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One would think that after blessing me with fungal pneumonia, a coma, sepsis, renal failure, pulmonary failure, paralysis, and a host of other goodies, all since last December, God would move on to somebody else. But no, that isn’t the way God works. He has more of a sense of humor than that.

When I was in the process of getting MRSA, Fluffy and I noticed a mottled red discoloration on the little toe of my right foot. One of my doctors used a purple pen to draw a line around the outer periphery of the redness so we’d know if the redness was spreading. But no, the redness did not stay inside the purple line. In fact, the redness took one look at the purple line and said, “Ha!”

The redness crept toward the adjacent toe, and then the toe after that. Then, when nobody yelled at it, it took over the entire foot.

Fluffy and I were a little concerned, but when we went to the infectious diseases specialist and then the podiatrist to make sure my MRSA was gone, neither of them said boo about the red foot. I thought this was a tad suspicious. My foot looked as though it was about to take over Cincinnati. It was going to be a hostile takeover, too.

Perhaps my doctors didn’t care about Cincinnati, but I did. I thought somebody should be calling out the National Guard. The military should be deployed. Heavy weaponry should be armed and aimed at my foot, just in case it did something naughty. But because nobody in authority challenged it and put it in its place, it acted bad. Very bad.

Fluffy and I were close to going to the emergency room before he finally googled a slide show on common skin disorders and learned first-hand about psoriasis. We knew psoriasis existed, of course. What we didn’t know was that an old person could get it for the first time.

But no, Google happily informed us that even though most people get psoriasis between the ages of 16 and 22, there is something called “late-onset psoriasis,” which occurs between the ages of 50 and 60.

Hold on. I’m 63. There’s something rotten in Northern Virginia, and that rottenness is Kathryn H. Kidd. Bummer.

I’ll tell you one thing I’m happy about. I’ve been looking at the pictures of psoriasis on the internet, and I can tell you one thing. There are a lot of nasty places you can get psoriasis. You can get it in your hair. You can get it in your eyes. You can get it on your tongue. You can get it in places that are so nasty you can’t even show them on a family website. I got it on my foot. I was lucky.

However, I’ve been looking at those pictures of psoriasis, and I don’t just have your garden variety case of psoriasis. I’ve got a textbook case. There are few pictures of psoriasis I’ve seen that are as bad as mine. Overkill, thy name is Kathy. In fact, I haven’t seen a single case of psoriasis on the foot that is even nearly as bad as mine is. I should be proud. And in fact, I am proud. If you’re going to get sick, go for the record books!

I should also be writhing in pain. The websites say psoriasis can be accompanied by “intense itching or intense burning.” I don’t need the websites to tell me that. All I need is to look at my foot.

This isn’t an example from the internet. This is my foot. Have you ever seen anything more painful-looking?

I ask you. Should that foot be in pain, or what?

I am not writhing in pain. I am not itching to death. In fact, if I didn’t look down, I wouldn’t know there was a single thing wrong with that foot. Through God’s own tender mercies, or maybe His sense of humor, He gave me the world’s worst case of psoriasis on a foot that is paralyzed — a foot you could hit with a sledgehammer, and that I wouldn’t feel a thing. You could give me psoriasis on that foot till my toes dropped off, and I wouldn’t feel even a moment’s twinge of discomfort. There is no pain whatsoever.

This is one of about a million things I love about God. He always gives me something to laugh about. I can’t wait to see Him again, when we can sit down with a bag of popcorn and laugh about all the crazy things He did to make my life so exciting and so fun.

Throughout the past decade or two, I have taken enough prescription drugs and dietary supplements to stock a vitamin store. I don’t just use those 7-day pill holders that you can get at Walmart. No, my pill holder has 28 compartments — and I have two of them.

A few years ago, one of the Young Men of our ward was at our home to do a service project, and he happened to see one of my pill holders. In a gesture of compassion that is not at all customary for teenage boys, he murmured, “Oh, that poor little old lady.”

