Less than a month into his new job, Terry brought home a cold, and it was a bad one, we both got sick. One day, I woke up and he was still home. I thought he had called in and decided to stay home and sleep off the cold. That is something we will do. Take some Nyquil and sleep it gone. He slept all day, getting up to go to the bathroom, but was a bit disoriented, that I thought is normal when you are sleeping hard, we all do it. But at some point I decided something was not right, because I was posting on a board I was on at the time about how uncomfortable I was with his sleeping all day. I stayed up most of the night finally falling asleep about 5 a.m., only to wake up to a very loud noise coming from behind the TV stand. Terry was back there disoriented again….I got him from back there, and where he needed to be, but something was not right…..at all. He stayed up and talked to me and I KNEW something was wrong from the way he was talking and acting, time to go to the hospital…..but he is a stubborn person and I usually have to “make a deal” with him about seeing a doctor. This time there were no deals, I called my back up, Jay, my brother in law. But he is not picking up, darn it. So I call his wife, I tell her what is going on and she starts trying to get him on the phone too, finally Jay calls back, I give the phone to Terry and here him say OK…again this is not like him at all. We are off to the hospital. We get there and they practically take Terry in 30 seconds flat, get him in a private ER room, and taking him for testing, good thing they could tell from the signs he was having what testing needed to be done. He was having a brain bleed, so began our 3 week long stay at the hospital, they had to determine what caused the bleed. (I had a family member die from an aneurysm so I was pretty sure I was being told I was going to be a widow.) I stayed with him the whole time because in my mind I could give him better care than the nurses, who I will say were awesome, but it was not me! After doing several tests they came back and said he has 2 aneurysms and they are not sure which was the one that was bleeding….not what I wanted to hear, but it is what it is. I had to make a decision, they were going to clip the one they thought was the bleed, so I was going to give them permission to take a piece of his skull out and do this, then later after a while they would put the piece back on. Well, that is not what happened, after looking at the films again, they decided they could coil the one that was on the basal stem, not the one that was on the frontal lobe. That meant no taking off a piece of his skull!! HOORAY!!! Fast forward to 2 1/2 weeks later, we are being let out of the hospital just in time for Thanksgiving, and it was the best Thanksgiving ever!
Now came the waiting game, waiting for Doctors appointments, more tests to check the size and all of the second aneurysm and see what our next steps are going to be….finally a few months later, the doctor tells us that the second one is small and unless it grew we would just keep an eye on it…so he released him to go back to work, just in time, the boss was about to give his job to someone else! I was working a seasonal job doing taxes and he was going back to work, we were going to be ok! Until that day in March when Terry came home and he had been let go….the memory of how to do the job just was not there, he had not said a word to me of the difficulties he was having, probably not wanting to worry me. We decided to see about disability for him, it was the only occupation he had for 30 years, and trying to get a job doing something new would be hard, he forgot things from one day to the next. Fast forward 5 months, and he was approved on our first try, no fighting with Social Security at all!
Now how were we going to achieve the dream? We were behind on rent, and struggling to make sure we had the basics. Well, when it seems darkest, a bit of sunshine seems to come through, I finally got calls for interviews…2 in one day! Awesome, I went for the first and was told they have a 2 interview system, which is fine, I have been through that before. It seems like I had just been back from that interview when the second call came in, and I had another interview for a different job the next day, and they did both interviews that day! Off I went for the drug screen and the next day I was called to come in for orientation….that meant we both had an income….(the first place called a couple days later and asked me to come in for a second interview, but I had already accepted the other job).
We decided to get caught up on rent, and pay a couple other things that needed to be paid, then we could start saving and looking for an RV! We are on the way….
Sorry todays blog is so long, there are still a lot of things I left out, it was a very difficult time but its all part of our story.
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