I’m not a hermit, I’m not anti-social, and I don’t hate my neighbors.  But if I start to walk out onto my upper deck, which means that neighbors from all around can instantly see me, I will turn around and walk right back in if I see anyone else outside.

Here’s the scenario:  I walk outside, to do whatever, and I’m minding my own business.  After a while, I glance over and realize one of my neighbors has been talking to me, yelling from their yard, and I’ve been ignoring them.  Awkward.  Even worse, now that I’ve made eye contact, I’m expected to respond.  But no matter what I say, I will not understand what they shout back.  This leaves me with two options:  casually wave and immediately turn around and go back into the house, or go down two flights of stairs, across the yard, to the fence and have a conversation I really wasn’t planning to have.

Yeah, it’s easier to just go back in the house if I see anyone else outside.

Like I said, I don’t hate my neighbors.  At this point, I really just don’t know any of them very well.  The neighbors to the left were here when I moved in (in 1989!) but were not super social, which suited me just fine.  What I knew of them came from my ex-husband, who was the type to wander into someone’s yard and stand talking to them for an hour.  I could tell that our neighbor didn’t appreciate this gregariousness so I mostly just smiled and waved if we made eye contact.  I know his name, his wife’s name, and a couple of their (now grown) kids’ names but that’s about it.

To the right, we have a rental home.  (Yay.)  Its occupants change every year or two.  At this point, we really don’t bother getting close with these neighbors unless they make the effort and/or seem like folks we have a lot in common with.  The latest batch are young partiers with a couple of young kids who scream outside all the time (the kids, not the parents).  Mildly annoying, definitely not people we would choose to spend time with, but otherwise harmless (other than playing music loud enough that we can feel the walls of our house vibrate – bothering Paige more than me or Dave).  But, you know, they hang out with groups of friends, getting drunk (and, um, other stuff) and that makes them chatty.

I’ve never gotten around to talking to them but Dave has – just neighborly chitchat as he works on the yard or whatever.  They know we both have hearing loss, but to be honest, this never stops people.  They either forget, or they don’t grasp that we can’t understand what they’re saying from the distant comfort of their backyard.  So it really doesn’t help to inform them; it just makes me feel less guilty when I realize I’ve been ignoring them because hey, they should know better!

A few weeks ago we had a big storm come through and everyone was outside, looking up at the sky.  The partying neighbors had friends over.  Dave, Paige and I were watching the storm roll in, trying to decide if it was really going to be a tornado as predicted.  As we scanned the skies, Paige nudged Dave and said, “Hey, the neighbors are talking to you.”  Aw, crap.  Dave looked over and one of the guys waved a beer.  Dave looked confused.  Paige said, “He wants to know if you want a beer.”  (Which was nice – like I said, I don’t hate these people!)  Dave just shook his head and waved his hand in a “thanks but no thanks” sort of way, and turned away.  He doesn’t really care what people think if he gives them the cold shoulder; I’m the one who spends too much time worrying about what other people think of me.

So when we daydream about our next house and we come up with features we would love to have, we do include things like an attached garage and air conditioning.  But we also include lots of space between us and our neighbors.  A wave from the distance is fine, thank you very much.

The other day, Paige asked me if I could hear my heartbeat.  I told her no; with my CIs off, I don’t hear anything…my own voice, the sound of food being chewed, my heartbeat/pulse, etc.  I just realized, though, that I don’t hear my heartbeat when I’m wearing CIs either.  I’m not sure anyone really hears their own heart beating, do they?!

Anyway, she was reading a book about beauty queens stranded on a desert island (or something like that) and one of the girls was deaf.  I guess there must have been a reference to her hearing her heart beating, which made Paige ask me about it.  I think it’s hard to really imagine what it’s like to not hear things like your own voice (although, again, I don’t think we hear our heartbeat anyway) and it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be deaf.  I thought I knew fairly well, since my hearing loss was pretty advanced before I went deaf, and that was nothing compared to profound bilateral deafness.  But I explained to Paige that it wasn’t silent…I was assaulted with noise all the time, noise that I couldn’t escape from, in the form of tinnitus.  That’s another thing you just can’t explain to someone…and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone just so they could experience having tinnitus.

* Am I the only one who remembers this song by the DeFranco Family?  I think the full title was ‘Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat’.  It came out in 1973, when I was all of 9 years old.

Alone

I’m completely alone in the house right now, which is weird.  Paige is at the library, volunteering at a Harry Potter party to celebrate the final movie coming out today.  Dave is at the VA hospital, returning his Bravo PH monitor.  It is really rare for me to be alone because Dave and I spend pretty much every hour of the day together.  I used to think I was a loner, because I do prefer to be alone and used to really crave time by myself.  Since I met Dave, though, that’s not the case…I can spend every moment with him and feel perfectly content.  It’s good to know that when we have an empty nest someday, we will enjoy each other just as much.  :)

Don’t Do Me Like That

We were trying to remember when Dave had that big panel of blood tests, the 15 tubes of blood, so I was looking back through my blog for the date.  I realized it has been over six months since he’s been trying to move forward with his fundoplication (the surgery for his hiatal hernia and GERD).  He had an endoscopy back in January or so, and just had another one two days ago.  This one included a PH study, which I talked about back in January as well – they lodged a capsule in his esophagus to register his PH levels and see how often he had acid reflux.  It took 6 months to get this test!  Now he has another endoscopy plus a manometry test (to check the muscle function of his esophagus) on August 11.  Then he sees the GI doctor on my birthday at the end of August.  (It was supposed to be the end of July, but she canceled the appointment, which is the second time she’s done that.)  It’s really frustrating to me because he can’t start on his Hepatitis C treatment until he’s healed from this surgery, and he obviously won’t have the surgery until September at the soonest, with all the testing they keep putting him through.  We assumed he would be starting his Hepatitis C treatment in early spring, March or April.  Now it looks like he’ll be lucky to be starting treatment before Christmas 2011.