I looked around the house to see if a little old lady had sneaked in with the youth group. When I didn’t see one I said, “I’m the only little old lady who lives here.” Jordan was mortified.

Years have passed. Jordan has served a mission and gotten married. I still don’t know what little old lady he thought was keeping her pills in our little-old-ladyless house.

As Jordan’s experience may attest, I was a pill-taking professional. I could take a handful of them at once. Sometimes I took pills without water. Nothing bothered me — not even those potassium caplets that are the size and shape of torpedoes. I used to take two of those at once without blinking an eye.

All that changed overnight after I got fungal pneumonia in December. Eventually the doctors had to do a tracheostomy, and I had to breathe through a tube. After the tube was removed, sometime at the beginning of February, the doctors continued feeding me about a zillion pills, capsules, and caplets every day. The only difference was that now I had trouble getting them down.

It wasn’t just the big pills, mind you. In fact, more often than not, it was the little pills that would get caught in my gullet. You know — the pills that are so small you can’t see them unless your glasses are on. The big pills were moderately difficult to swallow, but the little ones were killers. More often than not, they’d get stuck in my throat and eventually dissolve there.

I always felt as though I was choking on something, and more than once I had to stop eating a meal because something was stuck that wouldn’t allow food to go down. It doesn’t make a person very excited about eating dinner.

Eventually I got so curious that I asked my doctor about it. “What did you expect?” she asked. (“What did you expect?” was a question that Dr. Ricci demanded of me on almost a weekly basis. I soon learned that with an illness like mine, I should not be surprised if space aliens clawed their way out from my chest.)

When I looked at her blankly, she gave me the full explanation. “You had an incision in your neck. It was a big incision, because you have a big neck. There are all sorts of little bitty tissues that are in the human neck. They lie right on top of each other and don’t cause any trouble unless you get an incision there. Then you have scar tissue that keeps the tissues from going back where they belong. For the rest of your life, you’re going to have things getting stuck in your throat. Little things like the smaller pills are going to get caught in those little tissues more easily than anything else.”

I have since proved Dr. Ricci wrong. Something doesn’t have to be small to get stuck in my throat. I have choked on big pills as well as small ones. Food gets caught in my throat in a regular basis. (Even water gets stuck in my throat. Air, too gets stuck there, and then comes out in a manly burp. What a bummer that is!)

But those tiny pills are the real killers. I haven’t found a way to swallow them. I could put them in a dog biscuit, but I’m not a dog. I could put them in a piece of cheese, but then I’d have to swallow the piece of cheese. Besides, the amount of pills I take would require a whole lot of cheese, several times per day.

I have come to dread pill-taking time. But there’s one good thing about it: swallowing those tiny pills always reminds me of a scripture. The scripture is this:

Matthew 23:24
24 Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.”

I am certainly a camel-swallower as far as medication is concerned, but being sick for so long has changed my attitude in other ways. With the exception of my right foot, which I must admit gets yelled at on a regular basis, I am finding the post-hospitalization Kathy is a kinder, gentler Kathy than before.

With the exception of that obnoxious right foot, most little things don’t bother me these days. I seem to realize, perhaps for the first time, that when the toilet seat malfunctions or I get burned by a pan when I am trying to cook, that inanimate objects don’t have a vendetta against me. As often as not, it’s my own negligence that causes accidents or burns or disappointments. Even though I happened to have been using a tool or a pan or a piece of technology at the time, the inanimate object was not hoping I’d mess up so it could see me fall down. Usually, anyway.

(By the way, my right foot indeed qualifies as an inanimate object. When you have to wrest your leg off the ground with both hands in order to move your foot, you will probably agree with me on that.)

Although I was somewhat annoyed a couple of weeks ago when a parking lot valet just sat there and watched my wheelchair move backwards, sending me falling to the ground, even people don’t get a rise out of me these days. Most human beings are not trying to hurt the people around them. Most of us are doing the best we can to get through each day, although sometimes we’re distracted by our trials or the problems of a loved one. When that happens, we may not even notice that people around us are suffering.

