Best Father's Day Ever!!

For me, it doesn't take much. I love spending time with my family more than anything else and that's what today was all about.

Actually, my Father's Day celebration started last night when I played a gig with my dad at the Greshville Inn. It's the last time we'll play together in the near future. It has been so nice the last couple of years that my dad and I have had the chance to play music together regularly, and last night was a great way to cap off this period of our relationship before he and my mom head off to Colorado for a new adventure.

It was a very fulfilling night musically and personally because there weren't that many people there and I was finally able to put showmanship aside and just enjoy playing the music. When you are really connected to those you're playing music with and things are just flowing, there is little in the world that feels better. I consider myself lucky to have the chance to do things like that and appreciate them while they happen.

Today, Father's Day itself, turned out to be such an excellent day. Laur asked what I wanted to do and I told her, "Something that you think is too much of a hassle to do." ;-) It sounds silly, but that's the truth. That's what I wanted most, and that's what we did. :-)

Laur is such a great wife and really made an effort to make today special. She let me sleep in (more valuable than gold!), even if that only means 8:15 am these days. Sunday is grocery day, so she told me to stay home and just enjoy being by myself, but the weekly routine of grocery shopping with the kids is something I really enjoy. It's a way that I'm able to connect and have fun with the kids outside of their normal day-to-day activities. We make it a joyful experience and have quite a few little rituals during the process that make it special. From scraping them off the cart with any sturdy object I can find, to picking out fruit, learning to comparison shop, and finishing up with a "super power" gumball, I relish this time when we all truly enjoy spending time together doing regular things. So I told her to stay home and took the kids myself. George's white gumball gave him the "power of smart" which he used to it's full capacity. Caroline's red gumball gave her jumping ability, but she's saving it for another time... Plus, we stopped on the way home and picked a bouquet of wild Tiger Lilies for Lauryn.

After that, we picked up Lauryn and Henry and headed out to French Creek State Park (Hopewell Lake) for a trip to the middle of the lake in a row boat! After gearing up with life jackets (Henry was puffed up and hilarious in his), we headed out for some fun. Of course Laur was the captain, Caroline, the first mate, George the second mate, and Henry the last mate. I was Smee. ;-)

We tooled around a bit and the kids practiced casting with their Cars and Princess fishing poles. George's was in safety mode with a rubber tire on the end of his line, and Caroline had a silly lure on hers that I put on because the hook was mostly obscured by a neon colored, furry lure and wouldn't be much of a problem even if it was swinging around our heads.

They were enjoying casting and reeling when all of the sudden, Caroline's bobber went under! She started pulling instinctively, but I figured she just had it caught in some weeds, so I told her to reel it in fast. She did, her pole started to bend and then I saw it - a big fish on her line!! I grabbed the line, pulled it up, and sure enough, there was a 12" large mouth bass on her hook. Unbelievable!

I didn't know what to do because I didn't bring any gear as I wasn't expecting to be pulling in a fish! To my surprise, Caroline wanted to grab it and touch it and cook it up for dinner! A bit panicked, I had her lower it into the water while I rowed back to a spot where I had seen some fisherman before, thinking that they might at least have some pliers to make sure I could get the hook out of the fish. Finding no one around, I grabbed the fish and luckily the hook came right out. Caroline wanted to hold it before she reluctantly let it go back to the murky waters.

She was so excited and kept saying, "This is the best father's day ever!!" It was so much fun. :-) I couldn't help but think that this is a story that will become legendary in the Blakesley family history. One that we'll recount over and over, embellishing a little more each time until it scarcely resembles the truth, but captures the emotion and excitement of that moment.

We rowed back to shore, grabbing a few lily pads along the way as souvenirs, and headed off for the dinner I requested - Pizza Hut!

Sitting there eating pizza, crammed between two of my kids in one side of a booth, my wife and baby opposite us, after a day of excitement, love, and joy, is about all I could ask for. Total cost, less than $50, but memories to last a lifetime.

Each morning when you rise, you never know what the day will bring. But finding joy in the little things, being open to new adventures, and appreciating what you have, assures that you will always find happiness. I know I do.

How I Lost My Rib: A cautionary tale for javelin throwers

I found myself unable to breathe.

But I'll get to that later. I figured I'd start with the scary part just to get it over with.

This is the tale of how an otherwise healthy 29-year-old man ended up seeing 11 doctors, having his first two hospital stays, 3 operational procedures, and a rib extraction, completely unexpectedly over a two week period at the beginning of April 2011.

I guess you could say this all started in the Spring of 1997. My great-grandmother had just passed away, and I was about to head back to Iowa for the funeral, but was at the tail-end of try-outs for the high school baseball team. I spoke with the coach to let him know that I wasgoing to be out of town for a few days to which his face grew serious and he started looking everywhere else except my face. I guess he was the kind of guy who much preferred cutting people by posting a list on the wall rather than telling them face-to-face after hearing their grandmother just died.

