Monday, July 16, 2012

What's new.

Good question, what's new?

A lot really. But yet not a lot.

Here is a link to the full story of us trying to save our home.

http://igg.me/p/162652?a=828862




Thursday, August 4, 2011

All that glitters......

I have been trying to keep our friends and family facebook page updated with mostly positive things but I want to tell the whole story. Its hard to do though because when I put some posts on there I don't want people to feel bad for us or think we are a "charity case". I want people to care of course just as Kari and I care for others, but we know there are a lot of people out there that have way more and way worse problems than we do. But there comes a point when a person just needs to vent and just put down all the negatives and look them over and find all the positives that can come out of them.
It has been a tremendously hard past 3 years and I am glad it is Kari and I going thru it, I know there are so many couples that would have never made it as far together as we have. Our society has become such a "throw away" society. If you don't like something, including your partner, you just throw it away and get a new one. Don't like that flavor of soda, throw it away, it's that easy.
But I think thru all of our hard times, our relationship has grown closer and stronger. I know we are more in love today than we were yesterday and we work together thru everything.
It hasn't come easy though, and it's not all due to Kari's illness. I brought baggage into our relationship also and she has accepted it and lived with it as well.
I have a daughter that was born not long after high school. I will never call her a "mistake" or an "accident", and I am so proud of her, she has accomplished way more things I never did. She graduated high school with honors, and she graduated college in the top of her class and is now contemplating going on to graduate school. I had a hard time graduating high school. I wish I had gotten to know her better over the years though, its so hard to try establish that now, but I will keep trying. Megan is my only daughter and I do love her and am so proud of her and her accomplishments.
I was divorced before I met Kari also and have two boys from that and an ex wife that I feel is trying to ruin my life since I have a wonderful wife as well as a good life now and had we not divorced I would still be under her thumb. I have been losing touch with the boys due to not being able to see them as much as I would like. If they or Kari are sick its best that they don't come here, there has to be that measure of caution. Last year we spent most of the summer and part of the fall in California at UCLA Medical Center trying to figure out what was causing Kari's pain and getting it taken care of so I wasn't able to see much of the boys. All winter it seemed they were too busy on the weekends as well as she always had plans for them on my weekends. But when I would call them they hadn't done anything over the weekend. This past year and a half I have been in a financial fight as well that has worried us both. My ex wanted more child support since I wasn't spending a lot of time with the boys and it was costing her more. We went to a mediator twice and in front of a circuit court judge once. I presented all of our medical bills and other bills and argued that Kari had lost her job and that a raise in support would be detrimental to our finances. Both the mediator and the judge agreed and support was lowered by $48.00 rather than the nearly $300.00 increase that she wanted. I had represented myself thru all this without a lawyer since we couldn't afford one. She appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately I had to take out yet another loan and hire one. Our case will probably be heard later on this month or sometime next month, not sure when, but either way my loan was nowhere near what the lawyer cost us. Due to all this we are now facing filing for bankruptcy. Kari and I are trying to come to terms with doing this since we were both brought up that you pay for what you bought. It's hard to open up a bill and try to decide how much to pay against it. We have health insurance thank goodness, and it does take care of a lot, but not all, our non-medical stuff out in California came up to nearly $28,000, that's hotels, gas, car rental, plane tickets and food. What sucks is none of that stuff is payed for so it goes onto a credit card that we can pay off over time.
I am sure God has given us these challenges for a reason and I just can't see it right now, but I know Kari and I are still together, and that is what matters.
There, its all laid out and over the next few weeks I am going to read thru this and find the positives and put them down also.
Thanks for listening.
Steve