On the other hand, we can’t complain about the fact that he gets free, very good healthcare from the VA here.  It just takes soooo long to get anything done!

Enjoy the Silence

One final observation…I had two instances this week when it was just so convenient to be deaf (not something I often say).  First, we were in the grocery store, just meandering and taking our time (we love shopping in this store) when some kind of horribly piercing alarm system went off.  I think it was a fire alarm – there were little strobe light things flashing and intermittent extremely high pitched tones, but (thankfully) the sprinkler system didn’t activate.  I had to stop and grab onto the shopping cart because the extreme high pitched tones, although dampened down by the AGC in my CIs, made me so dizzy that I couldn’t walk.  We kind of looked around to see what was going on, if an announcement was going to be made or if people were leaving the store or what.  I left my CIs on so I could try to hear any instructions we might be given.  After a minute or so, I couldn’t stand it and just took the magnets off and let them dangle.  My God, the relief!!  It felt so good to just hear nothing.  Everyone else was grimacing and covering their ears.  I told Dave to let me know when it stopped, and we kept on shopping.  It went on for probably 10 minutes and finally we saw some firemen heading to the back of the store (no smoke or anything – who knows what set it off).  A few minutes after we saw them, the alarm stopped and I was able to put my CIs back on.  Very convenient!

And this morning, a guy came by to bury the cable for our internet/cable service.  It’s been lying across the whole backyard for seven months now, and Dave finally called and got a bit nasty with them to get them to come out and bury it.  (It was his second phone call about this; they did this back in December when they came out to do some cable stuff and claimed back then that they would be out in a few days to bury the cable.  They also gave us strict instructions not to bury it ourselves…they must know Dave well, because he was tempted!)  We were having breakfast and suddenly heard this tremendous racket, like a jackhammer, coming from the open windows.  I could barely speak over the noise, and I asked Dave if it was the cable guy.  He laughed and said, “What?  How could that be, unless he has a bulldoz….oh yeah, he’s got a bulldozer in the back yard.”  (!!)  So once again, I took off my CIs and told Dave to tell me when he was gone.  What a terrible sound!

…okay, this blog entry is just a bunch of unrelated thoughts and experiences, but there they are, for what it’s worth.  :)

We put in a garden again this year, after such a roaring success with tomatoes last year.  I say “we” but really, if the garden were my responsibility we would be nibbling on dry husks come fall.  Dave is my Farmer Boy, and he does all of the gardening and yard stuff.  This year he decided to start the plants from seeds.  It was, to me, kind of late in the year to be making this industrious decision (the last week of April) and I was skeptical.  I envisioned tiny, spindly plants under the glare of the July sun, while our neighbors tended to their waist-high robust tomato garden.

I was wrong, okay?  Really, I have no clue where plants or gardening is concerned.  I made Dave show me (nay, involve me) in the process, because I really had no idea how to go about growing a plant from a seed.  I guess I would grab some dirt from the yard, stick it in a Dixie cup and toss in some seeds?  Dave did grab Dixie cups, but he also grabbed coffee filters.  (Wha?)  We got the filter damp, spread seeds on one side, folded it up just so, and tucked the whole thing into the Dixie cup.  We labeled the cups (rosemary, thyme, basil, two kinds of parsley, cherry tomatoes and Roma tomatoes) and then I promptly forgot about them.  I don’t even know if Dave watered them.  (I just asked, and not only did he moisten them with an eyedropper, he did it with rainwater.  And he talked to the plants.  I love this man.)

Every now and then I would peek at them and yay, sprouts!  Dave transplanted them into slightly larger containers with dirt, gave them some time out in the sun, and I sat around doubting their ability to grow big enough fast enough.  And now?  Those suckers are huge.  They are out in the garden, or in pots (in the case of the herbs) flowering and growing away.  They kick the neighbor’s tomatoes asses.  I like to step out on the deck and look over the side at the garden and marvel that those huge plants were teeny little sprouts just 2 months ago.  Talk about satisfaction.

It’s time to find recipes involving lots of basil (seriously, we have many basil plants and I will be upset if they go to waste), lots of tomatoes, and lots of peppers (we cheated and bought already-started pepper plants).  It’s a good thing I’m Italian, isn’t it?  Unfortunately for Dave, he’s heading into a month of gastrointestinal testing for his GERD and hiatal hernia, and guess what he’s supposed to avoid?  Tomatoes.

More for me!! 

Just the act of waking up and remembering my hearing was gone made me sick to my stomach.  Another day of working so, so hard to understand what everyone was saying.  All I had to rely on was my speech reading skills, with a few signs and finger-spelling tossed in.  My mind was just in constant turmoil; I wanted to curl up in bed and cry and refuse to believe this was happening to me, but I had my kids to think about, candles to make and ship.

The first entry in my blog was called “Hindsight is 20/20.”  In that entry, I was looking back at that day, wondering if it would have mattered if I had realized all those ‘weird hearing’ moments were actually a sign of things to come.  Maybe I would have gone to the doctor sooner…would that have helped preserve some of my hearing?

