Focht Family Blog

Yesterday was my mom’s birthday! What did she get for her birthday? She got to use her Medicare card for the first time. Last week mom started to not feel well so she started to take the antibiotics that her gastroenterologist had given her in December. She wasn’t feeling better and started feeling worse when she woke up for her birthday so I took her to the ER at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Unfortunately she wasn’t happy with them when they told her she was staying. They did a CT scan and some bloodwork. Her white blood count was up again and the CT scan showed an area that was ruptured but contained. We had to wait for the surgeons to come speak with us and they felt that her body was keeping it contained so she didn’t need surgery yet. However, they suggested that she schedule elective surgery to remove the section as soon as she gets back to Savannah.

The doctor that did rounds today said that he might have released her today but because we are traveling he wants to keep her another night. So hopefully mom will be out of the hospital tomorrow and will be able to have her birthday dinner in a few days. She had picked out homemade stew and mashed potatoes and a pineapple upside down cake that Samantha and I were going to make her.

Tomorrow is Nathan’s birthday so we will be making lasagna and yellow cake with chocolate frosting for his special meal!

I’m almost caught up. Once we left Iowa, we drove to Wisconsin. Things have been busy here. We started out with a stop at the Mustard Museum. They are one of Nathan’s customers. The owner gave us a wonderful tour and then read the children a book that he wrote called Mustard on a Pickle. The children thoroughly enjoyed the reading. The owner signed a copy for them and we bought another signed copy of the book for my nieces.

After leaving the Mustard Museum we drove to Jellystone Caledonia. I was determined not to like this place because they have rules about not letting people receive mail here and a few other things. I have decided that the difference is that Jellystones and KOA’s are more campgrounds for families on a small vacation, not people who travel fulltime. But we booked the reservations for the children and they are enjoying the activities.

We started out our Jellystone stay with me taking a trip to the ER at the hospital for the Medical College. My rash is not gone and was getting worse. I was losing my grip on sanity and barely sleeping. I tried to get an appointment at the clinic but they were booked for 3 months. The ER doctor consulted with one of the dermatologists at the clinic and put me back on another round of heavy prednisone, a strong antihistamine (on top of my normal antihistamines) and a strong cortisone that can be applied to the skin. He feels that whatever triggered it made it so that things that wouldn’t normally bother me are bothering me. I told him the results of the skin tests in Denver and they gave me a large printout on formaldehyde that mentioned that if you get new bedding or blouses especially that you should first wash them in dry milk. Somehow this deactivates the formaldehyde. I decided I was done dealing with the new comforter. I threw it out. I bought a quilt from a company that I have bought bedding from before with out any problems. It is 100% cotton inside and out. I then took it to the laundromat and washed it three times in a huge washer. Once with dry milk, once with allergen free detergent and once with water to rinse it out good. Here is the new bedding.

Hopefully all of the medicines will give the allergy time to calm down and it will go away now. So far it is better but not gone but I am still on all of the medicines, too.

While we have been in Wisconsin we were able to enjoy a visit with one of our old family friends, George and Jackie Sargent. They live only an hour away from Caledonia. We went to their house on a lake and had a barbecue. One of their daughters, Laura, was there with her husband, Josh. She is pregnant and due in September. Here is a picture of Jackie, Laura, Josh, and the kids.

We gave George a hard time about not being in the picture so I got another picture with Jackie, George, Laura, Samantha and Timmy. Both Josh and Josh ran off.

It was an especially nice visit since I haven’t seen Jackie or Laura since my wedding.

Some of the activities that the children have enjoyed at Jellystone have included getting to tuck Yogi into bed at night and we also played candy bar bingo. Today we took the kids to the pool for a little while and they had a lot of fun. Here is Samantha helping Josh go down one of the waterslides.

Here is Timmy coming down another waterslide.

They had a really fun part of the water area called water wars. They give each person a bucket with 6 balloons. You fill them up with water and stand across from each other and launch the balloons through holes at the person across from you. Here is Nathan helping Josh and Samantha and Timmy trying to get theirs across to daddy.

After the water wars we went back to playing in the pool for a little while before heading back to the RV for lunch.

After lunch is when we took Misty to the vet. We have had to force feed her her medicine and some ice cubes tonight because she is locking her jaws and not letting us open them. We are really concerned about her being dehydrated and she can hardly stay awake. I am going to stay up a bit longer and try to get some more ice into her. I would really hate to see a cut on her foot be the end of her.

This must be the month. First, Andrea received good news. The lymph node contained tissue that is supposed to be gone in adults. I heard sinus tissue, mom heard thymus tissue… not sure which it was. Anyways, no malignancy was found. They are meeting with the oncologist this week to decide if they need to do anything with it. The thoracic surgeon wants her to have another CT scan in three months and if it has grown he will want to remove it at that point.

Today we had to take Misty to an emergency vet and she ended up with a biopsy. On Monday or so she had a small dime sized raw spot on her front paw behind the pad (like at her wrist area). Thursday morning we woke up to blood everywhere. She had chewed on it until it was a 3-4″ square of raw skin. I have been rinsing it with peroxide and bandaging it but she has been crying a lot and she has been wanting to lay outside. Nathan thinks that might be because nobody is bumping into her outside. However, she hasn’t eaten anything for 2 days and ate very light the 2 days before that. She is barely drinking water and today she was breathing strangely with shivers.

The vet looked at it. She was concerned it might have been a mast cell tumor. They gave her pain meds, sedated her slightly and cleaned out the wound. She prepared a slide from what was in the wound and said she thought she saw mast cells so then we had to wait longer so she could take a biopsy to send to the lab and also do a chest x-ray to see if there was anything in her lungs. Her lungs are clear. We will know by Tuesday if Misty’s biopsy shows cancer.