For those of you who have been following my posts about my dad (like @thekarmaguy and @nebula), here's the latest news.
He got to come home last Friday. We left Memphis in time for him to get home and watch the first game of the College World Series, though I'm not sure how much of it he actually watched. I suspect he slept through a lot of it.
People at my parent's church have been bringing us homemade dinners every night except tonight. Those will continue through Friday, but my mom said that one of her neighbors wants to bring us food next week and someone else they know will be bringing us food next Tuesday. That's been very helpful since it means my mom hasn't had to figure out what to cook and run to the grocery store to buy food. Though, I probably would have run out and done the shopping for her.
He also has a home health care nurse coming Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to remove old bandages and put new ones on. Unfortunately, it's painful for him afterwards, as you'd expect. He's been pretty uncomfortable for the past couple of days as all of the drugs they gave him during surgery and recovery have finally worn off. Plus, he has to lay and sit more on his left side so that the surgical sites don't get messed up so his left hip is getting sore.
On Monday, his cousin, Jimmy (picture Santa Claus, that's what Jimmy looks like) and his wife, Thelma, came for a short visit. They brought some chicken salad from a local restaurant and 83 ears of fresh picked corn. So yesterday, my role was that of cornhusker. It took me about 5 hours to husk those 83 ears of corn, 2 were bad, so that my mom could make creamed corn and freeze it for later. Pop boasted he could have done it in an hour, but I clean as much of the corn silk off as I can before handing it off to mom for final cleaning, cutting and cooking. Apparently he leaves a lot of corn silk for mom to clean.
But he's healing up very well. We drove back to Memphis this morning for his first follow up with his plastic surgeon. He took out 3 of the 4 drains, one of which was a vacuum pump drain he was attached to all of the time. I know he's glad to not have to carry it around with him everywhere anymore. In addition, his plastic surgeon told him that he'll be able to completely close the primary surgical site on his next visit (in a week) and that he won't need a skin graft like he thought previously. So we got a ton of good news today.
We'll drive back to Memphis on Monday for the first follow up appointment with his general surgeon. I expect further good news and that he'll remove the last drain. Then a return trip to Memphis on Wednesday for the second follow up with his plastic surgeon and closure of the primary surgical site.
He still has 6 weeks of 5 days/week of radiation treatments to go through. Those won't start until he's mostly healed up. It's likely they will start in late August or early September.
Now I'm going to vent some frustration, because, besides my wife, I don't really have anyone with whom I can blow off some pent up frustration. So, I apologize in advance...
Most of my dad's family lives here in West Point. I realize they all have their lives, but the only family that has come to visit are his cousin Jimmy and his wife Thelma, his sister (my aunt) and her husband (my uncle). He has a nephew and two nieces, and most their families who live here. While I can forgive my second cousin, Gentry, for not visiting (she had a baby a few weeks ago), it pisses me off that Eddie, Karen and Laura (my cousins, his nephew and nieces) can't be bothered to come visit or even call their Uncle Marvin and see how he's doing. I'm rather angry about it. I don't care if I get to see my cousins and second cousins (and third cousin, Hadley, the new baby) while I'm visiting, but it would be nice if they'd drop by for a few minutes to see him, or give him a call on the phone and talk with him for a few minutes. Is that too much to ask?
Ok, rant over. Thanks for letting me do that.
It looks like I'll start my return trip home (Las Vegas for those that don't know) on 02 July; I'll discuss it with my folks tomorrow to make sure that they won't need me here past that. I wouldn't mind staying longer, but I don't see many reasons to stay longer if my help isn't needed anymore. That was the purpose for the trip: help out my parents as long as needed. I'm not keen on starting my return trip on a holiday weekend, but there is one main advantage to doing so: I get one extra non-workday during the trip so it's one less vacation day I'll have to use for the return trip. In case you didn't realize it, I drove here (approximately 1500 miles). I didn't use any vacation on the trip out. I left early on a Saturday morning (I left Las Vegas right around 3:00 AM), stopping in Amarillo, TX Saturday night and arrived in Memphis on Sunday night. On the return trip, I plan to take it more leisurely, stopping occasionally for photo ops, especially at Petrified Forest National Park and Grand Canyon National Park.
Unfortunately, by leaving on 02 July, it means I won't have the time to visit my friend, Tommy, in Auburn, AL, which is a real bummer. I haven't seen him since 1992 when I was on leave between duty stations and stayed with him and his wife Angie for a night. However, I might be able to get in a short visit with my friend, Adrienne, who lives in Hamilton, AL. Hamilton is a lot closer to West Point. It also looks like I might not have the time to get in a photo hike or go back to the Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge. I was thinking about going out this weekend, but it looks like it's going to be in the upper 90s with high humidity. That's just not conducive for being outdoors for very long. Maybe if I get up very early before it gets too hot... But it's ok if I don't get any more photo ops while I'm here in Mississippi. I'll get some on the way home.
Along with helping out my parents, I am also working remotely. I haven't been slacking off, but I definitely haven't been putting in the number of hours I normally would. If there are things my parents need me to do during the day, I do make up some of the time in the evening or on weekends, but I definitely haven't made up all of the time. Fortunately, I don't really have anything to work on right now. My last project deployed successfully a week ago Monday so there hasn't been any software to test. In fact, there hasn't been any software to test for the better part of a month. We've been done with it for quite a while. We were waiting on our client and your client's client to get their stuff ready to deploy the software. So all I've really been doing for the past month is taking professional development courses through Udemy.com (Jenkins, Git/Github, Selenium Webdriver, Testing in Agile, SQL and Database Testing, and jMeter). Those were the topics that my boss wanted me to learn about. I ended up getting through all her topics faster than I expected because of all the down time. Now I'll start on some topics of my own choosing, like Cucumber and Behavior Driven Testing, Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing (Security Testing), more Java Programming (including Object Oriented Programming), Testing Mobile Applications with Appium and Selenium Webdriver, Python scripting, mobile application development (primarily iOS, and some other topics). If that all sounds geeky and dorky, it is. I'm a software tester. I break code and software for a living. It's fun. Who else gets to tell a programmer his/her code is shitty (in a much nicer way, of course) and not get in trouble for it? But it means I have to know a lot about a lot, al kinds of ways to test software, plus programming for creating automated tests. Well, I've gone off on this tangent long enough. Sorry.
I appreciate all the support y'all have given to me during the past two weeks or so. It really means a lot.
Stay Tuned...
DeadGuitarist
