ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Another summer ruined?

As tough years go 2019 would rank right up there....at least that is what I thought then.  Diagnosed with cancer, followed by the removal of the lower lobe of my left lung, followed by the normal recuperation that follows such an operation but then the news that the cancer had been totally removed and there was no further treatment needed.  That changed my initial opinion of 2019.   Not as bad as I thought. 

Then along comes 2020 it started out just fine, I was making a good recovery from the cancer surgery, but then the crap hit the fan yet again and boy another year that sucked...at least from March onward.  Following 2019 I had hoped for the ability to get back to normal...including some travel and a visit to our Arizona kids.  Needless to say that didn't happen, but it is hard to complain since everyone else in the world was in the same boat and a lot of people lost loved ones....so again a year that seems terrible at first glance turns out to be one that I really shouldn't be complaining about.  We got a lot of work done around the house and I did a lot of work in the flower beds and got things cleaned out and on top of that we got a whole new kitchen, pretty much from the walls out.  The sort of thing that makes you fall in love with your house all over again.  

One little odd event during the late summer which we gave little thought to at the time is worth describing.  I had been working out in the yard and it was a typical hot and humid day and I was doing some pretty aggressive hacking away of ground cover I was eliminating.    I needed to cool off and walked into the house, through the kitchen which was then only about half completed, into the dinning room where a new sink, and a new fridge and stove were all sitting in the dinning room still in their boxes where they had been for several weeks.  

Now the rest of this story I don't remember...I only know what Camilla has told me.  I walked into the living room and asked her what was in the boxes!  Keep in mind they had been delivered something like 2 to 4 weeks earlier.   I kicked the sink box and asked....."What's in this box?"  Was I kidding around?  She looked at me and said she knew I was serious and that something was very wrong.   She told me what was in the boxes and that we were getting a new kitchen and she then led me to the kitchen and was pointing things out and I kept repeating..."I don't remember any of this".  She took me back to the living room where I sat for some time before I came back to myself after 5 or so minutes.   We thought maybe I had suffered a heat stroke which can cause confusion.  We talked about the "event" for a couple of days and Camilla finally talked me into going to talk to the Doctor, just in case it was something more serious.   My doc, suspecting a possible stroke,  ordered an MRI which came back showing nothing significant that would explain the "event".  I had not had a stroke. Good news, add it up to being overheated and forget it.  

Several months passed and Camilla reported one other "event" and suspected another but both were of fairly short duration and in fact the first one she did not even realize what it was at the time it happened.  We were both sitting in the office and she was talking on the phone and I was at my computer.  She said I spun around and vomited on the floor....then I got up, cleaned up the mess with paper towel and went back to the computer.  That evening she asked me how my stomach was feeling and I told her "fine, why?"  She explained that she was just concerned since I had thrown up.   I looked at her like she was nuts and told her I did not know what she was talking about...even getting up and looking in the wastepaper basket for the dirty paper towels and CRAP...THERE THEY WERE.  WTF IS WRONG WITH ME?  

I had been making plans for a trip out west with our youngest grandson, and then came March 16th.  We finished dinner and I picked up my plate and carried it to the kitchen thinking to myself I was going to find something for dessert.  Camilla heard a loud crash and called out asking if I was all right.  I did not respond.  She found me laying on the floor in the pantry, unconscious, she talked to me, and then touched my leg and she said my whole body stiffened when she touched me. She called 911 and both the LFD and the Ambulance arrived.  I am told, but do not remember that the firefighters helped me up off the floor and walked me to the dinning room and were talking to me.  I have no memory of any of that. Then the Ambulance arrived and they helped me onto the cot and wheeled me down to the street and hoisted me into the back of the truck.  I do have a sort of hazy recollection of the feeling of being lifted up and I recall that the medic kept talking to me, asking questions all the way to the hospital and all I wanted to do was go to sleep.  As they were unloading me things were clearing up in my head and I remember being wheeled into the ER and of the events that happened there.   I had a cat scan which showed no stroke so they sent me home and did not make a specific diagnosis, just an unexplained loss of consciousness.  

I returned to the family doctor and I was referred to a neurologist.   At the first meeting with the Neurologist he said "You are having seizures".    So here I am in 2021 with an new ailment...a seizure disorder.  I have had 4 or 5 EEG tests, including one this weekend where I will be wired up for the whole weekend, day and night.  Like everyone else in the world as soon as the doctor suggested it was probably some kind of seizure disorder I started combing all the information I could from sources on the internet.  The closest definition to what I have experienced is something called a "Complex partial seizure". My symptoms all fit that particular type of disorder.   Since March 16th there have been two other "events" that were both less dramatic, but still troubling.  I have had another MRI and the result was much the same as the one from last summer.   

Oh...and did I mention, my driving privileges have been suspended by the doctor and Camilla.  That might be the biggest challenge of all.  LOL...  she and I have very different driving styles and habits. My driving style is one that was influenced by 30 years as a police officer and I have a hard time being a passenger.  I am learning to keep quiet, but it has been a challenge, and I have a ways to go.  Even though I know that I will always get a ride to wherever we need to go or even wherever I want to go...there is still a sense of loss of freedom and that's a very real thing...that feeling of needing to be dependent on someone else. We helped take care of both my mother who developed dementia and my father in law who developed full on Alzheimers disease.  I now have a much clearer idea  of a few the challenges they encountered, like when we took away their car keys.  

