Sustenance

Someone recently asked what sustains us these days. One thing that really helps is the new dog. We love our pooch Mandy, and the different activities she brings to our lives. She's dragging one or both of us out every morning and evening for walks around the neighborhood, and of course she gets K out a few times during the days as well. She's been to a lot of places with us in the car, sometimes going with us to restaurants that have patios, and sometimes staying in the car, on those cloudy cool days when we feel it's safe. We finished the beginner dog training final exam with a flourish - for whatever reason, Mandy did everything asked of her. K's jaw dropped as I led Mandy through her paces, or was it the other way around? Yeah, maybe it was me being led... We've had a few very fun outings to the REI flagship store by confluence park, and gone for walks around there. And K's been exploring the local dog parks with her, having visited a half dozen parks all around the metro area by now. She's ever so slowly beginning to own everything in the house. I see tonight that those chairs K had designated as off limits are now in the Mandy domain too. Of course she owned *us* the day we met her. :-)

K and I are planning on traveling to University of Chicago Medical Center later this month. She'll have medical tests and interviews, so she can be considered for a combined kidney/pancreas transplant. She's not officially on a transplant list, since she's still stuck on the heart stress test part, and they feel they need an angiogram to figure out what's going on there. The concern is that the dye for the angiogram may well shut down her kidneys for good. They're waiting as long as possible for her dialysis preparations to be complete, so if they do kill her kidneys, she'll be ready to go on dialysis right away. Once they figure out what's going on with her heart, they'll either try to fix that, or call it good enough, and press forward to getting her approved for transplant surgery. In the meantime, Kaiser has approved her to go talk to the U of Chicago folks. It's very nice that Kaiser is making all the complicated arrangements for her to have oxygen at all times during the trip, since that's one of the reasons we've avoided air travel for the past 18 months.