Even worse, we may not notice that our actions are causing problems for the people around us — we can cause accidents, or our distraction can keep us from preventing accidents from happening. When accidents happen around us that we could have prevented but were too distracted to do so, it doesn’t make us bad people; it makes us preoccupied people or unobservant people. That is no reason to get angry.

There is no need for me to be angry with people who cut me off on the freeway or break in front of me in the check-out line. Even if they acted out of malice, it only ruins my day to take offense at it. And I well know that life is too short to be carrying grudges, even for a minute or two.

There are a lot of things that I have at least temporarily lost as a result of my recent illness. My taste buds are AWOL, my feet are paralyzed, and my nerves shoot themselves off in ways that make me scream loudly at inappropriate times. But I’ve also lost a lot of the anger that human beings in this modern age seem to carry around with them like badges of honor. This is something I am glad to lose, and if it the illness that has done it, I want to thank the fungus that knocked me out early last December.

(This essay originally appeared in the Nauvoo Times.)

I have always had an excellent sense of taste. Part of that comes from being born in New Orleans, where even young children were expected to eat anchovies, oysters, capers, okra, kumquat, and eggplant. I was a food snob by the time I was six years old. It has always been more important to me to eat one bite of something that is stellar than to eat a whole meal of inferior food.

When I got married, Fluffy and I continued our food snobbery. We avoid McDonald’s like the plague. Our favorite restaurants are Brazilian, where I eat collard greens and farofa while Fluffy fills up on hearts of palm. My favorite meal is a single Dungeness crab, which takes two hours to break apart and consume. You get the picture.

So when I awoke from a medically-induced coma back in December and realized my taste buds weren’t working, I was somewhat concerned. I couldn’t taste anything, so I decided not to eat at all.

The doctors who were treating me did not like the idea that I wasn’t eating, so they plied me with the best food they could give me. I had a tracheostomy at the time, so they wouldn’t let me eat real food. Everything was put in a blender and pureed, and then — get this — the kitchen staff shaped the food the way it would have been shaped if it hadn’t been put through a blender.

It was artfully done. Carrots were put in little carrot shapes, and mystery meat was put in the shape of a steak. I like a good steak, but putting mystery meat in the shape of a T-bone didn’t fool me for a minute. Oddly enough, I was never served mashed potatoes (one of the few foods that is already in pureed form), but was given ground white turkey meat that looked like potatoes. I continued my practice of non-eating, to the frustration of the doctors and the dieticians.

The only way I ate at all was to drink an occasional bottle of Ensure. The doctors fed three of them to me per day, but I often forgot to drink them. The taste was okay, only because I had never tasted Ensure before and didn’t have anything to compare the flavor to. But “okay” had never been good enough for me as far as food was concerned before I got sick, and it still wasn’t enough to entice me to eat.

Eventually Fluffy started bringing food to me. It was an odd assortment. I really developed a taste for Jell-O, which lasted for several weeks. (I had not eaten Jell-O for decades.) He fed me yogurt, but I hadn’t had a taste for yogurt before the coma and I still didn’t have one. It tastes too darn healthy.

He brought me soup, and that was sometimes successful. I could eat a cup of soup at a time, which meant a big food day for me. But fruit didn’t work. Most foods tasted off, and I no longer had a taste for even Pepsi or chocolate.

One Sunday, our home teachers brought the sacrament to me in the hospital. As they put the bread on the tray, I got a glimpse of it. It was the most beautiful bite of bread I had ever seen. There were at least two pumpkin seeds in that little scrap. It looked to have been made of a different flour — rye, perhaps. The crust glistened so brightly that I knew it had been treated with an egg wash.