So I escaped Covid but am getting a lesson on brain health.  Maybe that is the most healthy way to deal with this...look at it as a lesson and learn as much as I can?  Does that even make sense?  As far as I know this isn't life threatening so I just need to deal with it.  I could bitch and whine that it isn't fair that 3 years in a row have sucked for me, three summers ruined but what would that get me?  2020 could have been so very much worse for me than it was.  I recognize that.  

 

This Old House

      I grew up in an old house of both indeterminate age and style. 

     It probably dated to sometime in the late 19th or very early 20th centuries, it never seemed to have a definite "style".  It lacked all of the elements normally associated with any specific architectural style.    It was just a big square two story box with 4 rooms down and four rooms up.  It had been built with no extra ornamentation either inside or out. No gingerbread trim, the woodwork was plain and probably of pine which was always kept painted.  The floors were pine, great for splinters, also kept painted or mostly covered with rugs and later with wall to wall carpet. The walls were plaster with wall paper in one or two rooms downstairs.  At some point in time an enclosed porch had been added to the front.  When my parents purchased it in 1950 there was not even any indoor plumbing.  Dad walled off one corner from the kitchen and created a small modern (for 1950) bathroom before they moved in and the old outhouse was moved away from yard near the back door and sat behind the tool shed for several years.  The new bathroom left my mother with a smallish L shaped kitchen. I'm sure she was happy to give up some kitchen space for an indoor bathroom.  

For a short time, perhaps around a year or two, three of the upstairs rooms were occupied as a separate apartment by my dad's brother Gwin and his wife Josaphine. The fourth room upstairs was shared as storage space.  There were small closets in three of the upstairs rooms, but none downstairs.  They shared the downstairs bathroom as well but had their own kitchen upstairs.  I can remember, as a toddler, standing at the bottom of the stairs and asking my aunt for gum and she would throw a stick or part of a stick down to me. Eventually my sister was born and my Aunt gave birth to my cousin and the shared living arrangement became crowded. My Aunt and uncle and cousin moved out and my family expanded into the upstairs. My parents occupied that house for 54 years and raised us 5 children there.  During those 54 years the house received several major updates including a kitchen remodel and two different additions.  Today my nephew is raising his family there and there have been further remodeling projects and additions. The house still lacks any definitive style description.    

I have had people tell me that they were not interested in owning an old home, for a variety of reasons…. too much cost to bring them up to date and keep them maintained, style not what they like, room layout that doesn’t meet current lifestyles, and any number of other reasons (excuses).  My wife and I have lived in a “modern” house exactly 4 of our 50 years of marriage.  It was a nice place, and served our young family well for those 4 years but it just didn't seem "natural" for either of us.  Besides that 1960’s vintage National Home we have lived in a classic 1920’s bungalow, an 1880 farmhouse, a small 1880’s town house that that originally sported a gingerbread victorian porch that a prior owner had had removed as he tried to alter the appearance of of the house to appear as a much older colonial style (not recommended),  a very special 1850 brick Greek Revival farm house and finally a 1913 Colonial Revival where we have been for the past 30 years. All very different styles and all had their own advantages and all presented different challenges as we tried to make them into homes that worked for our family. 

As you can see, besides the National Home, our homes all shared one trait…they were all homes of “a certain age”.  Some might label them “historic” and indeed our current home is part of a historic neighborhood and is protected under the city’s historic preservation ordinance.  That protection assures us that after we are gone the house will retain some protections and will perhaps be maintained long into the future. The first thing a friend asked me when he learned our home had been included in a historic district was “does that mean you can never change anything?”   

In short the answer to that question is “NO, that does not mean we can never change anything”. Exterior work requires approval by the historic review commission and that normally presents no problems.  I would probably be prevented from wrapping this brick home with vinal siding or tearing off the porch or making some other alteration that changed the overall style of the house.  Work on the interior of a historic house however, does not require pre approval…you can make the interior as “modern” as you want.  Add bathrooms, remove bathrooms, remove walls to make larger rooms, refinish floors or replace them with modern material, etc, etc.  Let me provide an analogy for what you can't do, using food.  You can't take a meatloaf and put icing on it, making it look like a cake.  

Kitchens in old homes are notoriously unfriendly to the way in which people today like to work in a kitchen.  For one thing kitchen designs of old never assumed more than one person would ever be working in the kitchen at the same time so many original kitchens in older homes were quite small and had few cabinets and few or no counter tops, instead relying on the home owner using a stand alone kitchen cupboard. 

I want to show you what I mean about making the inside of an historic home as modern as you wish. The following photos were taken 4 historic homes in my neighborhood. Each kitchen is suited to the homeowners tastes.  Two of the houses date to the first decade of the 20th Century, the other two are in homes that date to the mid and late 19th Century.