MS Walk 2013 recap

MS Walk 2013 on Saturday was a great success.  I had the largest total dollars for an individual walker, a real tribute to the love of many for Mary Anne.  Many thanks again to all who contributed.

It's not to late to add your support, if you are interested.

March Madness Marching Band

The walk begins

Lots of walkers

Hay rolls in the distance.  Certainly not Piedmont Park in ATL

Pretty sunflowers

The band warms up for the after party

Walkers return

Sponsor Tents

MS Walk 2013

MA at MS walk 2007

Knitting my sweater at the MS Walk

I have not walked to raise money for MS in 3 years, but will be walking again on 9/14.  You can read about the saga that caused me to miss the event for so long; it is a blessing to be settled enough to walk for this great cause again.  Please sign on to my page and donate, if you are so inclined.

Donate Here

For the first update ever, I can report that Mary Anne is actually better.  She has been taking Amyprya for 9 months now, and done some pretty intensive physical therapy.  Her gait is smoother, her stamina is better and her confidence while walking is much improved.  Pretty much a miracle drug.

Also, she has been off the interferon shots and talking a pill, Gilenya, for about two years to as the disease modifier.  That's a fancy way of saying taking that pill slows the progression of MS.  But doing that with a caplet once a day is infinitely better than the shot that made her feel like she had the flu every week.

The cooler climate in KY has also been an improvement.  There are still days where it is too hot for herself to go out, but they are more rare here.

So, all in all, the disease is less of a burden than it has been sometimes.  We are grateful to all who have given to the MS society in the past, and hopeful that we can raise money again to further this cause.

Sparky at 2009 walk

The green chair is empty

What a lovely graveside service today for Aunt Becky; the rector said it was the best he'd ever been to.  Sister Sophia spoke, because the immediate family couldn't get the words out.  The parable of immortality is below.

Mary Anne and I were privileged to be Becky's next door neighbors for a little more than a year; the Park will never feel quite the same without her.  Glad to think that Uncle Hall is the happiest man in heaven.

Becky's obituary

A parable of immortality by Henry Van Dyke

http://www.spirit-path.net/parableimmortality.htm

"I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch until at last she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other. Then someone at my side says, 'There she goes!'

Gone where? Gone from my sight ... that is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination. Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says, 'There she goes!' there are other eyes watching her coming and their voices ready to take up the glad shouts 'Here she comes!'"

~ by Henry Van Dyke ~

An Eventful Spring

In February of 1997, we moved into our house on Sequoyah Drive in Buckhead (inside the Perimeter in Atlanta, GA).  We had been in a small house nearby there for 6 years,

The Dump (in honor of Margaret Mitchell)

and had clearly outgrown it.  Eleanor’s piano lessons made us feel like the piano was on top of our head.  I remember I was out of town while MA was house hunting and when we were talking one night, she said she had seen the house we wanted.  It had a big kitchen and an Alpharetta master bath.

Work was going well at that point, although I think I was getting a little too smarty-pants about some of my management responsibilities.  I had an employee come into my office on Friday afternoon and inquire about sick policy.  My response was something along the lines of “I haven’t missed a day for sick in the 6 years since we started this company, so I’m not sure what the sick policy ought to be.  Just come to work.”

Back to the move.  Selling Ridgemore was the best house sale we ever had.  We weren't leaving the area, we had no job pressure, we just wanted a bigger house.  So I was able to negotiate from a very strong position and we did well with that sale.  As with most of our moves, I tried to get from closing to packing to closing to loading within a few days.  We were well on our way to that, when the corporate seller began to become problematic.  As we were threatened with a delay in closing, I told the selling realtor that we had our key and we had reserved our moving van and we would be in that afternoon, closing or not.  We closed at 11am.

By the second weekend in the house, it was time for a very fun chore - going to buy a bigger TV for the den.  Eleanor and I had a long list of errands.  I remember feeling just a little twinge in my belly at the Target as we got the TV paid for, but didn’t think anything of it.  By the time I woke up on Sunday, however, the pain was bad enough that we decided to stay home from church, which almost never happened.  I felt better as the day progressed and we decided to go forward with our plans to have dinner and bridge with the Martins that night.  Dan was bringing a bottle of Dom Perignon as his house warming gift (still the only time we’ve ever had that, despite champagne being MA’s favorite drink).

