On both of these trips, nearly all of the people we've spent time with were friends of mine. Linda had met some of them, but many friends were new to her. Yesterday, for the first time, we rendezvoused with people I had not met before, and it was cool to add two more names to the list of people we want to visit again in our further travels. Tina and Rob live in Louisville, Kansas, about 15 miles from Manhattan ("The Little Apple"), where Linda had dialysis, and afterwards we joined them for dinner and spent two delightful hours with them.
Tina is Linda's stepdaughter from her previous marriage, originally from upstate New York, and Rob hails from Arizona. I think Louisville, Kansas, is about halfway between those places, which is only fair. They've been married for 17 years; Linda and I celebrate our seventh anniversary this coming Sunday. Linda hasn't seen them since the 1990s, so this was a special reunion for them. There was lots of catching up to do, since their family is huge (Linda has six older brothers and about 20 nieces and nephews). I had photos of Linda's three grandsons on my camera, and Tina got a kick out of those. Rob and I hit it off, too. The whole two hours was a Good Thing. We had doubled back from Cheyenne to take I-70 home in order to make this reunion possible, and it was well worth it.
Meanwhile, Tim and Julie have been home-bound after flooding closed off the street they live on, caused by severe rain that started Tuesday night. We passed through those same storms Tuesday afternoon, when we drove from Cheyenne to Salina, Kansas (an hour from Manhattan). We thought we'd get hammered directly by the massive dark clouds ahead of us as we left Colorado and headed into Kansas, but instead we hit several intermittent cloudbursts. Every time the rain pelted us, the temperature plummeted, making for a strange yo-yo effect on the car's temperature. In less than an hour, the temperature went from 95 to 69 to 90 to 77 to 94 to 70 to 87 to 76 to 93. Crazy! But at least we weren't stranded by a flood.
That drive was over 500 miles, and so was today's drive from Independence, Missouri, to Louisville. I think we've had enough of those by now. We'll have a six-hour drive on Saturday after dialysis, and close to eight hours on Monday to get home the western part of Maryland. We're past 5,000 miles for the trip, so we'll wind up somewhere over 6,000 miles. I wonder how long our next road trip will be.
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Leftover business: if you have followed this blog, you know about the problems I've had posting photos. According to my computer guru, this is because we have stayed most of the time in cheap motels where everyone is on the wifi at the same time, using up bandwidth that doesn't leave enough for us to post photos. I corrected some of that problem in Colorado, posting photos on three of the blogs. This morning I've gone back to the last August post, "A Long Day But a Great One," and posted two photos of the beautiful memorial quilts at the dialysis center in Rosebud, SD. Just in case cyberspace swallows those up, here is another photo I took that day of two memorial quilts, created to honor fellow dialysis patients who have passed on:
Another ongoing issue has been the difficulty in arranging Linda's final two dialysis treatments: today and tomorrow. Part of the problem was that we requested "chair times" at the start of the day, which are less available because most units put regular patients in those early times. Another problem was that centers can't guarantee times until no more than a week ago before the requested date (in case they have new full-time patients). A third problem was that DaVita, the dialysis conglomerate which has been extremely helpful on both of our trips in finding centers for Linda's dialysis, dropped the ball a bit on these last two requests. They are in Louisville and (tomorrow) Cincinnati, two large cities with at least 20 dialysis centers apiece. Instead of contacting all of the possible centers to find one that could accommodate Linda, they contacted one at a time and waited for that center's response before going on to the next one. As a result, when I talked to DaVita on Tuesday, they had still contacted only six of the Cincinnati centers. Only when I told them to check every center within 50 miles of Cincinnati did they make that comprehensive effort. The result was that by Wednesday morning, they had found a center for her. That completed our arrangements--only three days ahead of the treatment. We didn't get a definitive time until Monday on the Louisville center where she's getting dialysis right now. So there has been a lot of stress and anxiety the past three weeks about making sure that Linda got the dialysis she needed, when she needed it. But the ending is happy, and that's all that matters today. One final note: as you may have noticed, Linda hasn't written a whole lot about her dialysis treatments on this trip. This is a good thing because it means that nothing has gone awry and the dialysis has been a relatively minor factor in our enjoyment of this trip. But before we get home, I will write another blog summarizing the dialysis issues she has faced in the past three weeks. So if you have followed the blog with an toward learning about dialysis and have been distracted by the travelogue, stay tuned. I'll have a few things to say before we're done. Thank you all for your support.
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