Denise the church lady

Well tomorrow after church service, it seems I will be voted to be the new church treasurer. My pastor assures me it's a sure thing.
It's certainly not that I need another "hat" to wear (mom, wife, caretaker, softball coach, landlord, bookkeeper for Tim's business, accountant, school volunteer, girl scout volunteer, housekeeper(kinda), cook(sorta)),
I've probably missed a few. BUT, what I do need is some kind of work experience as I will
be hard pressed to land a job when or if Tim has to stop working as having been a stay-at-homer for so long is just poison in the job market. My pastor approached me with this position and it
only requires a few hours per month and attending board meetings(I will officially be a board
member) and I could not pass up the opportunity. It could lead to other things later which
is what I hope. The secretary of the school run by our church is an old childhood neighbor of mine who already told me that she will have to leave her position for more money when she
finishes getting the college degree she never finished years ago. She is also going through a
very hard time in her life and we had a nice, mutually supportive chat a few weeks ago. I really like the folks
I've met since starting to get more involved with church again and it's nice. In other matters, I had a 24 hour blood pressure monitor put on
the other day. It appears that my BP is just dandy when I am sleeping or reclining in Tim's chair
watching TV but the rest of the time, well....it sucks. The doc is trying not to put me on meds
due to me intolerance of meds and he wants me to get a sleep study done cause I probably have
sleep apnea which raises blood pressure. I told him I snore like a bear. Tim hears me from downstairs over the TV!!! and Tim also says I stop breathing in my sleep,though he went on to say that's only when he's holding a pillow over my face to stop the snoring ;o). I'm getting all my girlie testing done. I damn near burst my bladder the other day after drinking an ocean of water for a sonagram that
was done an hour later than scheduled. NOT fun. I hate all this medical stuff. Very nerve wracking. I was tempted to call my new gynecologist to see if she got the results of the sonagram
so I could hopefully not think about it all weekend and their darn office called my cell phone instead of my home phone yesterday and I did not get the message till 11 o'clock last night. REALLY don't understand why folks use cell phones first. I never bother anyone on their cell unless they have
told me to call it. Of course they did not give me the "all clear" just said to call their office at my nearest convenience and they close till Monday. Anyhoo, Olivia is finished with school and
she and I have been running errands and hanging out together a lot. She starts her recreation
day camp on Monday so it's right back to having a schedule but she likes being with kids more than me(who wouldn't) and has fun there. I have to get a lot done before our first summer vaca.
We've got a 10 day trip planned for Cape May and then back to Chincoteague Island 'cause we all
loved it so much last year. My parents will be with us on the Cape May leg. Hope my mom does OK. She is struggling with adult onset asthma and it is really messing her up. My older sister goes out to Cal. a lot for her job and decided to take my niece, who just graduated high school, and my nephew, who is about to turn 21, out there to experience CA. They flew out a few days
after her so she could work and now she is showing them the sights. She e-mails and sends
a new photo every day and they are having a great time. I'm so glad. Things have been rough for
them. Their parents divorced and money is too tight for my niece to go away to the college she wanted so this was something to look forward to despite the disappointments of the last year or so. They are avoiding San Fran today as it is gay pride weekend and not that that bothers anyone but apparently the events are clothing optional so it's off somewhere else for the day. We didn't want to see that "photo of the day." Another MM
blogger commented on his blog that he was very disappointed in a lot about San Fran on a recent
trip there with his grandkids, not the least of which was a bunch of men riding bikes in the buff.
Boy, San Fran has CHANGED since I was there in '77 and it doesn't sound like for the better.
I'm not a fan of public nudity. Spare us the visuals people!!! Heck, at my age, even private nudity ain't what it used to be! Just kidding. Tim still looks great. Me....well it's a matter of lighting.
The less the better!!! ;o) Well that's the latest from hot and
humid New Jersey(land of the Roseann Rosannadana hairdos). Happy summer y'all.

The roller coaster appt.

Today, we saw Tim's doc for the first time in 4 months. We are supposed to go every three months but
May was so busy for Tim, he blew if off for another few weeks. We have only seen the nurse
practitioner for almost 2 years but he has left the practice and Tim's doc's good buddy, another
well known MM specialist who worked with him out at UAMS years ago, came to work here at
HUMC and that's who we saw today. We'd met him before. We did a consult with him when he was still in NYC. So I got a little
nervous when I saw the bloodwork 'cause a line was there about a slight band that also came
up on Tim's bloodwork last June. I thought his CR was ended and was just thinking that it was bound to happen and here it was, the other shoe dropping. Then the
doc came in and said to us, "that's nothing. It doesn't say anything bad there. Even the urine doesn't show
anything bad. You're fine, go home." So I said, "well I like your thinking better than mine so
we're going with it." Actually, he hung out and talked to Tim about what Tim does for a living and got
to know him a bit which I thought was nice. I'm glad to see he's trying to get to know the patients and not treating everyone like a number and since there was nothing interesting about
Tim's labs to him, I guess he figured they'd shoot the breeze about something other than myeloma. He said 3 months is fine to wait for the next appt. and he cancelled the Zometa too.
They are backing Tim down from quarterly to twice a year. So we look skyward and thank God
again for this time off chemo. We get to spend the summer living somewhat normally. What a relief. Now tomorrow, I go to my cardiologist who is gonna take one look at my blood pressure and probably put me on a beta blocker IV, one for each arm! I took Tim's blood pressure last night. 115 over 65. I could just smack that boy. Mine was 140 over 96. RATS!!! Can you guess
who the worrier is around here?