Sunday night my stomach felt worse, and by Monday morning I went straight to the doctor.  I had an MRI, confirming Dr. Dan’s immediate diagnosis of diverticulitis.  I got my prescription for heavy antibiotics, and went through 10 days with my mouth tasting like nails, but my belly not hurting.  At the end of that course of therapy, the pain returned, so I went to even stronger oral antibiotics.  One was TID and the other BID.  The TID ran out first, and by mid afternoon of the day I didn’t have a noon dose the pain was back.  I was on a business trip, so after a painful flight home, I called Dr. Dan.  He told me he’d done all he could, and he’d have to introduce me to someone with a knife.

We went in the next day and I was admitted to the hospital.  I was on more antibiotics, IV this time, to try to calm down the infection enough for surgery.  When we called my folks, TGP had MA hit me hard on the foot to see if I was really sick.  When that hurt incredibly badly, he conceded that maybe I did need to be in the hospital.  We played hospital bridge with the Martins, and spent 6 days with friends coming by the hospital.  This was the first annual Faithmates ski trip, and Matthews Gwynn et al called me from the hot tub in Utah to tell me they wished I was there.  MA had her folks come in from SC so they could watch the girls and she could stay in the hospital with me.

As the length of prep time became obvious, father-in-law Ira determined he needed to return home so he could work.  Mother-in-law Anna stayed at the house watching the girls.  Ira drove home in the hardest rainstorm any of us ever experienced along I-20.  The next day, as Anna was at our house watching the girls, she was speaking with Ira on the phone.  His speech became slurred and he dropped the phone and wouldn’t answer. Anna managed to disconnect the line and call their neighbor, also a doctor.  Bernie came over immediately, found Ira on the floor and called the ambulance.  Ira got to the hospital in time for them to administer TPA.  He became, literally, the poster boy for that drug, as it led to a remarkable recovery from his stroke. I wish I had a picture of the poster.

But I get ahead of myself.  MA was at the hospital with me, a day away from my surgery.  Anna was at our house with the girls, but needed to get home to the hospital for her husband.  Flights were all sold out, so we called our friend Lindsay.  He was Diamond Medallion with Delta at the time, so claimed Anna was his mother-in-law and got her on a flight to Columbia, SC.  The Wharton grad was forever known in the Horton household as “that nice southern gentleman”.

To cover kid-sitting on our side, MA called Muv and Soph.  Sophia came up from Charlotte and Muv flew in from San Diego.  Mary Anne was at the hospital with me during surgery and had to shoo my sister out afterwards when she made me laugh, before my body had recovered enough to laugh.  I have done fine since 1997 without those 18 inches of colon.

Recovery was slow but steady.  Months later, one of our new neighbors (this story is so long you forgot we were just moved in, eh?) said her daughter had asked her about the sad looking man in his bathrobe that walked just a little bit up and down the street.

Ira and I both made it through our ordeals fairly well, and tend to remember each other especially around mid-March.  My favorite part of the aftermath was that October, when we had PtHalloween at my company, and one of my colleagues dressed up as me.

Joining a church

We are about to join First Presbyterian Church of Lexington Kentucky.  It’s been a long time since we joined a church.  The second time we moved to Atlanta, in 1991, we knew where we belonged, Peachtree Presbyterian Church.

The first time in Atlanta however, things were not so obvious.  As newlyweds in 1984, we went to many of the Presbyterian churches out in the suburbs where we lived.  I was thinking that we should join the one closest to our apartment.

