Walking Spirit

Wow, I can't believe it's been almost a month since the last time I did an update. This time it's not because I couldn't think of anything to write. The delay was caused by a very busy schedule. The busier I get the more I value my personal time and I don't want to spend that time sitting in front of a computer.

September began with two trips to Dayton, Ohio, in the first week. The first trip, toward the beginning of the week, was a quick day trip to speak to the Dayton Rotary Club with Dr. Smith from CTS. The second trip, at the end of the week, was for an informational/fund raising reception at Dr. Smith's house. I attend these events to speak about being a tissue recipient, and the reality of the amazing gifts that come from tissue donation.

This month I also took on a new responsibility for accessABILITY - Center for Independent Living. I am now the chair of our new fund raising and marketing committee. Something that I'm pretty stressed about, because I really don't know the first thing about fund raising, but the committee is made up of a good group of people and we have a consultant involved as well. I've spent most of the month putting together the new committee, while working with a different team to start planning the 2011 Wheel-A-Thon.

Last week I had another trip to Dayton, this time to speak at a country club about the important service that CTS provides. Observing these receptions has been very helpful to me, as I hope to find people who are willing to host similar receptions for accessABILITY. Both organizations are not well known and I've witnessed the impact these receptions are having on the people who never knew what CTS does. I'm hoping to achieve the same thing for accessABILITY.

This past Friday night I had the pleasure of helping my friend Micheal Moros with the "mock" service training at his new restaurant, Micheal's Southshore. (The food and service was great. The restaurant officially opened for business on Monday.) On Saturday morning I drove down to Bradford Woods for the annual Adult Burn Survivor retreat. (Normally I would have gone down there on Friday night, but I just couldn't pass up on the free food at Michael's!) The retreat was emotional, as always, but I always feel more energized afterwards.

Unfortunately that energy was short lived. On Monday morning I woke up with some pain in my lower abdomen. I thought I was just constipated, but I was very wrong. I'm not going to go into the gory details... I'll just say that the pain steadily worsened until I finally called Mom a little before noon and asked her to take me to the ER at St. Vincent's. I was in excruciating pain for most of the day until the ER Dr. could see me. After he diagnosed what he was pretty certain would be a stone he had the nurse give me some pain killers through an IV and I finally felt relief! A CT scan confirmed that I do indeed have a 5mm kidney stone gradually trying to make it's way out. I've never experienced this before and it's definitely not fun. I haven't had anymore pain since Monday afternoon, but the stone still hasn't passed, so every time I pee, I pee in fear. I do not want to feel something that big making it's way out of my body! Maybe I'll be lucky and it will dissolve before that happens. Keep your fingers crossed!