Ailments, Failures, and Foibles

First, I'd like to ask you the favor of praying for my brother Myron, who is struggling with serious health issues, for perhaps the first time in his life.  After feeling abdominal discomfort for some time, he was diagnosed with an aneurysm in the artery that supplies blood to the left side of the body below the waist.  In a surgical procedure, a stent was placed about 1 1/2 weeks ago, which took the pressure off the ballooned area of the main artery.  Unfortunately, the blood supply being cut off to the left leg during the surgery necessitated a slower-than-ideal recovery because the blood pathways needed to be re-established.  Full recovery is anticipated, but it will take some time for the blood supply to muscles to become optimal again.  In the meantime, the left leg tires very quickly, and mobility is compromised.

This morning a new problem became serious enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room--according to the surgeon's instructions--and subsequent admittance to the hospital.  This time the right leg had gone numb and the muscles didn't seem to work.  Another surgery is apparently needed to remove a blood clot that has developed in a different "branch" of the major artery.  With both legs barely functioning due to inadequate blood supply, he can hardly walk.  For now, medication  is being given in an attempt to dissolve the blood clot, and waiting out the holiday is the next order of business.

Added later:  Several of the above details seem less clear to me than earlier--about exactly how the stent surgery affected blood flow initially, and where the most recent effects occurred, so some of the above information may need amending.  I know now that the clot has formed inside the stent, so that is new information to me

It's a blessing that Bryant is home from college and Andrew is on vacation from high school.  Otherwise someone outside the family would need to see to the cattle.  Having downsized the herd at auction on Thanksgiving weekend seems now like a good move at the right time.  Also, although there might never be a good time for Myron to be away from his travel office, this tends to be a slower time than most, so the timing for work isn't too bad either.

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Walter and Frieda's wedding has brought my cousin and his wife here from Ohio, and we've been enjoying our time with them.  M and A were with Frieda in BD, while she cared for our oldest granddaughter there.

Last night though, when all my local siblings and M and A were invited to Linda's house for supper, we talked a lot more about life with my aunt FJ, M's mother, than M and A's time with our son's family.  (Please excuse my obfuscation by the use of initials.  I'm not sure that it's strictly necessary, but there is some logic to this decision--though I won't spell it out here.)

I had a rather startling revelation--that I share many more of Aunt FJ's characteristics than I realized.  I won't detail all of them here, more for the sake of her privacy than my own.  You see, I've always thought of her as the "wild card" in her parental family, a characterization that no one in the family would likely dispute, her offspring included.  At the age of 95, she's the nursing home resident whom the other residents speak of when they say that "We don't need a TV here; we've got FJ." 

I actually doubt that people think of me in the same dramatic terms as Aunt FJ (I don't.), but I learned last night that she loved the outdoors and that she was far more passionate about gardening than housekeeping.   She always had strong opinions and, even now, she does not hesitate to speak out on whatever is on her mind, especially when she has a captive audience like at a family reunion.  Mostly her mind is still clear, but her ability to accurately read and seamlessly fit in with social expectations has probably not improved in her old age.  The results can be quite entertaining.  For example, she has been known to appropriate for her own use in her assisted living apartment bits and pieces of the decor that she finds in the common areas of the facility--Christmas decorations, floor mats, etc.  I think M and A do a stellar job of running interference between FJ and those who run the facility.

FJ's sense of propriety is strong.  No one tries to make Sunday a laundry day if she finds out, as one poor soul discovered when he or she showed up to pick up her laundry basket. The employee abandoned the laundry basket and came back on Monday--a more proper day for doing laundry, as everyone should know.  She does her own bathing--quite capably, it seems--because modesty is important to her--but not in a shower, because she got burned one time when she tried to use a shower while she was in the hospital to give birth, and not in a tub, because she doesn't have a tub in her living quarters and she wouldn't be allowed to use it by herself if she went to the tub-bathroom part of the facility.  Sponge baths it is. 