Now, though, I’m thinking that I wish I could have looked forward from that day, or that time in general.  If I could’ve seen myself today, right now, sitting here typing and hearing the keys as I hit them, hearing the door slam as Dave goes out to the garage, hearing Toby’s doggie nails as he walks across the floor…well, I could’ve been spared so many days of sadness.  I would still have grieved losing my natural hearing, because nothing can bring that back.  But if only I had known that this absolutely amazing technology would let me hear things I’d never heard before!

I was talking to Dave about the fully-implantable CIs they are working on –you have to have surgery every 10 years to replace the implant because the batteries only have a finite life (of course).  As we debated the pros and cons, I realized that I really like the situation I have now.  I really don’t mind being in my ‘natural’ (deaf) state when I’m sleeping, for instance.  If I had the added input of noise and sound, I’m not sure how well I’d be able to sleep.  Even when I still had some hearing, I took my hearing aids off at night and had a much reduced level of sound coming in.  I’ve basically never had full hearing while I slept.  I definitely wouldn’t want to have surgery every 10 years!!  On the other hand, it would be awesome to be able to hear while I was swimming, and to not worry about getting my CIs wet if it’s raining.

Right now I feel like I have the best of both worlds.  Who knows what the future brings?  Someday I might write another blog entry referring back to this one, talking about all the wonderful advancements I wish I had known about back on April 17, 2011. 

This time around, I wasn’t really worried about communicating…I was just hoping to find a solution for my rapidly declining near vision.  Two years ago it was just a cute little thing to complain about:  “Oh ha ha, I need to pull out my reading glasses to read this menu!  How embarrassing!”  or “Yea, I need bifocals…getting old, geez!”  It didn’t take long before I was keeping reading glasses all over the house, in my purse and in my coat pocket.  I was wearing them probably 80% of the time, peering over the top of the reading glasses to look at something in the distance.  I couldn’t even clearly see the food I was cooking, my eyes in the mirror when I put eye liner on, the lines on the measuring cups that we use when we make candles.  Everything was just kind of a blur.

I really dislike wearing glasses – I got contacts as soon as my parents would allow, when I was 11 years old.  I absolutely love my contact lenses.  Bifocal glasses were a bit of an adjustment…kind of disorienting to glance down and have a different prescription, and especially weird if I wore them going down the stairs (I glance down at the stair as I step, but don’t really need my near-distance prescription for that…yet that’s what I got when I looked down through bifocal glasses).  I rarely wear glasses, though – just early in the morning when I first wake up, and late at night when I take my contacts off before bed.  I didn’t want to switch to wearing bifocal glasses all the time, but it never occurred to me that bifocal (or multifocal) contact lenses would be an option.

I have to give credit to my friend Lisa for making me realize bifocal contacts might work.  She mentioned that she was wearing them on a trial basis and really liked them, so I asked her all the questions I had about them.  How do they work?  Can you tell you’re looking through different prescriptions when you wear them?  Do they ever move around, so you’re looking through the wrong prescription?  Her answers were so encouraging that I decided when my current batch of contacts was finished, I would get an updated exam and give bifocal contacts a try.

My contacts finally ran out this month, so I saw the optometrist on Wednesday.  I had a different doctor this time but she was easy to understand and spoke very clearly.  She explained that the contacts she was going to give me would have my near-vision prescription in the center, and my distance prescription in a ring outside.  If I can remember correctly, I believe she said when we look at something far away, our pupils dilate and thus I would be looking through the prescription on the outer ring (for distance).  When we look at something close up, our pupils contract and that is how I will see with my near-vision prescription in the center of the contact lens.  Pretty cool!

She said my prescription didn’t change (not a surprise) and that they like to have people try the bifocal/multifocal contacts for a week to see how they work in a variety of situations.  Some people find that the near vision is not clear enough (I guess monovision contacts with reading glasses give you the best near vision) and some people have trouble with distance, especially while driving at night.  So she gave me a pair to try (I was surprised they had my prescription in stock, since I’m very near-sighted with a -8.5 prescription in each eye).

I sat down, put the contacts in and prepared to be dizzy or disoriented.  Instead, I looked up and it was just like normal, except I could see everything clearly…near and far.  I glanced down and read the literature on the table in front of me.  I looked out the window at the traffic in the distance.  It was like having my 20-year-old eyes again!

I’m wearing Acuvue Oasys (for Presbyopia) and they actually have three rings that I can see when I take them out (I don’t see any difference when I’m actually wearing them).  I believe she said they have near, computer and far distance prescriptions in each lens.  They are really comfortable – I don’t even notice them in my eyes.  Then again, I’m such a long-time contact lens wearer that I didn’t expect to have trouble adjusting to how they feel.  I really never expected to just put them in and basically have normal vision again, though, with no adjustment period.  It’s amazing!

I constantly have to stop myself now from reaching for reading glasses.  I’ve been using them since I hit my late 30s and I’m 46 now, so it’s been a long time since I’ve had this kind of vision without reading glasses.  I’m sitting here typing at the computer with no glasses.  When I finish this entry, I’ll go into the kitchen and start dinner.  I won’t need reading glasses to read the recipe, or the information on the can of tomatoes, or the markings on the stick of butter.  I can see the oven temperature dial again.  I can clearly see the food when I’m cooking.

I took a shower today (the light is kind of dim in the actual shower area, making it even harder to see) and for the first time in many, many years, I could read the words on the various bottles – shampoo, conditioner, shower gel.  Lately, if I’m using a sample of some new shampoo and conditioner, I’ve had to just kind of guess – I couldn’t read the print on the packets (which look the same) to know if I’m grabbing the shampoo or the conditioner!  (And no reading glasses in the shower, ya know.)

