This past month has given me even more time to reflect back on my life, and the things I am thankful for. But, it also was also an answer to a question: “What is my Why?” What is it in life that I want to do, and try to achieve, as well as what is important to me? Why was I exercising every day? I have answered this last question many times in my blog. I was exercising every day as an attempt to help me be around longer, and spend more time with my family. But, as I found out, that is not always under my control. But, I will control what I can!
I definitely want to be spending more time with my family. We have lots of things to accomplish yet, and places to see, and things to do. Running was always a big part of this as well, as we would go to different races and fun as a family. That will still happen. I just need a little time to recuperate first.
It was a little over a year ago where we went to Disney and I did the Dopey challenge…4 days, 4 races, starting with day one a 5k, then a 10k, then a half marathon, and the 4th day the full marathon! Those days of adventure are not over yet, but may be delayed a little. I would love to have more of these times with my family, and Nick will be graduating next month, so we would not have to worry about school interfering with things. He could not go with us this last time.
With our Watertown Area Run Club, I have many more family members to be running races with. Here, last October, Paula, Jill, Amanda, Sarah and I went to Denver to do the Rock n Roll Half Marathon. Tom met us out there but could not run with us because he was dealing with an injury. But his daughter and son-in-law ran it. It was so much fun! Hopefully, there will be more adventures like this again!
Of course, Tom and I have had so many adventures over the years, both with races, and with training runs. Those days are not over yet!
Our WARC run group have become some of the closest friends we have. And, we all love to run. I will be back, hopefully in the next few weeks starting to at least get a few miles at a time!
Getting back to running with be a celebration to me! I don’t care about what finish line I cross at that time. I just want to get back out and run…that truly will be something for me to celebrate! These are some of the reasons I keep exercising. These are my reasons why I do this. Now, you just have to figure out what your why is. Keep trying. Make a list. Push yourself beyond what you thought you were ever capable of. Find out who you really are. You may just find out something new about yourself you did not know you had. What is your why?
Happy Easter everybody! Time to reflect on things in your life, and appreciate all of the good things that have come. We all have our struggles, and setbacks, but we have to keep looking beyond that.
easter quote; “The great gift of Easter is hope.”? Basil C. Hume
If we don’t have hope, then what do we have? Hope can keep us going with everything. You can get work through any struggle in your life as long as you have hope. It is no different when it comes to exercise as well. We can all struggle with this, but we need to keep trying, and hope that things will improve. It is never easy, but the more you do it, the easier it gets. You just have to begin…
The weather has been improving now, and hopefully the last snow for the season was last week. Even with the weather, a lot changes in a week. We had 2 feet of snow, and crazy wind, and now today it is essentially gone, and 80 degrees. We knew things had to improve, or at least we had hope that it would improve. Hope can keep us going with a lot of things.
You have to begin. Once you start, then you need to keep going. Health challenges can make a difference on this as well, which I am now experiencing first hand. I will admit, I do not like it at all! I want to be back to how it was, and enjoying life, experiencing life, and doing activities I love to do. I will eventually get there. I have hope. As long as you have hope, you can accomplish almost anything!
Since I have been having health issues lately, my dog Zeus knows something is not right either. He tends to hang around me more now in the evenings. He is worried too.
But, the one who has been at my side through all of it, trying to help me hang in there, and keep reminding me of hope that it will get better, has been Sarah…My Sarah! This is what a relationship is all about. You help each other when one is struggling. In reality, we are both struggling. This is all new to us, and we are keeping each other going. I have hope that I will be back doing what I love to do later, and be healthy…as long as Sarah is right there with me!
Some of us have health issues that come up and we don’t always get to have a renewal of life. That is what Easter is all about. Embrace it. Have hope! Just like all of us with the struggles we may have, keep trying, keep believing, and have hope!
Have a blesses Easter everybody! Have hope, keep looking forward, and keep moving everybody!
Slowly but surely, with a lot of help from Sarah, I continue to keep making progress as I continue to recover from the last few weeks. My workout now is walking 1 mile a day, at a 20 min mile pace. A far cry from what I usually do, but I am literally starting over. I am glad I have the opportunity to start over.
It was easier to get motivated even to go walk a week ago. The bike trails were all clear, the grass was clear of snow. It was great to get back outside and enjoy Spring for once! But even that had to change!
Getting 25 inches of snow will put a change in the routine of walking outside. At least I have a treadmill at home!