I know you aren’t supposed to get excited about the sacrament bread, at least from a food perspective, but that bite of bread was so beautiful that I couldn’t help it. When I finally put it in my mouth, though, it tasted like a balloon that was being inflated. It kept growing and growing in my mouth until I couldn’t swallow it. I started fanning my mouth the way people do when food is too hot. The home teachers asked if everything was all right. Eventually I swallowed the bread, but it wasn’t easy. Food just had that kind of effect on me.

I lost nearly a hundred pounds while I was hospitalized. I don’t look any different to me, and you probably wouldn’t notice a difference either. But I had just purchased a new wardrobe of blouses the week before I got sick, and they barely buttoned in the front. Now there’s at least twelve inches of slack in the tightest one, so apparently the scales haven’t lied.

Now that I’m home and recuperating, my taste buds are starting to come back from vacation. Chicken still tastes weird to me, and I still can’t eat fruit except for berries. Chocolate tastes off to the point that I can’t eat it, and I’m not even going to try Pepsi. Who needs the calories?

A real bummer is that I’ve lost my taste for water, which was always my favorite beverage.  I still drink it.  What choice do I have?

We had a traditional Saint Patrick’s Day dinner of corned beef and cabbage, and it was hard for me to eat the cabbage. Bummer. Cabbage has always been one of my favorite vegetables, and cabbage cooked with corned beef is the best cabbage of all.

A friend whose daughter had chemo as a teenager said this also happens to people who have chemotherapy. Marcia assured me that my taste buds would fully recover, just as they did with her Kristine. I’m looking forward to that.

You see, I still remember how foods are supposed to taste. Each food has a different substance and texture. The spices have their unique aromas and essences. I don’t want to forget all that. I want to be reunited with all these magnificent flavor experiences again before I forget how wonderful they are.

I think this is similar to our relationship with God. We all came from a place where we knew Him intimately. He was our sun and our air. That relationship with Him was life-giving. He was the most important facet of our existence.

Then we came to Earth. We couldn’t see God, or even remember Him. We couldn’t even feel His love without making an effort to do so. All sorts of distractions were put in our way. We had joys and sorrows, trials and achievements. Every scrap of life — the good and the bad — puts noise in our ears, so to speak.

With all the commotion, it’s no surprise that so many people lose their taste for God. They may know He exists, but they forget how central He is to our lives and to our souls. They may have a distorted sense of what God even is, forgetting that He, above all, is our loving Father. They may feel that something is missing in their lives, especially when they are going through hard times. They may even know that the missing thing is God, but they don’t know how to make a connection with Him — just as I still can’t taste chocolate even though I try.

I may remember what chocolate tastes like, but none of us fully remember what being in the presence of God feels like. That is something that must be rediscovered on the other side of the veil. But we can get enough of a taste for Him here that we may no longer fear death, but will look forward to being reunited with Him.

Our remembrance of God has to be cultivated with prayer and study and good works and faith. If we make the effort here, our rewards will be immeasurable. Once we are back with Him, all the church meetings and scripture study and other labors of living the gospel will be a drop in the bucket compared to the joy of that heavenly reunion.

This article was originally published in the Nauvoo Times.

I washed my hair today. Most people use that phrase, “washed my hair,” to mean they washed the 100,000 hairs that are on the average human head. When I use that phrase, I am referring to the one hair I have that is left.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But I am losing hair by the handful. I dread combing it because I have to clean out my brush not once, but twice, during the process. At first glance, it appears that a large rat has taken up residence in my hairbrush. Now huge colonies of hair desert my head at once, leaving me for what they must assume are greener pastures. They must be so sad to find themselves in the garbage can.

This is not an exaggeration: I have lost about two thirds of the hairs on my head, and I am quickly heading toward baldness. I asked my doctor in the hospital about it, and her answer was, “After all you’ve been through, what did you expect?”