I put my eye liner on and could clearly see my eyelid, instead of this general fuzzy area…no more worries that I’m going to stick the eye liner into my eye instead of on my lid!  I can also see the little tiny white dot on my CI processor volume control, the one that tells me if my volume is at the normal twelve o’clock position.  I can pick up a book or magazine and read.  All of this without reading glasses!

It’s only been one day but so far I have no complaints.  I still need to put the night driving vision to the test, but I suspect it’s going to be fine.  I go back in a week and I imagine I’ll be giving these contacts two big thumbs up!!

(BTW, this was not an ad for the Acuvue lenses…I wasn’t paid or compensated or any of that…just a happy consumer.)

I first found out about flax seed gel over on the NaturallyCurly.com CurlTalk message boards.  For the past year, I’ve been playing around with different things to try to make my naturally curly hair healthier and less frizzy.  I’ve been learning about my hair type and what ingredients work well in my hair, so that when I pick out hair products (cleanser, conditioner, stylers) I know what to look for and what to avoid.

When I started all of this last year, it was March and we were just entering spring in Illinois.  Temperatures were going up, humidity and dew point were rising…all good things for my hair.  Humidity really makes my curls pop!  So I had a fairly easy time of it, going into summer (which was one of the hottest, most miserable summers I can remember in recent times…ugh) and most of the products I tried worked fairly well.  About the only ingredient that can make my hair look frizzy and unruly in summer weather is aloe, so after trying straight aloe vera gel as a styler, I never tried it again.

But flax seed gel really appealed to me…something I could easily find at the grocery store and make at home.  I already lean towards the ‘make it yourself’ camp and I’ve dabbled in making my own soaps and lotions, so this was right up my alley.

What recently brought me back to flax seed gel after a long hiatus (while I tried various store-bought stylers) was my experience with these stylers during winter.  I learned that my hair doesn’t do well with lots of humectants – if they are high up in the ingredient deck (i.e., in larger quantity than other ingredients) I will end up with frizzy, flat, nasty-looking hair.

This means glycerin, panthenol, honey, propylene glycol…if I see those ingredients listed in the first few ingredients of my gel, curl cream or conditioner (I don’t use shampoo), then I most likely will not like the results if the humidity and dew point are low.  Unfortunately, the majority of curl creams and gels out there use these ingredients.  But flax seed gel is one humectants-free styler I found that works really, really well for me in the winter.  I learned my lesson and will make sure I always have a bottle of this stuff waiting for me in the fridge!

I use this after my leave-in conditioner – I use quite a bit of flax seed gel (I’ve found that I can’t use too much, really) and rake it through or comb it through at first, to make sure all of my hair is saturated.  Then I lean over and scrunch, scrunch, scrunch with both hands…each side and then flip my head to scrunch my hair upside down.  After this I add gel, because I need a little extra hold…even though this is called flax seed gel, the consistency is really more like slime/snot!  I use either LA Looks Sport Gel (very cheap, at most stores), EcoStyler Gel (another cheapy, I get it at Sally Beauty Supply), Biotera Gel (Sally Beauty) or Kiss My Face Upper Management Gel.  I scrunch in the gel, let my hair dry, and once it’s dry I scrunch out any ‘crunch’ from the gel.

So that’s how I style my hair, and this is how I make flax seed gel…it’s really fun!

First, I take ¼ cup of flax seeds.  This is what they look like:

Set a fine mesh strainer over a bowl that is deep enough so the gel can get through without the strainer touching the bottom.  Also have a small wire whisk handy, and any additives you plan to use.  (I use ½ tsp of vitamin E for preservative, and a few drops of mint essential oil to add a nice scent.)  You’ll also need a container for the final gel – one that will hold 4-5 oz should be fine.

Measure 1 cup of water.  (Note:  this picture is of half a cup, because I was making a half-batch when I took it.)

You can use tap water or distilled, or you can do what I did and use water that has ¼ cup of marshmallow root steeping in it.  You absolutely do not have to use marshmallow root!!  I like it because it adds some slip and I happened to already have it from my lotion-making days.  If you do infuse your water with marshmallow root, make sure to strain all the marshmallow root before you start making your gel.  (This is why my water is not clear, and why my flax seed gel ended up an amber color.)

Add the flax seeds to the water in a small saucepan and turn the heat to high.

Stir every now and then, to keep the seeds moving around so they don’t stick to the pan.

When your water starts to boil, start stirring continuously.

You really need to keep an eye on the gel because the next steps happen pretty quickly.  When you start seeing foam and the consistency of the water turns to a thin jelly, turn the heat down a bit and keep stirring.  When you see the seeds suspended in the liquid instead of sinking down, turn off the heat.  It will still look pretty liquidy, but believe me, you don’t want to cook longer than this or you will never be able to strain your gel!

Give your seeds a final stir and immediately pour the gel and seeds through the strainer.

I use the spoon to kind of stir and push the gel through (you can also scrape the bottom of the strainer, because gel will collect there).  It won’t look like a huge amount of gel but you can easily double the recipe if this isn’t enough for you.  This recipe gives me enough gel to last for a week or two, using it every other day or every few days.

While your gel and seeds are straining, soak your pot with some water…you don’t want the gel to dry in there because it can be a pain to wash!  You can either dump your seeds into the trash or you can put them into a Ziploc bag and reuse them – I can get one or sometimes even two more uses out of a batch of seeds this way.  Just pop them into the freezer until you need them again.