The treadmill is ok, as long as the TV is on, or I can listen to music. But, nothing compares to being outside. Hopefully this recent snow won’t last very long, as we all can get back outside again.
I guess overall it is no different when it came to exercising prior to having this recent illness. I am just at totally different levels of achievement at this time compared to previous. But it really is not any different. There is always some degree of discomfort. That is not always a bad thing. If things really hurt trying, nobody would do it. But, in order to keep progressing forward, there are always little obstacles in the way. Work, responsibilities…time. It still boils down to excuses. Time to decide what is more important to you, and to also ask yourself what are you going to do about it? Are you going to sit back and take it easy, or work for something you want to achieve? It truly comes down to choice…and are you willing to take a chance? No more excuses. The world is already full of excuses. Take control, and be the one in charge!
Spend time with friends. We have no idea when one of us may not be in the picture anymore! And remember, if you are trying, and moving, progress is still progress!
You never know what you have the potential to achieve until you try. Unless you try, you will never know. Never give up on yourself. If you truly can’t count on yourself, then who can you count on?
Never, ever forget this! When you move forward, you will continue to move forward. Keep moving everybody!
Well, I have now been home for over a week, and am starting to make progress. My weight dropped to a max of 14 # loss, and is now leveling out. I can finally start eating, but not everything I want yet. I could not eat anything for 5 days, and then after that it was just toast and bananas. It started out Sunday March 24. 5AM. I just had gotten up to go to the bathroom. No changes. Heading to the sink, when all of a sudden it felt like I got hit in the right side with a baseball bat, and fell to the ground. Then the vomiting started. The pain eased up following this, but then the next 3 hours it kept coming in waves, and more frequent. We were to go run with the run club at 7AM, and I told Sarah to go. I thought I just came down with the flu. She had her phone with her, and at 7:40 I called, and told her to come home to take me to the ER. I could not take the pain anymore. We made our way in, and had labs, CT scan of my abdomen, thinking then it was my appendix. The ER doctor came in to tell us my appendix was fine, but I infarcted my right kidney. That means the blood flow was cut off to the kidney by a clot, and it looked already at that point that I had lost 90% of my right kidney. Next thing is we are in the ambulance to SF (Fast!) to the vascular surgeon at Avera Heart Hospital. We do not have a vascular surgeon in Watertown. This surgeon literally met me in the garage of the hospital as they were taking me out of the back, and telling me all of the ramifications of this, and if there was going to be a chance of saving anything of my kidney, we need to go to the cath lab now and try to remove the clot. Away we went! He was able to remove some of the clot, and then I had a “clot buster” infused through my femoral artery for the next 27 hours, having to lay flat on my back and not move at all! That was beyond word description. I hope to never have to do that again.
This was the picture at the beginning with the clot in my right kidney. Not a lot of blood was flowing through.
This was my kidney after 27 hours of the “clot buster” TPA. I had improved blood flow quite a bit. It helped. I don’t know yet how much it helped…time will tell. But for now I have something of a functioning right kidney.
So how did this happen? All that time I had laying flat on my back helped bring it to light. We had gone to Jamaica the 3rd week in February, so we had a long flight. Also, I was wearing a night splint for my right foot to help with my plantar fasciitis. Well, between the 2, it was enough immobility for me to create a clot with in my right leg. I had pain for a few days after we returned, but no swelling. Usually there is swelling with a clot. At any rate, I thought it was muscle, and kept running, biking, swimming…all of my usual daily things. So, several tests later, they found I had a clot in my leg, and also a defect in my heart called a Patent Foramen Ovale: PFO. It was present since birth, but no issues…until now. What happens with the PFO is you can have what is referred to as a “paradoxical embolus”. The blood clot moved up from my leg, to my heart, and from there is very common to go to the lungs, and you have a pulmonary embolus. If you have a PFO, the clot moves from one chamber, the right atrium, through to the left atrium, and back out through the arterial system…to lodge somewhere else. By far and away the most common is presentable by having a stroke–up to 75% of the time. In my case, going to the kidney, it occurs 1% of the time. 1%!!! I guess I feel lucky. I have 2 kidneys, but only one head. This could have resulted in far more significant problems. But now the PFO had to be fixed, or it would keep happening!
They have a device that they deploy into the defect of my heart to fill the gap of this PFO. This is what it looks like.
This is what is looks like in a diagram of the heart closing the PFO. Thank God for modern medicine. This device going through the femoral vein in my leg to my heart first began undergoing trials for use in 2012. If this would have happened prior to then, I would have had my chest opened up in order to fix it. Now it was an hour procedure, and if everything went well, home the next day!
