Quote from: Alex on November 12, 2025, 08:57:58 PMWell, the past year has been... interesting. We were on holiday in the US just under a year ago. Spent a couple of days in London before we flew out and that was fine. Kristi wanted to go see things like Buckinham Palace and whatnot. We had a transfer at JFK and we literally caught the customs staff trying to steal a bottle of duty-free whisky we were bringing over as a present for someone. Kristi was feeling a bit ill, but seemed ok. We went to see The Trans Siberian Orchestra play one night (free tickets and in a hospitality suite, so free food and drink it was awesome), and I was due to fly out and spend a couple of days with Indy the next morning. During the night I woke up to find Kristi out of bed. She came back from the toilet and was clearly in a lot of pain. She asked me to wake her brother up (who we were staying with at the time), to give her a blessing (LDS thing for those who don't know), and seemed to settle down a bit after that, but a few minutes later she started shaking uncontrollably in what looked to me like toxic shock (which as it turned out wasn't a bad guess), so we rushed her to the nearest hospital.
At the hospital they gave her a scan, diagnosed her with diverticulitis but said they weren't set up for that kind of operation only being a small local hospital so arranged for her to be transported to a larger one for emergency surgery. I was a bit surprised that the ambulance was accompanied by a fire engine, but we got there in about 20 minutes and a surgeon who both looked and sounded like Billy Bob Thornton (but with long hair) operated on Kristi, removing about six inches of her small intestine. The operation took a few hours longer than we were expecting (mostly because when she'd ruptured internally, stuff had been expelled into her body from her bowel, other organs had swollen up and they hadn't been able to clear everything out so she'd to go on an intensive course on antibiotics to prevent infection).
Anyway, she spent 10 days in total in hospital. On day 3 one morning before I'd arrived to visit her, the Billy Bob Thornton lookalike surgeon came into her room. It was just him, a late stage pregnant nurse and Kristi there and he told her (in these words) "Your biopsy results came back today and curveball it wasn't diverticulitus, it was cancer" and then walked out the room. Her nurse then said to Kristi "Are you feeling ok, because I certainly am not?".
They'd to fit a bag to Kristi as she'd had her bowels redirected, but the way the surgery had been done, she isn't able to change it herself so I need to do that for her every few days. They figured all the cancer had been removed and she'd be fine as it would have been the same operation either way. We were given a ridiculously complicated set of layers to go through when we changed the bag, and it kept bursting and leaking no matter how many different nurses tried doing it. It wasn't until the day we were due to fly home that a workable solution, ditching most of the extra stuff that was being put on that it started going ok. Because all of her faeces was very liquid, it was running through the extra bits we'd to put on and causing the stoma bags to fall off.
Anyway, when we got home we'd to get our own doctors involved. The surgeon at the local hospital was pretty shocked at the standard of medical care she'd received, especially how the operation had gone and how Kristi had been told about the cancer diagnosis, but I figured well at least they saved her life so I can't complain too much. They repeated the scans she'd received in the US, didn't find anything but decided to give her a course of chemo just in case anything had been missed.
She went through three months of that. It hit her health pretty hard. She'd be unable to go out because even on a warm summers day, it felt too cold for her. Luckily, work said they would do anything they could to help out and transferred me onto nights so I could get Ash to and from school.
Anyway, fast forward a few months to the end of summer and more scans. They found scattered colonies (not sure on the exact medical terminology here), of cancer across Kristi's lower torso. They think when her guts ruptured it spread cancer cells across the region when then sank down through the body fat until they came to rest on top of her reproductive organs, so a second, stronger round of chemo has been scheduled and started. Somewhere along the line we received the bill for her treatment from the US coming in at over $100,000. Good job we took out medical insurance (although paying it since we are in another country is overly complicated and is being done via an agency in Israel. With everything going on over there, snail mail is even slower than you'd normally expect).
Anyway, that is where we currently sit. Kristi has had two of her chemo treatments in this set. Somewhere around the holidays she'll stop it, get some more scans and we will see where we go from there. When we were talking to the specialist, he used the word "challenging" a lot in regards to treating her and where the cancer is. They aren't trying to cure it right now, just get it under control. She might not die of cancer, but there is a very good chance that she'll die with it.
During all of this, I've also been trying to deal with some stuff with our military housing. When I left the airforce and joined the army, they stopped charging me rent, I pointed this out to them and they sent me a bill for a couple of grand (which arrived right before xmas), but didn't restart charging me rent. It took 2 years before that would happen and only after I received a letter saying "Hey you've not been paying rent for 2 years. It is part of your duty to inform us of any mistakes in your pay, why haven't you done this?" Anyway, to cut out a lot of stuff I sent them all the emails I'd kept copies of proving that I had told them, they just hadn't bothered their arses doing anything about it, put in a formal complaint and got an apology. Still got to pay the £10,000ish in back rent though. Between that, paying the normal rent and Kristi being unable to work money is a lot tighter than it was before, but we still have enough. Just had to cut down on the luxuries a bit, but between my wage, my pension and the social security benefits we get for Ash we have enough.
Anyway, that is where I've been for the past year more or less.
Quote from: Rev. Powell on June 21, 2025, 05:01:34 PMA washed-up _______ rediscovers his passion for his calling when he's forced to take care of an 8-year old orphan.Reader for MGM