It’s time to start buying a lot of silly hats to conceal the inevitable. Although Fluffy assures me, “It will grow back,” there is obviously going to be a period when I am as bald as a hairless cat. I do not see any earthly use for a hairless cat, unless the cat owner is severely allergic. What’s going to happen when we have a hairless Kathy?

The same thing is true with my feet. I can barely wiggle the toes on the left foot, and that’s my good foot. My right foot is about as functional as a dead mackerel. The hardest part about sliding from my wheelchair to my bed is when I have to place my feet on a rug. The right foot is likely to be napping on its side, completely oblivious to the transfer. I have to manually pick up my legs by the knees to get the feet in the right position. Even then, the right foot stubbornly refuses to obey me — even when I use naughty words to communicate my displeasure.

And then there’s my brain. People who drop in for a casual visit rave about how I’m “the old Kathy.” People who actually have to work with me are getting a different impression altogether.

I am unable to read a book or to say my prayers, because my attention span is that of a gnat. Fluffy and I celebrated Christmas on Thursday, March 14, and my addled brain decided that March 14 was Christmas for everyone. Thus I didn’t do my editorial work on Thursday, and a friend and coworker bravely picked up the slack when she realized I was AWOL. I didn’t realize my oversight until I turned on the computer on Friday, when my email box was full of queries about Thursday’s (lack of) work. Fluffy likes this predicament, because he can tell me the same joke every day, and I will laugh as though it was the first time I have heard it.

I’m hoping all these things are temporary, but the bottom line is that we just don’t know. The jury is still out. I may yet grow a full head of hair, recover my feet, and regenerate my brain — but I may not. This “temporary” Kathy may turn out to be the new Kathy. What a bummer that would be!

Or maybe not. My patriarchal blessing has a sentence that says I will have “the health, the time, and the ability” to serve God the way He wants to be served, and I firmly believe that is true. Over the years as my health started to deteriorate and I began to use a walker and then a scooter, I was able to reach other people who were using walkers and scooters — people who would never have spoken to me otherwise. The same thing will no doubt happen if I go totally bald or if I stay in a wheelchair.

One thing I’ve learned in life is that we are all tools in God’s toolbox. He has a purpose for each of us, and we were all designed to be used in different ways. We can’t all be the hammer, and we cannot all be the wrench.

Some of the tools in the toolbox don’t want to be used. They lie there in the toolbox, still shiny and new. Other tools are scuffed and worn. They may not be pretty anymore, but they have been well used, and well cared for, by the Master Carpenter.

I want to be one of the ugly tools. If the way God wants to use me is to put me in a wheelchair, bald and wearing funny hats, let Him do it. I’m just glad He’s using me. I hope that whenever there is an opportunity for me to be of service, I see the need and perform it — whatever shape I happen to be in.

Who would have guessed when I went to the doctor’s office on December 5th that it would be three months before I got home again? During that time I was a guest of three hospitals in three different jurisdictions (Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.). Each hospital involved a different ambulance ride, too.

I was always curious about the experience of riding in an ambulance. But now that I’m an ambulance veteran, I can assure you that it is not something you want to do unless you are one of the medical personnel, or unless you are unconscious.  Somebody should have beaned me on the head with a rubber hammer so the ambulance rides would have been less excruciating. During my last ride they even delivered me to the wrong hospital, so I got to repeat the delightful experience of being unloaded and loaded an extra time for no additional cost.

I was robbed of all of the excitement of the Christmas holidays, I didn’t celebrate the New Year, and I wasn’t even home for Valentine’s Day. I missed the trifecta of holiday celebrations, all for the joy of lying in a hospital bed.

Having gotten that complaining out of the way, I must confess that both Fluffy and I are greatly blessed that I am still on the leafy side of the turf. When I was admitted to the first hospital, my sister Susie was visiting me, and one of the nurses told her that she should take advantage of the opportunity to look in on me for what was going to be the last time.