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

My Soul Mate

I met my soul mate Kari 11 years ago. At the time I didn't know she was even looking at me. I was going through a really rough time in my life. I was going through a nasty divorce at the time and really wasn't thinking about moving on with my life. I was a paramedic and every time I took a patient to the ER where she worked she was always in the room to help with the pt. it took me a while to catch on, and every time I went out to the smoking area she would always follow me out and we would talk. On August 17th I asked her out to supper. We went to a place called Baxter's Cafe. We went back to my apartment and she spent the night. We talked all night long, I let everything out about what was going on in my life. From that day on we have rarely spent more than a day apart.
Kari started getting sick about 6 months after we met, there were days when she couldn't even get out of bed she was so sick. We moved to her hometown where I got a job as a paramedic/firefighter. Kari kept getting sicker and sicker and she ended up in the hospital quite a bit. She was finally referred to a really big hospital where they found one of her immune system levels was gone and 2 others were critically low. They started her on monthly infusion that would "boost" her immune system. At first we were able to do them at home since I was a paramedic. We would put 3 small needles into her stomach and the medicine would pump in over 4 hours. She would end up with really large bumps on her stomach due to the medicine. She would get quite sore from the infusions and she would be sick for a few days afterwards. The infusions helped a lot though and she was able to lead a fairly normal life. I was able to spend my days off with her and go visit the agents that she managed. We really didn't spend much time apart.
Kari had terrible "heartburn" all the time and ended up having Nisan surgery which fixed the problem. With Kari's immune system problem it would be nearly impossible for us to have kids. Her body would abort a male and we knew a girl would end up with the same immune system problem. We made the hard decision that she should have a tubal ligation. It was a very hard decision since Kari didn't have kids and with this being done we would never have kids together. I have two boys from my first marriage and they fell in love with Kari from day one, and I think she loved them back just as much. She knew she would never replace their mother, but she could love them more than her.
Life pretty much went on as good as it could, we both had good jobs. Kari's mom and dad gave us some land in one of their pastures for a wedding present and we ended up putting our dream home on it. We had so much fun designing and helping build our house. We had fun picking out paint colors, carpet and all the little odds and ends together. We liked all the same things so we never had any type of an argument over anything. We moved in in September of 2005.
Kari started developing severe pain in her abdomen in 2007 and ended up in the ER many times. We went back to the big hospital where they ran numerous tests, poked and prodded her all over and could not come up with an answer. Back home we went, no answers. The pain became more and more frequent and lasted longer. In 2008 she was referred to a different hospital. In 2008, 2009, and 2010 Kari had over 18 different surgeries with no answers as to what was causing her pain. One doctor would run one test and it would come back abnormal and we would think we had an answer, then they would run it again to rule out a false positive and it would come back normal, back to square one. In 2010 Kari was referred to a hospital on the west coast. She spent most of the summer and fall out there. By this time she had over 500 days that she spent in a hospital room. They ended up doing a procedure where they injected a chemical on her nerves that were causing the pain. The procedure worked but would only last for 6 month to a year and she would have to return to have it done again.
Through the years Kari had lost her job and we were depending on just my income which was barely enough to get by on. With the mounting medical bills and all the expenses of travel, hotels, and meals we drained all our savings and had basically loaned ourselves to the limit. A benefit was held which helped tremendously.
In 2011 Kari had a new immunologist who had a pain doctor in the same clinic he was in. It was decided that a nerve stimulator would be implanted over the nerves that were causing her pain and in July it was placed and seems to be helping.

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Saturday, July 30, 2011

Hard Life

      I am not much of a "blogger" but I have gotten good at creative writing so hopefully the two go hand in hand. With that, here goes the first one.
      I know most people believe they have a hard life and without walking a mile in their shoes I can't say that they don't. I know how hard my life has been though and thought I would just share some of the roads that God has put me on. I also know that I have a good life and wouldn't change any of my paths throughout life if I could.

       I guess it started in high school for the most part. I wasn't popular, I wasn't smart and I didn't do all that well in sports. I had a few friends but we weren't the "in" crowd, we weren't "jocks" but then too we weren't "nerds" either. We were just a few guys that hung out together. I didn't drink, much, but I did smoke and I think that hurt my friendship with some of the people in my class. We were a very small school though, my graduating class only had 26. Graduation meant a new adventure for me, I was ready to take life by the horns and wrestle it to the ground. The bad thing is life had other plans for me. 3 months after graduation, I was working in Sioux Falls, my high school girlfriend that had broken up with me a month before graduation drove up, got out of the car and told me she was pregnant. Talk about a shock, I was already dating and "in love" with a girl from Sioux Falls. My mind was racing a million miles a second, I had so many questions and not one answer. I did what pretty much most guys in that situation would have done and hid my head in the sand, told everyone what they wanted to hear and ran. I didn't marry my daughters mother which at the time my parents thought would be the right thing to do. Instead I ended up marrying the girl I was "in love" with. I didn't take the opportunity to be a father to my daughter which I do regret deeply, in fact I only saw her a couple of times before she graduated high school and went on to college. I am very proud of her and her accomplishments as she is contemplating going on to graduate school. Looking back I wish I had done more for her.
      Ok, married the girl I was "in love" with. We ended up having two boys, and after 10 years, well 11 if you count the year it took to get divorced, we ended our marriage. I will save that story for another blog.
      After the divorce I met my "soul mate" who after 4 years of dating I married. She had some medical problems, which were easy enough to deal with and still are for those wondering. We built our lives together as well as a home. We are living the "American Dream" so to speak, which is now facing a mountain of medical bills, a mortgage that will probably be foreclosed on, having a dog and 3 cats and never being able to talk to my boys.
      Life goes on one day at a time.