I love being able to look out the window and see my horses. I haven’t lived in the same location as them for over thirty years. Even though on these 100-plus acres I sometimes have quite a hike to bring them in for feed. I guess they want me to get some exercise.
Life doesn’t always go the way we’d like it to. I was thrown into being a caregiver the year I turned 50. Mike was 53 when he was diagnosed with a Relapsing Polychondritis a rare auto-immune disease. He would say he felt like he went from 53-83 overnight. It was a huge change for our family. It threw our whole routine out of balance.
Besides the first hospitalization in January 2013, it started out fairly uneventful. A trip to see a rheumatologist in Denver then most of his appointments in Colby and Hays. These were sort of local trips at 20 and 90 miles.
In January 2014 we made the first overnight trip to Denver to have a procedure done to see if they could find the cause of his esophageal pain. We went to John’s Scholars Bowl competition, had dinner with him and his brother, and left for Denver. They found nothing conclusive.
It was in July 2014 that we made the five-day trip to Rochester, MN to the Mayo Clinic. We left on Wednesday for appointments on Thursday and Friday. Then drove home in two days instead of one. I was working full-time as the Oakley Area Tourism Director and didn’t feel like I could take any more time than that. I took Monday off to recover then realized on Thursday, when I was recovered, I had been emotionally dehydrated. Even though I was at work on Tuesday and Wednesday I had been checked out. Certainly not functioning at my highest level.
Reinventing myself at a Hope Held by a Horse event. Photo by Ida Ridgeway
That fall and the next spring things escalated as he started seeing doctors at KU Med Center in Kansas City, a 350-mile drive from our home in Oakley. We would try to make appointments on Mondays or Fridays so I would miss minimal workdays. When he was seeing more than one doctor, we’d try to schedule them in one day to minimize our travel. If one of them was changed I sometimes spent hours on the phone trying to coordinate them so we could make one trip.
When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in November 2017, we were trying to coordinate even more appointments. The day after both my surgeries he had a procedure scheduled. As I started chemotherapy weekly in Hays in February 2018, we’d schedule so we could leave from Hays to go on to Kansas City because we were already 90 miles closer.
How do you handle it when life throws you a curve ball? Does it knock you completely off-center? The horses and I can guide you to a better way to handle those situations. Click the button below to schedule an exploratory session to see how.
Make a Connection in the comments below.
Onward!