Thus ended my official baseball career. (Though I did end up playing ball with a Senior Babe Ruth team through the rest of my high school years). What does this have to do with me losing a rib 14 years later? Hold on, I'm getting to that.

Never having been comfortable with having nothing to do, my first task was to figure out what other sport in which I could participate every spring. 1st on my list of possibilities: Javelin throwing.

I'll spare you the details, but it turns out, failing at baseball was one of the greatest things that could have happened to me. I took to javelin throwing like a bird to the sky when pushed out of the nest for the first time. That is, I stumbled a bit at first, but with some hard work had a very successful high school javelin career that transitioned into a rewarding college experience as a javelin thrower in NCAA Division 1 athletics.

All that just to make the point that over a 9 year period, I worked on stretching, strengthening, and otherwise abusing my right shoulder to get the maximum performance out of it.

Fast forward 8 years to 2011 which finds me a not noticeably different in physical appearance, but certainly not the picture of physical fitness I once was. With the gentle prodding of my wonderful wife (more from her later), I decide that I've taken enough of a break from working out and should start a new regular exercise routine so that my heart may be strong enough to beat beyond my 30th birthday. Great! At least it sounded like a good idea at the time...

After a few weeks of easing my way back into a less sedentary lifestyle, and some helpful tips from a personal trainer at the gym, I was feeling pretty good about taking a moderate approach that would make me feel healthier overall. Despite what felt like a small tweak in my right

shoulder that showed up after I began my new quest, I was almost enjoying jogging, working with kettlebells, and getting a good sweat going a couple of times a week.

On Tuesday, March 22nd, I went to bed before midnight and slept the restless sleep of a 29-year-old who has a queen sized bed that becomes infested by two miniature bed hogs on a nightly basis. You read it right. Not bed bugs, bed hogs. For the past few months, my wife and I have enjoyed (I use that word loosely) the company of our 2 young children in our bed starting anywhere between midnight and 4am each night. And despite their small size, these two kids can take up a startlingly large amount of room in bed. This usually left my wife and I to sleep in whatever strange position we can find to keep the peace and keep everyone asleep. On this particular nigh, I chose the enviable position of laying on my right side with my right arm extended straight up and supporting my head, which left me uncomfortable, but only taking up about 4 inches of width in the crowded bed. Par for the course. Until the next morning.

I woke up and started to get ready for work when I noticed that my right arm was about 75% larger than normal and a deep reddish/purple in color. Clearly a circulation problem, but not a surprise considering the strange position in which I'd slept. I figured it would go away as the day went on and continued with my morning routine.

Problem was, around 11am (6 hours later), my right arm was as swollen and red as ever. No relief. Being the mild mannered completely medically inept person that I am, I still didn't think much of it other than as a painful nuisance. My wife on the other hand is much smarter than me. Being a nurse, she knows the signs of serious circulatory problems and knows the serious consequences if they are not addressed in a timely fashion.

With her gentle nudging, I left work and stopped by an urgent care facility to get a professional medical opinion. The doctor checked me out and sent me next door to have a vascular ultrasound in my right arm to check for blood clots. After a very gooey hour and a quarter laying in the dark with a woman I hardly new (wow that sounds bad!), the ultrasound was finished and no clots observed. The doctor, at a loss as to what it could be, prescribed some steroids and muscle relaxers and told me to ride it out. So, off I went, pills in hand.

My wife, not being particularly convinced or pleased with this diagnosis, persuaded me to make an appointment with an orthopedic specialist. I did, and after running the course with my steroids for 6 days with no physical change in my arm, I was sitting in the office of an orthopedic doctor who ran me through the paces to determine what could possibly be causing my gigantic Incredible Hulk arm.

His best guess was that it might be a hematoma caused by an internal hemmorhage in my shoulder that was then bleeding into my arm where all the blood was pooling and staying. Sounds great. But he wasn't sure, so he ordered me to get an MRI done to confirm or disprove that theory.

I scheduled an MRI for the following Wednesday and had the pleasure that so many before me know all too well of being trapped in a plastic tube, ordered to remain as still as humanly possible, while loud noises surround you and a voice tells you, "Here comes another one for 4 minutes!" For those of you who haven't yet had the chance to to complete this wonderful procedure, don't worry. They'll pump John Mayer tunes into your headphones the entire time! But seriously, as long as you're not claustrophobic, it's not too bad.

