2009

In all our years of sending Christmas Cards, we've never sent out newsletters or even photos. I hope this is not TOO boring...but a LOT has happened in the past year.

Carol and I still live here on our micro-ranch here in North Texas. We have our 10 acres, a farmhouse, a barn, a pond, three bad puppies, some cows, and more blessings than we can name. Here's a picture of our house taken after a rare snowfall in 2008.

Carol is still working with the 3-5 year old preschool class at our Church. She spends a lot of time planning their crafts, lessons, and stories. I help out with their worship and prayer time. Just about the time the worship portion of our adult service ends, I head back to her classroom. It always seems to work out just right...I tune my guitar and we're set to go. They're very energetic (and loud) with the songs they are most familiar with. By the time they're finished with us, we're finished ourselves (i.e. they wear us OUT)...but it's more of a blessing to us than we can describe. She has continued to be faithful to her Women's Bible Study and intercessory prayer groups at our Church as well.
 

This past June, Carol encountered a (still unknown) insect which bit/stung her on the right thumb. She and I both initially thought it was a fire ant bite. A couple of days later, not only was her thumb painfully swollen, but the swelling had spread to her hand and wrist. We went to the emergency room late at night, where the nurse practitioner agreed that it was a fire ant bite. She prescribed a steroid to reduce the swelling and some pain medication. Between what she received at the hospital and the prescriptions, she finally was able to sleep that night. I stayed awake most of the night to watch her and finally went to sleep sometime around 4:00AM.

However, by the next morning nothing was resolved and the swelling had now spread into the rest of her hand and was progressing down her forearm. Her pain was increasing not decreasing, despite the medication. I urged her to see our family physician and Bob took her there that afternoon. He wasted no time admitting her to the hospital. I gathered up the necessaries and met them there, sending Bob back to the office. Our family physician prescribed morphine and the admitting nurse gave it to her in an IV, and it worked...but only for five or ten minutes. Her pain level then returned right back to where it was. We continued to pray and cry out to the Lord, but all that evening the pain and swelling continued to increase. The night nurse came on and got right on the phone with our family physician, who prescribed an even stronger pain killer. With the help of our nurse's persistence, this course of treatment finally began to work and she finally began to rest (after they had increased the dose enough). The night nurse convinced me to go home after midnight or so.

Carol called me around 1:00AM to make sure I had made it home OK and to urge me to sleep as much as I could (remember I had been up most of the night before). That night around 5:00AM, Carol had what the nurses told me later was a "minor respiratory episode." She couldn't breathe and was disoriented. They calmed her down and got her back to sleep.

At 6:00AM, our family physician was making his rounds at the hospital and was stopping by Carol's room to check on her. At that exact time, Carol had a "major respiratory episode" where she began having a seizure, couldn't breathe, and couldn't find the nurse call button. Thankfully, God is STILL on the throne. He made sure our family physician was literally present in the room when this attack happened so he could take the appropriate measures to save her. If God had not intervened, one of the nurses told me later that there was a very good chance that she would have died.

In addition to our family physician, there were hand specialists, infection control specialists, respiratory specialists, and many others involved. NONE of them could figure out why they could not get the swelling and infection in her hand under control. Our families and our Church family continued to pray and after two surgeries and many different treatments, we finally saw the swelling began to decrease and her pain subside (somewhat).

After seven days, she was finally released. However, she still had pain and only had minimal nerve response in her right hand and was unable to use it to any great degree for a few months. God has continued to be faithful in her recovery and my guesstimate is that she has regained about 80-85% use of her hand at this point. It gets a bit better each month and the hand surgeon told me that it could take as much as 12-18 months for a full recovery.

On to happier news! This past spring our son Bob completed his undergraduate work in Accounting at the University of North Texas. This fall he started his graduate classes where he is working towards his Masters in Accounting. Once he has completed these studies, he will have enough credits to sit for the CPA exam. Having both his MS in Accounting and a CPA certificate is his goal.

He is still working for me in my healthcare consulting practice (www.martusfs.com). However, once he became a degreed accountant he got his "accountant raise." Using this raise, and the downturn in the real estate market he was able to buy his own home about 20 minutes from here in a nice family-oriented neighborhood. He has begun to furnish it (with furniture and multimedia equipment), and is eagerly anticipating his "Obama" refund on next year's tax return.