A book review

I don't know if I've ever done this on my blog. I guess I've been blabbing away on here long enough that I can't remember what-all I've said but I just read a book I found pretty moving
and somewhat relevant to anyone going through a hard time as my family is. It's a pretty popular read now called "The Shack"by Wm. Paul Young. My friend read it in her book club awhile back and my
book club never took it up so I went ahead and read it this past week. Interesting book. It starts
off with a bad event and it goes on to talk about mans' relationship with God. What it is and what
it really is supposed to be. Sitting on a mountaintop last weekend, despite the level of acceptance I have with our situation, I still found myself asking God why this had to happen to us. To Tim and our kid. I'm convinced these answers are revealed when we get to the other side
but it sure is a struggle to make sense of it all now. Sometimes I just look at Olivia and think about what a warm, loving, compassionate, innocent little thing she is and it just breaks my heart
that she has to live with her dad having cancer and the possibility of losing him. I don't want to
spoil anything about this book 'cause I really do recommend it but basically, after years of grieving over this event, a man learns about God, Jesus, and the holy spirit and how to heal his
relationship with them to help him move on with his life. One of the things that helped me in the book is when it spoke about living in the present. This is something I had to start working very hard on after Tim's diagnosis. I even bought a ring when I was in Mystic, CT that is printed with the words "live in the moment" so that I have a constant reminder to bring myself back when my head gets too far into the future, or past for that matter. I'm not going to repeat this word-for-word because I'm taking it out of context, but basically there's a part in the book where God tells him that He dwells in him in the present. Though there's a lot to be learned or remembered from the past, you should go there only for a visit and not an extended stay. And that when you imagine things about the future, it is almost always dictated by fear. It goes on to say that living in the future is a desperate attempt to gain some control over something that you can't, something that isn't even real. It's like trying to play God. You imagine the evils that you
fear becoming a reality in your life and then you try to make plans and contingencies to avoid what it is you fear. These statements in this book stopped me in my tracks. How many times has
this exact scenerio taken place in my head? My whole life really has been trying to prepare for the "what-ifs" but even more so now. It's these imagined fears that aren't even real that have probably taken years off my life. You think that somehow thinking about what may happen can
help you prepare in some way. Well the truth is there are just too many things in life that you can never be prepared for. Oh sure, you have to plan ahead sometimes, especially where money
is concerned but the fact is, if you think you are steering this vessel, well... you just ain't. You may be paddling and trying to get to where you're going but there's all sorts of plans for your life that you cannot control or change. Somehow you have to have a level of faith and trust that it will all work out for good in the end.....that someone up there knows what the heck He/She's doing! The book also went into forgiveness. It said that forgiving is for the forgiver. It's not about forgetting, excusing, or even forming a relationship with that person. To quote, "It is about letting go of another person's throat" to release yourself from something that eats at you, destroys your joy and ability to love fully and openly. Anyway, not since "Embraced by the Light" have I read a book that moved me like this. It got a little repetitive sometimes and is
a first novel but a worthwhile couple of hours. The author is the son of missionaries and his father was also a pastor. He has degrees in religion too and has seen pain and tragedy in his own life.
He had a lot of good things to say and supposedly, there may be a movie made of the book someday. Anyway, the other book I just mentioned is the most spectacular life-after-death story
I have ever read. This woman died after a surgery and was eventually revived but not until she got a lot of answers to the whole mystery of life. Very comforting to read when you find yourself asking all those WHY questions. Did you ever see/hear one of those kids that just keeps asking
his/her parents "WHY" about everything? Everything the parent says, the kid just keeps asking, "why?" Kinda like adults with God, doncha think? Well, for some of us anyway. Wonder if God ever gets tired of it and says, "OH ENOUGH ALREADY, BECAUSE I SAID SO!!!"

Back to reality....did I ever leave?

Well, we just spent an extended weekend at my sis and bro-in-law's place in Craftsbury Vermont. It was really nice. They have an 18 acre spread on a mountain with great views
and I spent quite a bit of time on an adirondack chair so taken by those views that I hardly
read the book I brought. The weather was unseasonably warm for northern VT this time
of year. Liv got to work at the dairy farm of friends a bit. She threw candy from the rumble
seat of her grandpa's '28 Model A in the Memorial Day parade. Drove a tractor for the first
time. Lots of fun and memories being made. The only hard thing is coming home. Not that
you ever leave your troubles completely behind but coming home to face a mammogram,
2 sonagrams, MM check-up appointments for Tim, a visit to a cardiologist for me
that will most definitely result in going on blood pressure medicine, doing the income taxes I
put off time and again. There's just no way not to start obsessing about all that on the 7 hour
ride home. Well.....no way for a worry wart like me anyway. So, once again, back to the grind.
Gotta just take it all one step at a time. Thank goodness for these little breaks in the routine
though. They help a heckuva lot. And, of course, Liv NEVER minds missing a few days of school
to go on vacation. :o)