I recently read that fungal pneumonia (which I had) has a survival rate of only 10% for those patients with compromised immune systems (which I have). So we both understand that my survival was the answer to many prayers. For those of you who kept us in your thoughts and prayers, it is much appreciated. Some of you also sent get well cards and emails, and we both really appreciated those.

My recovery is not yet complete. I was in a medically-induced coma for about a week (to fight the infection), and then it took me about the same time to wake up. Who would know that after a two-week vacation, all of your muscles refuse to work, and you have to learn to do everything all over again?

Most of my muscles are pretty much back online, but I’m pretty useless south of my knees. So now I am learning about the challenges of living life in a wheelchair, and Fluffy is learning about how to be both a nurse and a physical therapist. I will still be in physical therapy for some time, plus we have our daily workout sessions where Fluffy is my therapist. We have seen gradual increases in my abilities, but it is still a slow process.

My brain also took advantage of the sleep time to go on vacation, and like any other muscle (yes, I know that the brain isn’t actually a muscle) it has been reluctant to get back to work. I am just about finished reading a book written for third-graders, and that is about my level at this point. Trying to pray or read anything written for adults is a lost cause.

I’m like a dog that has a tiny attention span, jumping from one shiny object to the next in a manner of seconds. I hate those little yappy dogs, and I’m not happy to have become one.

But I am happy to be home, and Fluffy and I are enjoying being together again in the same house, even if we had to move our upstairs bedroom into the downstairs living room, and make other compromises.

For the most part our life is good, despite the challenges. Fluffy is happy that he doesn’t have to drive to the hospital each day, and he enjoys having a tank of gas last for two weeks rather than three days.

As Mormons, we believe that all experiences are designed to make us better people, even the ones that are difficult to live through. Both Fluffy and I have learned many things from this challenge, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of those ideas in future columns.

I’m not sure how many columns I will be able to write each week, but I will try to have at least one, and hopefully more. Until then, thanks to all of you for your continued support and prayers.

Planet Kathy is back online after more than a four-month hiatus. I did not plan this hiatus, but it happened upon me.

I have written a few articles since returning home for the Nauvoo Times. They will appear here about twice a week until I catch up. Then, as nature intended, I will run articles in the Nauvoo Times that previously appeared here.

I am currently planning for two essays a week to appear here. Eventually I want to get back to the five-a-week schedule.

Being in a coma and now in a wheelchair is a real booger. But life is good anyway, and I want the world to know it.

After some delays, Kathy was finally moved last Friday night from the rehabilitation hospital in Washington D.C. to a rehabilitation facility in Rockville, Maryland.  Of course Murphy’s Law was in full force, and they didn’t pick her up until rush hour, and then they encountered two accidents on the way to the new facility.  So after a very uncomfortable two-hour ride, she was at her new home (and hopefully her last stop before really coming home).

The first two days at the new place were kind of tough, because she was adjusting to new surroundings, and they really jumped right into therapy for her.  On her first full day she had three therapy sessions (occupational, physical, and speech), was placed in a wheelchair four times, and had a minor meltdown towards the end of the day (“I know they want to get me strong again, but does it have to be on my first day?”)  But now she has settled in, and really likes the staff, her surroundings, and the therapy sessions.  She is really anxious to get home and is working to make that happen.  When the staff is not working with her, she is doing exercises on her own.  One day she did 600 repetitions of five different exercises, or 3000 reps in total!

She is eating much better (taste buds are still recovering), and her arm and body movements are almost back to normal.  Walking is still a challenge, because her hospital stay caused some neuropathy in her feet and legs.  That causes extreme pain and numbness in her lower legs and feet, and the doctors are trying to come up with the right balance of painkillers to remove the pain while not increasing the numbness.  But even with the leg pain she is able to stand by herself and stay standing for a few seconds if she has something to grab onto.  This new facility has all kinds of rehabilitation machines, and they are really using them to her full advantage.

Many friends have sent cards or emails, or have visited her in person.  That is much appreciated by both of us, and we also appreciate the continued prayers and expressions of concern.

