Where to start? Well, right now I'm sitting in a rental cabin near Pigeon Forge, TN. It's early morning (3AM) and John is still asleep, so I came out to the LR so I wouldn't wake him. It has been a busy and stressful spring, and I've been saying I needed a vacation forever, so here we are - planned on the spur of the moment.
The year so far:
The conference I was awarded the Conversations in the Disciplines grant last spring is now behind me, after months of planning and much stress. It went very well. The subject was Promoting Scholarly Communication through Open Access Journals. We had about 75 people from all over, and Marilyn Billings from UMass, Amherst was our keynote. What a fabulous job she did. Then, 2 weeks ago was the Graduate Research Conference, and I spent the week before helping Adrian scramble to get everything done, working until 10PM one night, and 7PM another.
But the toughest part of the year happened on April 16th. John's sister, Jean, suffered an aortic dissection, something people usually die immediately from. She initially went to Medina, where they were unable to tell what was wrong with her, since she was unresponsive. They made the wise decision to send her to Strong, where she underwent surgery to put a graft in place. It was touch and go, and the doctors told us we had to decide whether to even do the surgery, knowing that she might well die on the table or if be a vegetable who was paralyzed from the waist down and on dialysis for the rest of her life. Fortunately, they were able to bring her out of the sedation enough to determine she hadn't suffered any injury to her brain due to lack of oxygen, and so the surgery was a go. The surgery was a success, her kidneys started functioning again, and now she is in the cardiac ICU at Strong recovering. Three weeks later they are beginning to wean her off the ventilator, and once that happens she should be moved to a regular room on the cardiac floor to begin her long program of rehabilitation. She shows a small amount of movement in one leg, that seems to be the biggest unknown at this point.
So what are we doing in TN? Looking for land to buy to build our retirement home. And that is another story for another time.
