Dr. Jim to the rescue

Dear Family and Friends,
Its nice to be writing to you this evening, this way I don't have to use my voice. When I try to talk I end up in spasms of coughing, gut wrenching experiences that now require I hold my tummy to reduce the pain of each cough. Family and friends had urged me to "see a doctor" and for me that means I call Jim first. A friend since PUC days he has seen me through lots of bouts of infections and illnesses. He is a special friend for another reason too. When he was a young guy he lost his wife and had to rebuild his life as a result. He is now a grandparent and he and Marti his wife of many years have built a beautiful life together. I find him a meaningful role model in many ways and he would often visit the hospital room when Nan would be there for a few days and we would talk into the night. What is it with doctors and not knowing when to go to bed? In college Jim would come back to his dorm room at 3 am after working a shift in the college bakery and he never came away empty handed, always with a beautiful loaf of wheat bread and we would eat and talk in the middle of the night.
Jim fitted me into a already bulging schedule of patients and checked things out well. He supplied some samples of Leviquin 750 mg which was sure nice. He also gave me a prescription for some new cough medicine, the bottle I've been using became outdated Feb of 2008. My co pay was only $10 for the bottle. Once I had arrived at the Safeway I was in a pretty wasted state. The codeine plus the hundreds of episodes of coughing had left me slumped over and I sort of shuffled through the store searching. My mission in the back of my mind was to locate and purchase Vicks Vapor rub and I never could find it in Safeway. So while I waited for the cough medicine to be prepared I shuffled next door to Longs and found the Vick's. So many of you had suggested that I try to "new miracle cure" of putting Vick's on my feet, covering it with soxs and then going to bed, well I decided to try it. I had a $20 dollar bill and had to keep thinking it through if I could buy the Vick's and the cough medicine or now, I find that when you shuffle through a store you pretty much get left alone, no one gets in your way. So I came home from the store with Vicks and the cough medicine and the twenty still in the wallet, so the credit card must have cleared. I don't remember all of that too well.
I came home to the cool house, excited dogs and the recliner. But the house smelled so good, what was it? And the kitchen light was on, had I left it on? Lois had left a homemade loaf of punpkin bread, wow is it good! So that and a couple slices of my bread with thin slices of a beef steak tomato, a little glass of orange juice and I settled into the recliner to snooze and watch CSI episodes from the DVR. I built a little fire which burned brightly while I slept. Finally I reluctantly climbed out from under the blanket and came here to the office to update the bank account, take my meds, share today's exciting events with you and head to bed. I am at a point now that I'll do almost anything to keep from coughing as it hurts from my knees up with each eruption. Jim thinks that I'll make a fast recovery and I know he is right. I have work piling up undone, this is no time to be ill.

So how has your day been? Are you enjoying the Christmas season? I sure like that channel 77 on the xm radio in the car, Christmas pops, wonderful music with NO commercials.

I want to share a little story about an incident that occured last evening after I had blogged. After slugging through appraisal work all day at my desk I had a growing frustration with the terrible quality of printouts I was getting from the printer. When Jim, my IT guy cleaned up my personal computer recently he found to his frustration that the HP 1000 that has always been connected to my computer would not work when he was through. Running out of time and needing to go to his next appointment he switched printers with one that sits unused in the lower office. Its a HP 1215 and is newer but of lower quality than the HP 1000 I am used to. But over the years we have all learned to our dismay that the HP 1000 is very cranky when first connected to a computer and over the years we have lost the CD that has the printer driver and instructions for installation.
Well last night I thought I would sure like to accomplish something, I'd like to get my HP 1000 working again since the print quality was so poor on the other one Jim has resorted to switching. So in spite of feeling a bit woozy I manhandled the computer off my desk and brought the right one back and began the process of trying to get it working. Hour after hour went by with no success. Nothing seemed to work. I went on HP website and looked at fixes, I tried every sequence of powering down the printer and then rebooting the computer, nothing would work. Finally in desperation I gave up and just left my computer turned off while I went to find something to eat, then someone called and we talked for awhile and during that time I turned the computer back on. I had prayed before I started the switch asking God for His help because I knew how impossible it was to get the HP going. I had resigned myself to having to move the printers back the way they had been and just put up with lousy print copy for awhile. On a whim I just asked the printer to print something out from my emails and it started to grind and then lights flashed and it began to print, problem solved. Even though it was such a little thing that moment of success seemed like a little miracle and brought tears to my eyes. Seems that for the HP it needs some time to completely load before it will work and I had accidentally given it just the right sequence to finally connect. Every page I have printed today gives me a tiny jolt of happiness remembering how close I was to giving up.
May you have a good evening and avoid this plague, its not fun.

love

tim