This brings us to Thursday, March 30th, which finds me going about my normal activities, Hulk Arm in tow. I've made a follow up appointment with the orthopedist for a few days later which is why I'm so surprised to receive a call at 5pm from the orthopedist's office. They've seen something unexpected on the MRI and want me to get another vascular ultrasound the next day to confirm what looks like a possible DVT. Not knowing what in the world a DVT is, I try to call the hospital to schedule the appointment, at which point I'm told the earliest they could get me in was next week. Ok, no problem. But...problem. My wife actually knows what a DVT is and an appointment next week is not going to work for her. She tells me to get to the ER, now! I put up a bit of a fight (who wants to spend 6 hours in the ER?), but in hindsight, a Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) is not something to be taken lightly, and seeing as I've likely had one for nearly 10 days, we shouldn't wait another minute to treat it. The concern is that the clot would dislodge itself from my vein and make its way to my heart, brain, or lungs leading to stroke or death.

So off I go to the ER! Where, luckily, there is no wait and I'm seen nearly immediately. I spend about 25 goopy minutes in another dark room, with another woman I hardly know. But this time, the doctor comes back and says, "Yep. You've got two DVTs in your right brachial and subclavian veins." Excellent! The doctor prescribed Lovenox and Cumadin (blood thinners) and said the clots should dissipate and that would be the end of it. Great.

The next day, I give the orthopedist a call and let him know how it came out. He says that going to the ER was the right move and recommends that I make an appointment with a vascular specialist to make sure everything is on the right track. So I make the appointment, like any normal person would, for the first available time which is the following Wednesday. My wife seems ok with this, so we go to sleep and get ready for the typical crazy weekends we usually enjoy.

The next morning, Saturday, my wife heads in to work a shift at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital where she is a critical care nurse (ahhh! All makes sense now, right?). I've got the kids with me at my in-laws' house when I get a call from my wife. She spoke with a member of the Jefferson Vascular team who intimated that my visit to a vascular specialist might be a little more urgent than a Wednesday appointment. The new recommendation was that I should head down to Jefferson (in the center of Philadelphia, about 50 miles from where I live on the most congested roads imaginable), go through the ER, and the Vascular Surgery team would be expecting me.

I'll be honest here. At this point I've already seen more doctors than I would care to admit, and am now on a path with a diagnosis, medication, and a plan that I personally feel pretty comfortable with (out of my own ignorance, of course), so I'm in no rush to sit in another ER all day. But in the end, smarter minds prevailed, I left the kids with my mother-in-law and I checked into the ER at TJUH.

Again, I was taken right away and got a room in which to wait until one of the doctors could see

me. Thank god I brought my iPad! (This would become the theme of the next 2 weeks of my life). After waiting in the colorful surroundings of a major city hospital ER, 2 members of the vascular team came to see me and talk about what they saw in the ultrasound and the recommendation from the team of doctors. This is the first time I hear the term: Thoracic Outlet Syndrome (TOS).

In layman's terms, it's when the gap between your clavicle (collarbone) and first rib is narrower than usual. When the arm is moved in certain positions, the gap gets even smaller or non-existent and it compresses the brachial vein that runs through that gap and supplies blood to the arm. It's not terribly common, but shows up more in baseball players, swimmers, and apparently, javelin throwers. Anyone who would have used and substantially developed their shoulder muscles. BINGO! It's now starting to make sense how a healthy 29-year-old ends up with 2 DVTs.

The new plan is for me to be admitted to the hospital where I would be prepped for a venogramwhich is an operational procedure where they pump dye through your veins to identify the exact location and nature of the clot. Then I would be on a "clot-buster" medicine (TPA) designed to rapidly remove the clot, or if things were really bad, they could surgically remove the clots. Then we could do the entire process all over again for the other DVT!

I went to bed Saturday night, my first night ever in a hospital bed, too ignorant to be nervous, and too weirded out to sleep very well. The next morning, I was prepped for surgery and, hiding my growing apprehension behind inane humor that no one appreciated, I was wheeled into the pre-op holding room. Cut, cut, dye, dye, x-ray, x-ray, and I wake up a few hours later on a few IVs and monitors while being told that everything went well. I'm on the TPA for the next 18 hours or so when they'll do another venogram to check that the clots are removed.

Wait, wait, wait. Next day (Monday), same thing. This time, the clot was not completely neutralized so they had to do an additional round and I had another venogram in the late afternoon. Tuesday, I'm given the 'all clear' and am clot free!!

With that bullet dodged, the next concern is that because we have verified that it is indeed TOS (the doctors positioned my arm in the OR with the dye in my veins to see if the flow was cut off in the way they expected and it was), the likelihood of more clots forming is almost certain. The best and most effective way of preventing a future issue is to remove the first rib so that it does not continue to compress the vein.

Wait...What??? 2 days ago I had no idea my ribs even went as high as my collarbone, and now I'm having the first rib removed?!?

This is not a terribly common procedure, but Jefferson happens to have one of the country's leading surgeons for this particular type of extraction. He could possibly fit me in on Thursday, or I could get on the schedule for the operation the following Tuesday. Rather than stay in the hospital for the next two days with the possibility of having the operation on Thursday, I decide to break out of the hospital (or be wheeled out calmly in a wheelchair) and spend a few days at home before returning for the rib resection.