It has been three weeks since the last update, so it is probably (past) time to pass along some recent news.

Miss Kathy was indeed transferred to a different hospital on December 19^th.  This is a rehabilitation hospital in Washington D.C., about an hour away from our home (when traffic is not bad).  She was placed in the ICU portion of the hospital, because her condition was still considered to be serious.

Since her admission, her new doctors have worked hard to make sure all infections are gone, improve the strength of her lungs, and get her body moving again after being in bed for over a month.  Her progress has been slow but steady, and we have seen improvement in all three areas.  Her primary doctor said all of the major problems are resolved, and she could come home now if she was just stronger.

Miss Kathy (with the world's worst case of pillow hair) says hello from the Dinosaur Hospital

After starting from the point of zero strength, she is now quite animated and is talking and moving her arms quite normally.  Her legs are stronger also, but not strong enough that she can stand on them yet.  When her physical therapists sit her on the edge of her bed, she can sit up by herself and dangle her legs over the edge of the bed.

When she was first admitted to this hospital, she was not able to speak (because of the tracheostomy), and we all became very good at reading lips.  Her lungs are now strong enough that she can tolerate a “speaking valve,” so it has been good to hear her real voice for the past couple of days.

Now that she has her voice back again, she wanted to pass along this message to all of her friends and readers:

I send greetings from the Dinosaur Hospital on Planet Kathy.  I think this place was built during the Jurassic period, and I’m surprised that they don’t still use leeches as a recovery technique.

I have been incarcerated in one hospital or another since December 5^th.  All of the jokes you hear about hospitals are true, but they don’t seem to be as funny when you are the patient.  All you can do is laugh anyway.

Fluffy is taking good care of me.  He comes for a visit every day, and brings me Jell-O, chocolate milk, and other foods that I can actually eat.  He’s cuter than all of the doctors here.

I’ve been thinking of lots of ideas for future blogs, but my fingers are not cooperating yet enough for me to type.

Thanks for all of the prayers, thoughts, and acts of service that have been offered in our behalf.  I can assure you that no one wants me home more than I do!

You can see that her wit seems to have survived the ordeal, and that she is anxious for things to get back to normal.  Her doctors say that later this week she will be transferred to (yet)  another rehabilitation facility.  She will probably be there another few weeks as they get her strong enough so that she will be able to come home.  That will be a great day on Planet Kathy!

Our dear sweet Miss Kathy was admitted to the hospital on December 5^th, with what was later diagnosed as a severe case of pneumonia.  After seeing no improvement over night, the doctors decided that the best course of action was to put her to sleep, put her on a ventilator and let her body heal.

About a week later, the infection was gone, so they took her off of the sleep medication.  It took her more than three days to show signs of waking.  Her lungs had a hard time getting used to breathing on her own again, so they performed a tracheostomy yesterday so that she can get more air into her lungs and wean herself from the ventilator gradually.

The plan is to move her from the hospital (hopefully this week) to a rehabilitation facility where they can work with her to get her lungs and her body back into shape.  After almost two weeks in bed, she is weak and cannot even do simple tasks such as move her limbs.  It may take her some time to get back to her keyboard, but hopefully the more serious portions of this little journey are behind her.

Standing by Kathy's hospital bed is like being on the space shuttle!

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and prayers.  Kathy and Fluffy know they have been helpful and we appreciate all of her faithful readers and friends.

My sister Susie came to visit for a few days, and we had great fun talking together and driving around to various stores and places that I wanted to show her.  Something happened while she was here that I thought was a bit humorous, and it was only later that I started thinking about some of the implications of what I had witnessed.

We had gone to a home furnishings store that I really like.  They have lots of unusual goods and their prices are very good.  Even though it was in the middle of a weekday, lots of other people seemed to have the idea that going to that particular store that day would be a terrific idea.  That’s the problem with shopping in December when people have lots of vacation time to burn.