At this point, you can add any additives (you don’t need to add anything, but you should keep your gel in the fridge to help it last longer if you don’t use any type of preservative).  Give your gel a good whisk and then pour it into your bottle or container.

And that’s it!  It sounds kind of convoluted but it’s a fast process…definitely less than 10 minutes.

Once you get past the squick factor because of the consistency (it really is kind of slippery and snotty-feeling), you may find that you love flax seed gel as much as I do!

Have fun!!

We start wandering around, turning back and forth as the beeping or dripping continues.  Sometimes we can’t even tell what we’re hearing:  “What the hell is that sound?  Is the water running?”

If we’re lucky, Paige is home and she can clear up the mystery with a few words:  “It’s coming from downstairs.”  “The faucet is dripping.”  “It’s Dave’s hearing aid whistling.”  (This last happened when he was asleep and had set his hearing aid on the coffee table, but forgot to open the battery compartment door to shut it off…hence the whistling.)

Being able to localize sound is one of those things we take for granted.  You hear someone call out to you and you turn in their direction.  You hear a car engine and know to look in that direction to see how far away it is.  Something beeps and you walk towards it to change the battery or get your food out of the microwave.

Dave and I have the double challenge of first trying to figure out what it is we’re hearing (for some reason, running water is really hard to ‘understand’) and then figure out where the heck the sound is coming from.  It’s incredibly frustrating!

I used to wear bi-CROS hearing aids, which meant that I wore a receiver on my deaf right ear, and it transmitted the sounds wirelessly over to my left ear, which had a moderate-to-severe loss.  It gave me the impression of hearing from both sides, but was absolutely no help when it came to localizing a sound.  Everything just sounded like it was in front of me or off in the vague distance.

Dave can’t stand the way bi-CROS aids sound, so he doesn’t wear anything on his deaf left ear and just wears a hearing aid in his right ear.  Of course, everything sounds like it’s coming from his right side.

I’ve noticed, now that I’ve had my cochlear implants for over 2 years, that I’m getting better at figuring out where a sound is coming from.  More and more, I’m the one who answers when Dave asks where a noise is coming from.  I can tell if it’s inside or outside (this is more of an issue when the windows are open), upstairs or downstairs, to my right or left.

Sometimes I close my eyes and listen for a while; it just happens.  I can just tell which ear is receiving the sound I’m hearing.  It’s something I’ve never experienced before and it’s not a big dramatic thing – it just kind of happens and my brain makes the connection.  I don’t know how long it took before I realized I knew which direction sounds were coming from, but it’s definitely something that is quietly improving as time goes on…behind the scenes, so to speak.

Right now I can hear my cat meowing and I can tell she’s to my left.  Dave just cleared his throat and my right ear heard it.  I hear a kind of ambient noise and my guess is that it’s the refrigerator…I hear it more in my left ear, and the fridge is behind me and to the left.  It is so cool to hear this way!!

The first few months after I was activated, everything just sounded like it was “in my head”.  I was so busy learning what everything sounded like that figuring out where the sound was coming from was just too much information.  It’s amazing to me how much my brain is still learning and how much it’s adapting, even a couple of years later.

It’s still not perfect; that incident with Dave’s hearing aid happened last week, and I actually didn’t hear the high-pitched whistle at all…Paige heard it.  But I know it will just get better with time, and that’s fine with me!

Since Valentine’s Day is almost here, and I currently have a raging case of writer’s block, I thought I’d post these.  Now, they are old – the first one was written in Feb. 1999, and the second was sent to the SayWhatClub-World list (I’m not sure if it still exists) in July 1999.  I’m not going to change the tense or details, I’m just posting them as he wrote them.  Here they are:

Well, it’s February…the time of the year when the folks up north start to think about how much longer winter will last and the ladies begin to think about Valentine’s Day.

Wendi and I are both members of an online hard-of-hearing group, The SayWhatClub. I had joined back in July of ’97 and she came in a couple of months later. I always tried to greet the new members with a personal e-mail and I did so with Wendi.

When she replied I noticed that her positive attitude and cheerfulness just shone right through her words. We started a correspondence that soon revealed we had many things in common…perhaps the most important was the respect that we each felt for the other person.

We fell into the habit of chatting online (once she showed me what that was) and we began to realize that there was something very special in the way we thought about each other and the closeness we developed in our talks. I certainly wasn’t actively looking for anyone and Wendi had enough going on in her life that searching for love was a low-priority item also.

However, when something is meant to be, life will find a way to open even the hardest heart to the ways of love and that is just what happened with us.

We’ve been together for almost a year now and it has been absolute bliss and we have never had any doubts about whether it will last or is this really the real thing. When love is right, you know it.

This is.

Happy Valentine’s Day!!!!!

This is the second one, sent to the SWC-W list, on the topic of finding a ‘soul mate’:

…The older we get the more sure we become that we know what this perfect companion will be like. We instinctively seem to know the qualities that our partners should have to complement our own strengths and weaknesses.

The problem lies in our ability to tolerate the differences between the real person and the imaginary one. The longer you’ve spent thinking about what this *soul mate* will be like, the more likely you are to be either surprised or disappointed by the real person. AFAIK, no one has ever just wished for their perfect partner and then found that exact same person.

If a person is willing to let go of their preconceptions, they have a very good chance of finding someone that will fulfill their dreams…just not in quite the way they had imagined. I think the keys here are tolerance and flexibility.

I don’t know why things happen the way the way they do in life. Whoever or whatever is behind the scenes making things happen doesn’t consult me on a reliable schedule…unless my life itself is the answer to all the questions I have. <g>

I’d like to think that life works like the Richard Bach books – Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions.  I’d like to think that…so I do. You can see I’m a simple-minded sort of fool.

