Gardening This Year Has Been Tough
2005-06
Just wanted to let everyone know we are still kicking, despite Jim's illness. Jim experienced kidney failure two and a half years ago. He was forced to retire earlier than we wanted to.
He chose peritoneal dialysis as his temporary method of dialysis while waiting for a kidney. It is a manual method that you can do right in your own home. It is also relatively easy to do while traveling, though it takes considerable creativity and patience while driving in the car. Unfortunately, Jim developed two hernias early on in the treatment. This meant halting the home method temporarily while undergoing surgery for the problem. He had to go onto the hemo-dialysis for about two to three months while recuperating. That was horrible experience. The hemo-dialysis washed out all Jim's strength and caused him to have no energy to do anything. Besides, it took up most of a day just sitting in the unit where it was performed. He was grateful when he was able to restart the home method!
Jim tried the machine method at night. We stopped it after about two months because he just wasn't getting any sleep. He is not a good sleeper. He wakes up frequently, which caused problems being on the machine. A secondary problem, but the most problematic, was that if anything out of the ordinary happens during the night, like you roll over on the tubes or the machine doesn't like the numbers that are being shown, or the bed is too high from the ground, the machine will beep. It was beeping two or three times per night. Jim hated it and I was awakened every time also. Before we knew it our tempers flared and our patience was non existent and the entire household was walking on egg shells. No one was getting any sleep and no one was happy. So, we went back to the manual method. What a relief.
We were lucky. We hadn't been on the transplant list very long when a match came along that was so good, Jim did not have to take the steroids, (this one med causes the most severe side effects of any of the immune inhibitors), which has made his transplant experience one the best out there. We have passed the three month mark, (usually if an organ is going to be rejected, it will be within the first three months). Now we are looking towards the one year mark. We were told that if we can get past this one year mark, it is unlikely that the organ will be rejected. That will be an exciting day for us!
So, as you can imagine, we have not been able to do a lot of gardening. Both of us have spent the last couple of years either sitting in doctor's offices or hospitals. However, Jim did manage to plant some tomatoes, cukes, and zucchini. We have learned from our former experiences and now realize that next year we will be doing our raised beds on legs--off the ground. We are hoping that will prevent the fire ants from invading the growing beds. That has been our most complex and irritating problem while learning to grow things in the South. We planted a second pear tree this year because after several years of not getting any fruit, we realized that the self-pollinating tree was really a self-pollinating tree. However, we also did not get any peaches this year. We had a freeze early in the blooming timeframe and we think they were frozen. Next year I want to try smudge pots.
This is all for now on our gardening adventures. Let's hope next year will be filled with a lot of new discoveries!
Chris and Jim