So the store was more crowded than usual, and it was somewhat of a challenge to navigate the narrow aisles with my viper blue scooter.

As I was going from one aisle to another, I kept getting closer to a young child who was not very happy.  He wasn’t so much talking as just whining and generally being obnoxious – the kind of thing that children do when they are bored, tired, and just ready to go home.  I finally saw the child that was causing all the commotion.  His mother was pushing a cart, and he and his brother were riding inside.

I went down the aisle next to them, so that they couldn’t see me, but I could hear every word that was said.  Now I wasn’t doing this on purpose, but was just browsing through the merchandise and happened to be close to them.  At this point the young trouble-maker said something that really made me chuckle.  He said “Mom, if you buy me this, I promise I’ll be good.”

So now I began to see the hidden agenda of this little demon.  Perhaps he was not just bored, but was using a well-worn strategy to blackmail Mom into getting him an object of interest.  “I know I have been acting like a little brat, and making your shopping experience miserable.  But all of that can go away for just a few dollars and this item that I just have to get.”

Fortunately, Mom was either wise to the game, or in no mood to be played.  She walked right by the item of interest, which resulted in a fresh barrage of whining from the little monster.  Fortunately, the trouble only lasted until they got to the next aisle, and her passenger saw other things that he could covet and whine about.

This got me to thinking about promises, and how good we are about keeping them.  We’ve all known people who seem to be pathological liars.  They have no intention of keeping their word, and just seem to make false promises and tell lies for the rush that it gives them.  These people may fool us for a time, but we soon learn that nothing that comes out of their mouths has any veracity.

At the other end of the spectrum, we all know people who follow the old adage “my word is my bond.”  Those of us who are old geezers learned in school about President “Honest Abe” Lincoln, who walked miles to return a few pennies when a customer overpaid for an item.  We probably all know similar upstanding people in our own lives who will move Heaven and Earth to keep a promise.

I suspect most of us fall somewhere on the spectrum between Honest Abe and the pathological liar.  Like the young boy in the store, how many of us make firm promises with full intention of fulfilling them, only to slide back into our old behavior after the heat of the moment as passed?  The best example of this is the yearly pledge to eat better and get into shape after the holidays.  I suspect that more gym memberships are sold in January than in any other month.

I also thought about the promises we make to God, and then how well we try to keep those promises.  Most faiths teach that deity gives us certain rules or commandments, and then blesses us if we are faithful in honoring those rules or covenants (as Mormons call them).  Some faiths also believe that we will be punished if we don’t keep our end of the bargain.

This reminded me of the old joke about a man who was roofing a house, when he found himself slipping and sliding down the roof towards the edge.  He offered up a fast prayer where he said “Lord, I have never been much on going to church, but if you save me from this fall, I will be there every week.”  Just as he got to the edge, his pants got caught on a nail sticking out of the roof, and his slide towards oblivion stopped suddenly.  This prompted a second quick prayer of “Sorry to have bothered you earlier – never mind!”

I wonder how many times we find ourselves in similar situations.  Have we made promises with every intent of keeping them, and then fallen short?  Have we made promises that resulted in blessings, but then not kept our part of the agreement?  Do we make promises to spouses, friends, or to God like the boy I saw today?  “Let me have this, and I promise I will do better.”

In my experience, blessings usually come after good behavior, and not as a bribe to refrain from bad behavior.  This is expressed by the title of a book written by a former Mormon leader: “Faith Precedes the Miracle.”  I have to remind myself of this often, and keep remembering that it is not the other way around.  I cannot ask for a miracle with the promise of increased faith.  I need to show that faith first and then the miracle will appear.

Note: This was the last blog entry that Kathy wrote before falling ill and being admitted to the hospital with a severe infection.  Her ICU doctors have had her on a ventilator and asleep for six days to try and let her body recover.  She is the one who needs the miracle now.  Please pray that the Lord will return her to us quickly so that we may experience her wit, wisdom and insight again.