Now for the story:

When I joined the SWC 2 years ago I was almost 4 years post-transplant and a lot of the problems were easing up. I draw a VA pension so I don’t have to work. I worked on my sister’s house off and on and pretty much did whatever I wanted to.

I didn’t want a relationship…I had remarried my ex-wife after the transplant and that was 15 months of *learning experience*!!  Lol

That little episode led me to the conclusions I stated above about the differences between what you get and what you hope for.   She was just so sure I was going to make her life perfect and she was sooo disappointed when that didn’t happen.

So at the time I joined the SWC I was pretty much doing what I wanted…playing golf every day…reading…running… whatever I wanted within my means was mine to have.

Was I lonely? Maybe…it’s a little different situation than most because there was always a fair chance that I would die suddenly from some complication of the transplant. I’d seen it happen often enough to people I knew like me. I most definitely was not looking for a relationship nor did I think I would ever have one again. I had resigned myself to living by myself for the rest of my life and making the best of it. Truthfully??  There comes a certain peace of mind when you’ve made a decision like that…to accept things being as they are.

So there I was, all by myself, just got my little WebTV and found the SWC on the web and I was busy being obnoxious as hell (I have a talent for it) and then I met Wendi online when she joined the club.

Now, I’m not going to tell you that lights went on and fireworks started exploding and the skies opened up and the big Fella up there said, “Dave, this is the woman for you…your soul mate and lifelong companion.”  But he might as well have.

There was definitely something going on from the first even though I was trying to discourage myself from getting close. When life wants you to go in a certain direction, it’s best to just go. So I did.

I’m not going to bore you with trivial details about how we finally met and all those long nights spent online chatting. But the one thing that stood right out was how often we were both thinking the same thing at the same time.  You’ve all seen the web acronym, GMTA, well, that kinda became our own little motto.

Anyhow, the moral of this long rambling post is: sometimes you have to give up searching for what you want in order to find it.  Best of luck to everyone who’s still looking!!

So that’s the guy I fell in love with.    Happy Valentine’s Day, from me and Dave.   <3

The original advisories made it sound like the main storm would be Tuesday morning/afternoon.  I mentioned to Dave that he might need to reschedule his biopsy, depending on how much snow we got.  Usually we get snow and the plows are ready for it – we might get 3-5 inches one evening and you’d never know by the condition of the streets the next morning.  So if the worst of the storm was over by 8 or 9 pm Tuesday, the streets would probably be fine by Wednesday morning.

He was pretty casual about it … “We’ll see – usually these storms pass us by.”   So we just kept watching the weather, not really sure what to do.  It’s a long drive if the traffic is heavy – anywhere from 40 to 60 minutes, depending.  If the roads are bad, a 40 minute drive can easily become a 2 hour drive.  We needed to be at the VA hospital by 8 am for his blood work, then up for an ultrasound at 8:30 (for them to mark the biopsy site) and the actual biopsy at 9:00.

By the time Monday afternoon rolled around we had a Blizzard Watch, and it really seemed like there was no way the storm would miss us.  The timing also shifted so that we were now looking at a huge snow storm starting around 3 pm Tuesday, the worst being overnight Tuesday, and continuing into late Wednesday morning/early afternoon.  People were being warned not to even think of getting on the roads early Wednesday.  Dave called to cancel his appointment.

Then he began fretting.  “What if it’s not that bad?  I’m really going to look stupid for canceling my appointment.”  I kept reassuring him that he’d done the right thing, but we’ve had so many big storm predictions that turn out to be hardly anything and I could understand his ambivalence.

It started snowing a bit on Monday night, and we thought maybe that was going to be the snow storm.  We weren’t sure if it would get heavier overnight or if Paige might get the day off from high school.  I woke early on Tuesday to see if we had a message waiting, letting us know school was canceled.  Nope – no message, no snow, and the roads had been cleared pretty well.

On Tuesday, the Blizzard Watch changed to a Blizzard Warning.  The VA hospital called Dave to cancel his appointment for the next day, which was weird – it was a computerized message, saying they would call us to reschedule.  But either way, that helped reassure him that he did the right thing by canceling the day before (even though apparently the computer system didn’t realize that).  Now he was able to breathe easier, knowing the VA didn’t want him there the next day no matter what!

We watched the news, kept an eye out the window, and waited.  And waited.  We were beginning to wonder if the snow would ever start, when suddenly it was like someone flipped a “Blizzard” switch.  Around 2:15 it started to snow.  Paige usually gets off the bus around 2:50 and walks in around 3:00.  By the time she got in, it was really looking like a blizzard…the wind was picking up and the snow was much, much heavier.  Dave had gone out for some last minute provisions that morning and picked up some powdered donuts.  He felt bad about her walking in that crappy weather, so he made hot chocolate for her and had it waiting when she walked in the door, along with some donuts. 

And the rest is history.  It really was a blizzard, in every sense of the word.  Although I lived in Illinois during the big blizzard of 1967, I was only 3 years old so I really don’t remember it.  This was the worst storm I’ve ever seen – the wind was so strong, and lasted for so many hours (it started at 3 pm and was still howling and going strong at 11 pm when I went to bed).

