Focht Family Blog

I survived the surgery. Anesthesia was not fun. I think I feel more pain from the intubation than the surgery. I am having problems being able to clear my throat. Other than that the pain isn’t too bad. I woke up and still have the left side of my thyroid so I guess that means the cyst was benign. Here is a picture of my main incision and bruise.

I realized while I was uploading the picture I had a few miscellaneous photos that I hadn’t posted yet. The first is of Timmy in a bunny suit at his grandma’s house.

The next two I have a cute story to tell on my mom. While we were in Indiana it was my youngest niece’s birthday. We asked what she wanted and my sister-in-law said she would love a long Amish dress. Andrea likes cultural clothes and Meghan loves long dresses. So we decided to see what we could do. Mom went shopping in town to see if she could find something in one of the antique shops. They send her to an Amish store but they only had dresses for babies up to size 18 months.

On a side note every time we go to Nappanee we go to an Amish bookstore that is owned by one of the men who works for Newmar. They have two kids and their little girl is about the same size as Meghan. I had told mom to go and ask her if she could buy a dress from her. So she asked the owner of the dress shop if she knew the family and if she thought it would offend the wife. She said no so she went to the house and asked her. She brought her into the house into the laundry room and gave mom one of the dresses off of the line that had just been washed. She had never sold one of the dresses before so she was going to sell it to mom for $5 but mom gave her $20. Here is two pictures of Meghan in the dress that mom bought off of the back of an Amish girl! :)

Tomorrow morning at 5:45 I will report to MUSC for a partial thyroidectomy. Any prayers sent this way would be greatly appreciated. I am stressed out and worried. I am not sure why but I have always been afraid of general anesthesia. The surgery is not worrying me as much. The only complications that might occur is damage to the parathyroid gland which gives you problems with calcium absorption and possible problems with damage to the vocal cords.

The good news is that mom made it through her surgery on Wednesday. She is healing as fast as she can and she should be released from the hospital tomorrow morning. The bad news is that today we received word from our dear friend Maryellen that she has breast cancer. She will be having a double mastectomy on Friday so any extra prayers sent her way would be appreciated. I will update as we receive more information from her. Right now I am ready and waiting for my surgery. The cyst is growing so the choking feeling is getting worse as well as the symptoms. I am just hoping Hanna or Depression 9 do not alter my plans for surgery since Charleston has tendencies to flood without hurricanes being involved. If Charleston is not under water my surgery should be on Thursday, September 11.

We were in Indiana for the last week and a half and it was wonderful as always. I always love it there, even in the snow. While we were there we drove the RV over to Lehman’s. He does woodworking for RVs and is well known in the area for making custom cabinets and desks and such that blend into your existing cabinetry. We have decided that we will go back the beginning of December and have the cabinet in the hallway next to our pantry removed as well as the hallway sink and medicine cabinet. He will then build a bed in the space that can be accessed from the stairs into the loft. There will be 3 large drawers under the bed and then on the bedroom side will be a cabinet with shelfs since the one side of the bedroom will be closed off. The new bed will be Samantha’s and then the boys will have the beds in the loft.

We are also going to take out the carpeting and have linoleum or linoleum wood planks put in so we don’t have carpet to deal with anymore. We have also discussed adding a second satellite and having flip down TVs installed for each of the kid’s beds and then converting the TV cabinet to another regular cabinet. So… by Christmas we will have a new to us RV without the extra payments! :)

We will be back in Savannah this afternoon. Mom has her pre-op appointment tomorrow morning and I made Misty an appointmnet in the afternoon to discuss giving her shots for her arthritis. She is getting bad fast and it is very hard for her to get in and out for her potty stops. Once her vet appointment is over with we will go back to Statesboro and settle back in until the surgeries are over with. We will be in GA until October 1 when I will have my appointment with the MUSC endocrinologist and my check up with the surgeon. My surgery will be on September 11. I should be released the same day and once I am released I won’t have to check in with the doctor until 3 weeks later.

I am disappointed. I had hopes that this would be the perfect RV for us. The way I had it all planned out we would put a single bed in the loft, instead of the queen. That would be Samantha’s bed and the extra floor space in the loft would be the play area. The bunks would be for Timmy and Josh….. well…. that was the plan at least. The reality is that the loft is at best the height of an over the cab bed in a Class C. Nathan had to belly crawl in and out of it. I could get up there on hands and knees and Samantha was hitting her head trying to sit. We tried to talk to Newmar about lowering the floor by 6 inches which would make it good enough but still not ideal. Their answer was “no”. I am not sure if they are just not wanting to invest money in the engineering behind a redesign or not. There were 2 other people at Newmar while we were there that wanted the new floorplan as well but for all of us the loft height was the deal breaker. So… Newmar just saved us a bunch of money! Nathan put up a page that has all of the pictures on it that we took. If you are interested in seeing this engineering malfunction, go to: http://www.focht.net/photos/4159