the blood sugar better.
For what ever reason it has occurred I am grateful. I could tell that my eye sight had improved. Dr. GREVE told me I no longer had to come for those tests since I was not taking the medication any longer and every thing looked good in the eyes. I took that opportunity to thank him for all the hard work he did to give me back the use of my left eye after the stroke. Although he would have liked to have continued with the eye injections to restore the vision fully, the violent and very serious reaction I had after the third injection prevented us from continuing with that treatment. He did tell me that the blockage that caused the hemoraging in the first place was still there and that it could happen again, if it did I was to contact him immediately rather that going through my optomitrist and that the prognosis may not be as good the next time because of my inability to tolerate the eyeball injection of Anastin, which really did make a tremendous improvement everytime I had it done.
In my mind he is a super hero. He starts seeing patients at 7 am and often times when we leave the office at 7 - 7:30 pm after a very long wait to see him there are still 20 or more patients yet to go. His staff say sometimes he is there until 10 pm. There are four other doctors that work out of the ALBERTA RETINA CONSULTANTS office and they are all as busy. It is the only retina specialist facility in western Canada. This last visit I talked with a fellow and his mother who had flown up from Vancouver to have the injections done on the mother and another couple who were from eastern Saskatchewan and a man from Whitehorse....very busy indeed. THANK YOU !!! DR. GREVE my hero!
This is the first winter, in five years that I will not have to make Robt white knuckle drive me into Edmonton for a specialists appointment during a blizzard or freezing rain storm. He never complained but I always felt so guilty.
He loves me, what can I say ... I love him :)
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