I can’t believe we didn’t lose power, although I’m forever grateful that we didn’t!  We were very worried about Paige’s hedgehog because he really needs warmth – he has a warming light in his cage that we keep on all the time during the colder months.  I was worried about my cochlear implant batteries and keeping them recharged.  I have eight of them – four in the smaller size and four large.  However, they are 2-1/2 years old and don’t hold a charge as long as they did in the early days.  I’d be fine for a short power outage, but if the power went out for a couple of days I would have to plug my charger into the car to recharge my batteries.  I’m not sure how long it would take to recharge the batteries so we were speculating how it would actually work…would we have to go drive around for a few hours while the batteries charged?  (Which, of course, wouldn’t have been possible because the roads were impassable.)  Do you just turn the key in the ignition and not actually turn the car on?  It’s kind of embarrassing that I don’t know this stuff, but really, I never charge things in the car so this is all completely new to me.  I usually just switch batteries out with fully charged ones that are already on the charger, and I don’t even know how long it takes my batteries to charge up…an hour?  Four hours?

Once it was all over, we got about 20” of snow, with drifts up to 5 feet in our back yard.  The driveway had 3 to 4 feet of snow, which was a joy to shovel.  Between the 3 of us, going out in shifts (it wasn’t possible to do it all at once without keeling over from heart failure), it was 3 pm before it was finally done.  Even now, two days later, Dave still has to constantly re-shovel the end of the driveway where the snow plows keep depositing a wall of snow.  (How they manage this I’m not sure, since the roads are clear of snow…why are plows still driving around, and where are they getting the snow they are dumping at the end of everyone’s driveway?!)

Although I love snow, this definitely satisfied my craving for a good storm and I’ll be happy to wait for spring now, thank you very much. 

I’ll be honest…I’m a cat person. We do have a dog, a black Cockapoo named Toby, and I love him with all my heart. If it weren’t for Dave, though, he would not be part of our household. It was Dave who took a then 5-year-old Paige to the county pound back in 2000 and told her they were going to look for a dog. It was Dave who picked Toby out, named him, declared him the Perfect Dog. It is now Dave who gives Toby his Neverending Haircuts, takes care of any problems in his nether regions (dingleberries, anyone?) and reassures me when Toby does Dog Things that worry and confound me. Dave is a Dog Person. I’m glad he’s a Dog Person, because our lives wouldn’t be the same without Toby. However, I don’t get dogs the same way I do cats.

When Dave and I met, back in 1998, I had one cat. His name was Bear, and he lived to the grand old age of 20 years. Dave and Bear got along famously and I think he was Dave’s first experience with a cat that was kept indoors and pampered, rather than an outdoor farm cat.

We adopted another male cat from a shelter the following year. He’s all white and his name is Sugar. We had originally intended to get a female cat, figuring Bear would accept a female quicker than a male. Sugar, however, won Dave’s heart by grabbing onto the hood of his sweatshirt jacket as he walked past the cage. We read the index card attached to the bars, and found out that Sugar had been rescued from the streets. He’d been in the shelter for 5 months and was only 7 months old, although he looked full grown. He’s partially deaf, and could only go to a home with a ‘hearing’ cat to help him along. We agreed it was a sign — after all, we were both partially deaf and we could really relate to a partially deaf cat!

We went along like this for quite a while…Bear and Sugar the cats, Toby the dog. We even adopted 3 guinea pigs from a guinea pig rescue organization here in Illinois. (For some reason, none of our cats think of the guinea pigs as prey…they completely ignore them.)

Bear’s health deteriorated in 2005 and we had to have him put to sleep that summer. It was heart-wrenching for all of us — the kids had Bear in their lives forever, and I’d had him with me since he was just a tiny kitten in 1985. Dave & Bear had forged a bond that was truly amazing — Bear would sit on Dave’s lap, and Dave’s lap only.

We waited a month, and at the end of August 2005 Dave took me to look at cats waiting to be adopted. We had promised the kids we’d get a kitten — we figured it would be easier for Sugar to accept a kitten, and the kids had never had the experience of raising a tiny kitten before. However, I immediately fell in love with a 4 year old long-haired black female cat. I couldn’t help but return to her cage again and again — the kittens were cute, but something about her just drew me in. Dave declared her my birthday gift and we brought her home. We named her Sabrina and she fit into our family immediately — she is by far the friendliest, most laid-back cat I’ve ever owned.

Later that year during winter, we noticed a stray cat in our neighborhood. We assumed it was a male. We first noticed it walking on top of the wooden privacy fence between our home and our next-door neighbor’s. As we watched this little cat do an amazing balancing act, I declared to the family that I wanted that cat…it was meant to be with us…after all, it was black and white, which was a combination of our current two cats (Sugar, all white, and Sabrina, all black). We made jokes about having only monochromatic animals, and everyone began to humor me when I made noises about wanting to bring this cat into our home. After all, we had no idea if it was truly a stray/feral cat or if it was somebody’s pet that was allowed outdoors.

As the weather warmed up in early 2006, this black and white cat started showing up by our patio door. We sometimes set a plate of cat food outside on the deck, and this cat figured out that a free meal was available. We began feeding it, called it ‘Max’ and would all gather around to watch as it polished off each plate of food.

In mid-May of that year, our lawn had grown to jungle proportions and Dave went under our deck to retrieve the lawn mower. The deck is enclosed, and as he opened the doors he was met with a surprise: there was ‘Max’ under the deck, along with two tiny kittens. We realized Max was a girl, and the reason we’d been seeing her on a daily basis was because she was living under our deck.