Equipped with an ACE bandage to keep the swelling

down, a Lovenox prescription to avoid more clotting, and an arm that looked like it had been repeatedly run over by a truck, I was homeward bound, if only for a few days. The good news is that I was in good spirits and had tons of support from my wife, family, and friends.

Fast forward a few days, and I'm kissing the kids goodbye and heading into the city again for an expected 4-day stay in the TJUH hotel and leaving with one less rib. Surgery prep, anesthesia, one of those funny shower caps for my head, and my lights go out (not before I make a few more attempts at nervous humor with the OR staff who at this point are very used to my terrible jokes).

PAIN!

I woke up and found myself unable to breathe. Not quite what I expected. So here's what happened. The surgery was a success, the rib was removed. The vein was scarred enough and didn't open up on its own so they had to perform anangioplasty using a balloon. The biggest complication, and the reason for my lack of being unable to breathe properly, was a collapsed right lung (pneumothorax). If you have never had the privilege of having this type of thing happen to you, let me explain the feeling. Imagine that you feel compelled to take a deep breathe at all times because you're not getting enough oxygen, but as soon as you start to take your breathe someone stabs you with a knife in your chest.

Yeah, it's that awesome.

I spent the next 7 hours under the care of a wonderful nurse in the Jefferson Post Acute Care Unit (PACU) while my faithful wife doled out ice chips through my dry lips. Seriously, one of the low points of my entire life. The only words I could squeak out in a raspy, hushed voice were "Hurt" and "Breathe."

But it got better. My throat hurt a bit and the right side of my tongue was numb from the tube that was down my throat during the procedure, but the actual incision points were not much of an issue and my arm looked better than it had since the whole episode began. After being moved to a couple more rooms over the next few days with a half dozen other very kind and competent nurses, my lung was on the mend, my levels were looking good, and I was ready to go home!

I checked out on Friday feeling very capable and optimistic about the future. My lung was healing nicely and my arm and shoulder showed encouraging signs. After working from home on Monday and Tuesday, I was back in the office full-swing on Wednesday (though I don't have a physically demanding job). I don't expect to be doing windmills and scissor kicks playing guitar for another few weeks, and I'll probably never be able to throw a javelin again, but I can find a way to live with that.

All in all, the whole ordeal sounds a lot scarier than it felt for me. Kind of like how the eye of the hurricane is the most calm. But thank goodness I have such a loving, concerned, and attentive wife who watched out for me the whole way and made sure I got the care I needed.

Thanks for all the nurses and doctors who treated me so well and to all my family and friends who supported my wife and kids while I was incapacitated. It's good to have family.

Baby

What a joy a new baby is (even if sleep has now waived bye-bye to me for quite a while).
It's really an indescribable feeling to be responsible for another human life.
One of the many things my sister is really good at is writing things that make me cry. She was so excited while waiting for news of the birth that she wrote the following:
note: Murray is the name Lauryn and I used for the baby in utero, which is really silly now that we know it ended up being a girl!

Ode to Murray
by Elisabeth Ballstadt

We await you with bated breath,

Watch the minutes crawl…the phone sit idle.

You stir in darkness--yet in a pure light,

a light we can hardly now recall…

So anxious we are,

To hold your hand, to teach you about light and life and breath.

So in awe we are of the joy you’ve already filled our nervous beating hearts with…

Can you understand how much you are loved?

How much you are awaited? When we know not even your face or your name?

Can you feel the shallow but steady breath of your father, as he steadies the woman who holds you…the woman who will nurture you for the rest of your life? Can you feel his excitement, and can you understand how this moment—your moment--is the moment that will define his existence for the rest of time?

Do you know, little one, how your very first breath will shatter through any worry or thought of any other thing great or small in so many--in so many far off places?

And do you know, dear one, that for every day hereafter--you have created life in a woman who will never feel empty again? Do you know that every move she makes and every word she speaks will first be with thoughts of you...?

Do you know—that when you trade in your pure light for a new one, that you need not be afraid…because on bated breath await those who have loved you even before you became…and will love you long after you return to the light you know now.

We await you. On bated breath.

Watch the minutes crawl…

The phone sit idle…

Caroline Grace Blakesley

As you can tell by the previous post, she's here!!
Our little girl, Caroline Grace Blakesley, came to us on Wednesday, December 20th at 10:19 AM.
What a beautiful blessing and miracle to start off the Christmas season. Talk about an immediate shift in perspective and priority. The whole world is a new and different place all because of this little one.
More to come soon, but we're all home from the hospital and Mom and baby are both doing very well.

Caroline's Wake Up Song

One of the many songs I'm sure to make up that will embarass her someday....