This is how it looks in me! It worked! Other than getting rid of the nausea and vomiting, and trying to gain strength, it was a matter of time for it to heal. I am currently on multiple meds, including multiple blood thinners for awhile. I can walk, but no aerobic activity for minimum of a month, but have been told once this all heals up, I can run marathons again if I want too! What am I going to be able to do running with no hole in my heart anymore? I am learning to be on the other side…the patient side. It is very humbling!
I appreciated all of the texts, emails, notes, cards while gone. Jill and Tim Makepeace had these cupcakes delivered. Sarah and the kids loved them, and I saved one for me later to have, but just could not eat anything with the nausea and vomiting. The nurses taking care of me got to enjoy the rest, so then they kept an even closer eye on me after that! My consecutive streak came to an end, but I started a new one. It started off last Sunday walking 1/4 of a mile…1/4 of a mile!!! This after biking 30 miles and running 3 miles the day prior to all of this happening. I am now up to 1 mile walking, which I will hold for awhile. It wipes me out. I have had time to reflect on the good things in my life, what truly is important to me, and how lucky I really was! I am here! Keep moving everybody!
I always knew someday my consecutive exercise streak would end. I did not know how it was going to be, or the circumstances that would be involved. The one thing I knew for sure it that it would be because of something I would have no control over. It was not just going to be an “excuse” to say I could not do it that day. That day happened last Sunday. I will expand on this more in the next several weeks, but will briefly summarize by saying my life changed that morning. I developed a clot going to my right kidney, and I was losing my kidney. I also had a clot in my right leg, and found out later that it was brought on by my heart, and had what is a called PFO: Patent Foramen Ovale. 3 angiograms later, with 3 subsequent procedures, 5 days in the hospital, I was able to come home. My exercise streak however, stopped. Day # 4196. This is how far I went. This has been driving me for the last 12 years. Lead by example. Don’t just tell people, my patients, that they need to stay active. Show them! As the saying goes: Records were meant to be broken!
Sometimes, you do just need to go with the flow! Life is always changing. My world changed over night. But, I am here. For the next 6 months I will be on multiple blood thinners, and will be taking it easy. I can’t do any aerobic activity for the next month, and then will be very slow progressing. But, I still can!
Things will changes. Things are going to be different. But I will be able to run again later. It will then be time to start a new consecutive streak. I look back now and wonder how I went this long. Things come up, life throws curveballs. Most of the time it is just an excuse. An excuse your mind can take control of. You just need to take charge. Many different events, races, causes have been accomplished over this time period. Many of them with my Watertown Area Run Club (WARC) members. Working together to raise money for charity, FARA, and going somewhere different for a race just to have fun!
Last Fall, Jill, Amanda, Paula, Sarah, Tom, and I went to Denver to do the Rock and Roll Half Marathon. These 3 came up with a shirt they had printed: South Dakota Girls…and Dan! We had so much fun with this, and had so many comments on this!
That same WARC spirit carried on this last week as well. Here they had a large group together on Wednesday, and ran for me, which would have been day # 4200! Holding a sign, and peanut M and M’s (my favorite candy!)…it still brings tears to my eyes when I look at what they did for me! But this is what WARC is about. We go the extra mile for one of our own. This is why this group of people/friends are so important. It is not about running. It is about being there for each other, and we just happen to run at the same time! I can’t thank WARC enough for this! I was at a pretty low point that day, and just had the 3rd procedure done, and this just lifted me right up! Thank you!
I guess it is gonna come down to how tough am I? I have gone through adversities before. One thing for sure, I am not gonna let this be a excuse to not restart another consecutive streak. It did definitely put life in perspective. We are all human, and don’t know what tomorrow is gonna bring. Live today! I have been watching (too much) TV lately being down this week. A movie came up that is one of my favorites. Shawshank Redemption. It has a great line in it that opened my eyes once again: “Get busy living, or get busy dying!” Choose…
Sarah and I have done a lot of talking. The consecutive streak was not the goal. The exercise was not the goal. Being together is the goal. I am going to listen to her and recover from all of this because I want to be able to do more things/events with her later. My daughter is getting married in August…the first wedding for one of my kids. I do not want to miss that for anything. I will be back. I will start a new streak. In the process, maybe this will not only help motivate others, but also help motive me! Keep moving everybody!