We spent about 2 weeks going under the deck to feed the cats, sitting on old crates quietly until the kittens would come out of hiding and begin eating. We brought down an old litter box, an old cat bed, blankets, food and water. We rarely saw Maxie (her new, more feminine name) but the kittens began to get used to our presence. Since they were eating solid food, we figured they were 5 or 6 weeks old. We named the grey and white kitten ‘Smokey’ and the black and white kitten ‘Boots’, for its white paws.

We found this all fairly amusing — we had promised the kids we’d still get a kitten, if the time was right and the right situation presented itself. We had to admit that having 2 kittens pretty much drop into our laps seemed very much like a sign!

On top of discovering the kittens, we also began to have a problem with tomcats coming into our yard. More than once we found them looking into the windows of our candle workshop, and they were always in and out of the yard. We would see them chasing Maxie through neighborhood yards. Eventually, one of them took to waiting on the deck, near the entrance under the stairs, that Maxie was using to get in and out (since she hadn’t mastered opening the deck doors with her paws!) which made us very nervous. We had no idea if they were going to try to harm the kittens.

One morning we went down to feed the cats and saw a large amount of grey fur outside the deck door. This fur looked exactly like Smokey’s fur, and we were certain that a tomcat had gotten in and killed one or both of the kittens. We had been planning to eventually trap the kittens and bring them indoors, and this pushed our plans into high gear. We ended up emptying everything out from under the deck, hoping and praying that what we found wouldn’t be heartbreaking.

We’d cleared the deck entirely and found no sign of any of the cats. At that point I was convinced Maxie had moved the kittens to another location. There was only one item remaining under the deck — a large platform ladder. Dave lifted it up and both kittens shot out!

We were able to coax both of them into cat carriers and then we moved them into a large crate in our garage. The next day we set the crate on the deck, using the kittens as ‘bait’ (how horrible that sounds!) to catch Maxie as well. This literally took hours as she circled the crate but refused to go inside.  We had tied a string to the crate door (the kittens were in a sectioned off back part of the crate, which was huge – it was a crate for a large dog).  We extended the string into our house through the deck door, closed the blinds and peeked out while we waited for Maxie to walk inside.  We were beginning to think she would never fall for this, when she finally walked into the crate to sniff her kittens.  Dave pulled the string, the door slammed shut, and Maxie went crazy…but we had her!  All of the cats were okay, although Maxie had an obvious fight wound on her side.

We set up an area in the garage, using the crate as well as some shelving material, to give the feral cats a place to stay where they couldn’t run off but also couldn’t expose our current animals to any diseases or fleas.

We took all three girls to the vet a few days later. (This was easier said than done…we had to once again trap all of them into cat carriers for the ride to the vet, and this took about 45 minutes each time we had to do it.)  We found out that both kittens were girls, so we renamed them: the grey/white kitten became Grace, and the black/white kitten was christened Alice. They were in remarkably good health, with no worms, fleas or ear mites. Maxie was spayed and her abscess was cleaned up and stitched closed. (It was huge; the vet said she would have died if we hadn’t intervened.  Poor girl!!)  She did have worms, which were treated and cleared up, but no fleas or ear mites.  The kittens got all of their vaccinations and then got spayed, and we began very, very slowly working on socializing them.

In the beginning, Gracie was much more friendly — she would come up to us, let us pet her, pick her up, etc. She was completely fascinated by Toby and loved to walk up and sniff him. Alice was very timid and would run away if we approached her. However, at the vet’s office she was the calm one and Gracie was the hissing, spitting wildcat!  Over the years, their roles reversed.  Alice (or Ally-cat, as we often call her) is friendlier and will come up for long petting sessions.  Gracie is still very nervous and will often shoot out of a room if we enter.  Every now and then, we can get her to hang around long enough for us to pet her.

Maxie is my little sweet pea. She will come up to us, rub her head on us and let us pet her. As I mentioned before, we don’t pick her up. As soon as we move our hands to her sides, as if to lift her, she slinks down and runs off.  She has come a long way, though! She used to swipe at us and hiss if we came near. Now she sits on our chests if we’re lying in bed, sits with us on the couch, and she even tolerates Toby, Sabrina and Sugar.

If it weren’t for the fact that we still can’t pick them up, you’d probably never know these cats used to be feral.  It took about 2 years of patience, but it’s really been worth it.

We submitted their story to Borders for their Hopeful Tails book project, and it was accepted.  You can see a short story and sweet photo of our girls on page 79 of the book.  One funny note:  in the abridged version of their story that was published, my name was changed from Wendi to Melissa in the middle of the paragraph.  Everyone who sees the book wants to know who Melissa is!

Each of the girls has their little quirks:

Maxie loves to jump onto one of the kitchen stools when we’re cooking.  She peeks her face over the corner of the kitchen island to watch and sniff the enticing aromas, but she always stays on the stool and never tries to jump up onto the counter.

Gracie is our Flying Wallenda.  We often find her on the fireplace mantel or on top of our work oven in the workshop.  She’s the one most likely to leap from surface to surface without hesitation.  She’s also still absolutely in love with our dog, Toby!

Ally-Cat loves to come up for chin scratches and back rubs, and will flip over in a ninja roll when you start to pet her.  We’ve never seen a cat do somersaults before!

The cats tend to hang out downstairs in the summer and in our bedroom during winter.  It makes Dave a little bit nervous; he has to race Maxie into the bedroom and try to leap into bed before she gets there.  Otherwise he has to try to slip under the covers without her thinking it’s a game – a couple of times we’ve had cats attacking our toes under the covers and boy, their teeth are sharp!

So that’s how we ended up with 5 cats.    Here’s a photo of Dave with all the cats and Toby…I believe this is the only photo we have with all of them in one shot: