Stressed? It Will Be Okay! (Part One)

So says the front of the SERVPRO brochure left with us July 13^th after their first of many visits. I display it in the kitchen window to continually remind me that this spring and summer of challenges – if we weren’t having bad luck, we weren’t having any luck at all – would one day be behind us. Bob claimed in an e-mail that he sent out that he was rewriting the book of Lamentations. One friend suggested she was waiting for the arrival of locusts, and another proclaimed that he was really rewriting the book of Job. I don’t think any of it has been God-ordained, but I sincerely hope this is not our new normal. It all started with our trip to Europe in April.

This had been our goal through those months of isolation after Bob’s bone marrow transplant. His doctors had said from the very beginning that Bob would be recovered enough to go on our already planned Bordeaux riverboat cruise. We’d be vacationing with Bob’s brother and his wife and two other dear couples. I’d bought us personal air purifiers to save us from our first and probably worst exposure to viruses – the dreaded airport and airplane. Our first days in Paris were fine. Then we had a couple day bus ride/tour through the Loire Valley to Bordeaux and our riverboat. On that final bus day a man two seats behind us coughed and coughed. Bob immediately said, “I bet I’m nailed.” He was correct. At his birthday dinner that evening he hardly had a voice. He got sicker and sicker, rarely left the cabin, and didn't go on any tours. He did try to periodically eat lunch al fresco with the group and attend dinner, sitting at the end of the table and leaving before we had coffee. He was so sick that I rarely left his side. Then I caught it.

We had signed up for a post-cruise extension in Paris with some of the group, and it was then that I succumbed. I was not happy. The next day we got antibiotics and were just well enough to wander around Paris during the afternoons for another nine days. More than three weeks later from our April

1^st departure, we were back in our own bed with more antibiotics. Finally it was May, and I was able to garden. It was also time to head to Holland.

Bob had not wanted to spend his winter recovering in Holland, so we hadn’t been to the condo at all in 2014 until mid-May. It was wonderful to be back at our “happy place,” as Bob’s oldest daughter calls it, until I fell over a heavy wooden crate in the middle of the night. I injured the top of my foot; it had a huge lump and was purple and swollen. The doctor at convenient care x-rayed it, said it wasn’t broken, and predicted that it would take six weeks to heal. (He was right, although it continues to swell and be sore to the touch.) Hobbled or not, too soon we needed to return to Savoy to get ready for Amy’s and the twins arrival from Las Vegas and Bethany’s arrival from Vermont. Grandson Jeremiah was getting married to the smart, talented, and pretty Betsy.