Among The Weeds (Reads)

I have been watching a tulip grow in our front garden, for days. Not an unusual occurrence in spring, I hear you say. What is unusual is where it is growing. I spotted it first about a week ago. Small stemmed with one tight bud, alone, under a window, surrounded by weeds

An Ocean View

As a follow up to my latest post "Four Girls and a Bar of Chocolate." a friend sent me this. It has made me chuckle all day. I hope it will do the same for you. Thanks Debbie F!

A group of 15-year-old girlfriends discussed where to meet for dinner.
They agreed to meet at the Dairy Queen next to the Ocean View restaurant because they had only $6.00 among them and Jimmy
Johnson, the cute boy in Social Studies, lived on that street.

Four Girls and a Bar of Chocolate

** This post is dedicated to  strong, resilient, brave friends  all over the world  who are living  with serious illness:  patients  and  caregivers. **

Here we sit, four of us in Edgar’s in Manhattan on a Saturday night. We’ve all gathered for the weekend for M’s son’s Bar Mitzvah and it is obviously time to eat again. Four of us in our forties, each dealing with medical issues of our own, or our family’s, are at crossroads in our lives.

There is much to discuss.

The Power of Passion

  This past weekend our middle son Aron received his EMT certification. An EMT is an Emergency Medical Technician who works on an ambulance and fire truck.  It is a process that began eleven months ago, when Aron joined the Rockville Volunteer  Fire Department.  He has volunteered at the fire station and on the ambulance  every Wednesday night after school until 11.00pm, juggling 11th grade schoolwork and his father’s illness and brain surgery.  He has  gone on  emergency calls from 5.00pm until 7.00am the next day, on Saturday nights and during  school breaks. He has attended calls to attempted suicide victims, car crashes and sick infants, fall and  stroke victims and a pregnant woman whose  water had broken. On top of that time commitment, he has also  completed 131 hours of classroom  training and 12 exams  to become a state of Maryland certified EMT.

In this age of helicopter parenting and being connected to our children 24/7 via phone, text, email and Facebook,  it came as quite  a shock to us, to wave Aron off,at the age of 16  into the belly of the local fire station.

Giving and Receiving

Oreo flower cookies

*My family is very good at medical conditions with unpronounceable names. As if trigeminal neuralgia wasn’t difficult enough to say and remember, our oldest son at the age of 16, was diagnosed with a heart condition called Wolff Parkinson White with supraventricular tachycardia. (Try saying that a few times very quickly…...) which entailed him having 2 heart surgeries, between January and April  2010.

During that time, and again when Jonny needed brain surgery recently, our family was the recipient