Aunt FJ had five brothers before she had any sisters, and then she gave birth to four sons before she had her only daughter.  It's easy to see why she needed a fairly strong constitution to hold her own in the family, and why refinement and finesse weren't easy to develop.  M says that FJ speaks of my  mother as having been "weaker," so she usually worked indoors and got better at such things than FJ and Aunt Esther did.  I didn't know that.

I know that my mother was a "blue baby" (she waited alarmingly long to start breathing after birth), and that she likely suffered from a mild case of polio as an adolescent.  Nevertheless,  my mother birthed ten children and raised twelve of them--something neither of her "strong" sisters did.  (With M and A, we laughed about when Mom was in her final illness in the hospital and a nurse asked her how many children she had, and she answered "twelve."  The nurse was fishing for evidence of cognitive impairment and was sure that Mom's answer was the evidence she was seeking.)

FJ often accompanied her father on trips, since her mother (my grandmother) was far less interested in traveling than her husband and daughter were.

My brother Ronald's family recently visited Aunt FJ when they traveled through Ohio.  At our Christmas gathering, Ronald regaled the rest of us with a story she told then about a shoe mixup at the last communion service she attended--during the feetwashing part of the observance.  He told the story, complete with deep-voice sound effects and the deliberate pace of FJ's speech.  FJ went home with two shoes, but they didn't match, and she doesn't know if she'll ever again see that one shoe of hers.  How can such a doleful story provoke such hilarity?  That's FJ's modus operandi.

One more story:  On the day of my mom's funeral, her brother Jesse told a small family group that  the older brothers in the family used to speak of their three sisters as Mary (my mom) being the match, Esther, the fuse, and FJ, the dynamite.

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Oh, one more gem from the Sunday night conversation:  When another doctor earlier had asked my mother to list words that start with "F," (cognitive test again) she said "Fannie."

When the doctor looked startled, my sister quickly explained, "She has a sister by that name."

"Oh," he said.  "So we're not talking about a body part."

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While I was helping members of my Anabaptist History class do some genealogical research, I came across the fact that the German name Veronica was often abbreviated to V[F]eroney and then Froenie and then Fannie.  So the common name Fannie among Amish people actually started out being a fairly sophisticated-sounding German name:  Veronica.  Imagine that.  No doctor would ever be startled by a demure Amish Mennonite lady uttering "Veronica."

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I marvel at how having common ancestors can produce a bond with people that we actually don't spend much time with.  One of the ways this surfaced again the other evening was when M described what kind of food they ate for supper.  It was always soup or brie.  Cold "broeckle"* soup in the summer time and hot milk soup of some kind in the winter--either rivvel** soup or tomato soup.  I confess that most of these soups are not high on  my "favorites" list, but I certainly learned to eat them without complaint, since I didn't really have a choice.

I had almost forgotten about brie, but my mom used to serve it as well. Few Kansas people knew about or ate brie.  It was made by combining sugar and cornstarch or flour with cold milk, and mixing the paste into a kettle of hot milk.  It would be stirred over heat till it had thickened and come to a boil.  At the table, a bit of brown sugar was added and stirred in.  Yummmm. The family bond with M felt strong while we talked about brie.

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In Arthur's wedding sermon, he spoke of the pleasure of a marriage in which both are fully known and genuinely loved.  I think being with relatives is much the same.  Failures and foibles can be freely discussed without fear that bringing them into the light of day will jeopardize relationships or diminish love between relatives.  This is a gift and I am grateful when I experience it --like I did last night with M and A.

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*I have no idea how to spell this, but broeckle soup is made by tearing bread into "cubes" and then adding sugar, cold milk, and fruit.  That was our standard summer supper as well.  Several of my siblings (Myron and Linda) still love this soup.

**Rivvel soup is made by making a paste of beaten egg and flour and then dropping this paste into hot milk, creating tiny, irregular dumplings.