His girlfriend Anna received a full scholarship for her Masters at the University of Montana at Bozeman. He misses her a great deal and buying the house has helped him "fill in" the time while they both pursue their post-graduate goals. Our busy cost report season will help with that as well pretty shortly (our busiest work time is between January and July).

With Carol having recovered sufficiently and Bob having no summer school for the first time in a couple of years, we were finally able to have a great McKay family vacation cruise to the Caribbean with everyone (the three of us, my parents and my brother's family). There was plenty of food and fun (too much food, actually). Our nieces and nephew (and my Dad) attacked the ice cream machines at all hours of the day (and night). Our wonderful cabins were unfortunately located right over the theatre...which was kind of like living over a movie theatre playing loud action movies all day long. We enjoyed being all together but for me...it just ended too quickly. Here are some pictures from that trip...my camera's flash was having troubles, but luckily my Sister-In-Law's seemed to be doing just fine. Note the blue bandage on Carol's right thumb in one of these pictures:

In September my brother Scott and I were able to be there (in Milton, FL) for my Dad's 77th birthday. Here are a few pictures from the celebration.

For me, 2009 has gone by so quickly. I guess Carol and I are now technically empty-nesters, even though we still see Bob every weekday (our business operates out of our basement). It's not so different yet...since he's been living in residence at the "Hotel Bob" on our second floor since 1999. For Carol I guess there are fewer dishes to wash and fewer clothes that pile up. Of course I now have taken on all of the mowing and trash can responsibilities (I can hear Bob cheering now). We've finally figured out how to keep the basement dry, so I've started tinkering a bit with our home theatre again. I still play bass for our Church worship band and sing with the Choir. I still teach adult Sunday School for about 3-4 months out of the year.

As a precursor to my my home theatre tinkering, I've been going through old files, boxes of old records (bank statements, credit card statements, etc.)...you know, the stuff you may have forgotten you still had. I ran across our first digital camera, an old Kodak Easy Share (so old that it had to have a dock to upload picture files to the computer). When I checked the camera's memory, I found this picture from Christmas 2004 taken on our front porch with our (then) four dalmatians. We've since lost the dalmatian (Minnie) in front of Carol and the one in my lap (Mickey) is starting to have health troubles. But most of all I also can't get over how young Bob looks here, the years are going by so FAST...too fast. 

For anyone keeping count (my Mom certainly is), I've now lost 140+ pounds from my all-time high weight following my lap-band surgery a few years ago. My type-2 diabetes has also technically disappeared along with it, though I'm trying to eat as if it's still there (most of the time). I'm also currently fighting through my second bout of mono in the last 5 years. In my case, it's technically called Epstein-Barr (or Chronic Fatigue) Syndrome. You know, I used to doubt and laugh at people in the past who said they had it so I guess you really do reap what you sow. A blood reading for someone normal is 22 or below and my reading is over 750, so I guess it's real after all (grin). There's no cure, but it's certainly not fatal...you just have to allow yourself to REST in order to get better.

Carol and I are planning two more cruises for next year (so far). The first is in January (just a few weeks away) from Los Angeles to Hawaii and back. The second will be starting with some land travel in Europe in early November. We'll then catch a transatlantic ship which goes from Athens to Ft. Lauderdale (with stops in Egypt and Israel, among other places). If you would like to keep up with us, I keep a travel blog of our trips. I was a bad boy this past summer during our family reunion and didn't keep up, but it'll be better next year (isn't that what New Year's resolutions are for). If you're interested, you can find our travel blog here at: LINK

This blog has ongoing narratives and pictures from all of our past trips since 2007 on there as well (we've been to Alaska, China, Russia, Korea, Thailand, England, France, Brazil, and Africa...and there's probably more I'm not remembering). Some of the pictures there are good. If you're not used to using Blogspot, I've posted a semi-tutorial here on the one of my blog entries which you can find by clicking on THIS LINK.

May God's blessings fall upon all of you this year and may His favor follow you wherever you go. It is our prayer that each of you prosper even as your souls prosper. 

Love to you all,

Don & Carol