Sister Piel was singing with the church choir in Pensacola, FL and they were coming on tour to Atlanta.  One late spring Sunday, they were going to sing at Peachtree Presbyterian, so we decided we should visit.  We put on our Sunday bib and tucker and headed into town.  We knew where the church was - we’d been to the High Museum and seen the Presbyterian Church on Peachtree road.  We settled into the pew about 10:50 and were looking through the bulletin.  No trace of a visiting choir from Florida!  We went out to the payphone (1984 - no cell phones, no Google Maps) and called Muv and Pha.  Somehow, Pha was still home and told us we must have the wrong church.  Piel was singing at Peachtree Pres on Roswell Road.

We hurried up P’tree and took the left fork at Buckhead’s main intersection.  Into the church (parking was less of a problem in the mid 80’s than it became later) and settled in again.   Piel sang; we signed the friendship register, showing South Carolina as our church home.  That Wednesday night, senior Pastor W. Frank Harrington called the suburban apartment and Mary Anne talked to him.  They were both from God’s country.  Frank told us we needed to join his church.

Well, you didn’t say no to Frank, so we had our new church home.  We were in a Sunday School class for newlyweds, which included a rafting trip down the Chattahoochee.  We were there for 2 years, then to Gaithersburg, MD and then to Mt. Pleasant.  In 1991, we came back to PPC and made many lifelong friends in the Faithmates Sunday School class.  I was ordained as an elder at Peachtree.  We will always miss that church.

But now, we get to see what God has planned for us in Lexington.

Ski in Ski out

I had this story as part of the saga that we have been through over the last couple of years, but it really deserves a post of its own.  In February 2011, while MA had a hurting hip and we were staying in an apartment in Denver, Caroline and friend Katie 

















came out to visit and the four of us went to Breckenridge to ski.  Roommate Joe has a very nice ski in / ski out house there.

The drive up the mountain was hard on Mary Anne, with every curve and bump causing her shooting pain.  About an hour into our drive into the mountains, I realized that I had left all my ski equipment (carefully boxed and mailed to CO) in the apartment back in the city.  I don’t think Caroline had ever heard me exclaim quite so negatively and forcefully.

When we got to Joe’s, it was clear MA couldn’t handle the stairs that were required to use the bedrooms, so we camped out on an air mattress on the main level.  Caroline and Katie took snowboarding lessons and I skied with Joe and a friend of his.  

By the third day, after two days on the slopes, Caroline and Katie thought they were ready to “ski out”.  The path from the house to the lift is not very wide, and turns into the woods a couple of hundred yards down from the house.  The girls spent 30 minutes coping with the first 50 yards, and we all realized it would be foolhardy to turn and go between the trees.  Caroline, Katy, and I backed up until we found some stairs, and climbed up them.  That put us back at street level, only about 30 yards down from the house.  We walked up the front door, only to find that the house was locked.  There was no way I was going to ring the bell and get Mary Anne to hobble to the front door, so I turned around.  After retracing my steps down the now infinitely long seeming stairs, still in ski boots, I found myself looking uphill to the back entrance to Joe’s.  I wish I had pictures of that walk.  My legs would sink down to the hip with each step, which is apparently called "postholing".  I needed snow shoes.  Eventually I ended up doing a marine crawl to get to the back porch.  Up through the house, let the girls in, drive them to the lift, drive back up to the house, skis back on, and finally “Ski Out”.  I got my first real run by 11am.

During this weekend adventure, the land that I grew up on back in KY was about to go on auction.  Without as much deliberation as you might think, I worked with cousin Berkeley and we put some pre-bids on Millstream 1.0.  Herself will tell you now that she may have been clouded by the pain meds, but by the time we came down from the mountains, we were on the way to owning land in the Bluegrass.

Pedro

It was Thanksgiving week, 2005.  I remember sister Sophia calling me on Monday morning because TPG had had an event and been taken to the hospital.  On the very first call, it seemed like things might resolve themselves quickly, (something about a gall-bladder), but by mid-morning, it was clear I needed to get to Pinehurst.

Muv had been awakened by Pha wandering in the night, delirious.  It took all of her strength to get him to the bed and and wait for the EMTs to come and take him to the hospital.  Soph was there with first light and brother Dunn and I were there later on Monday.

They removed Pha’s gall-bladder, but that did not seem to have any impact.  The doctors knew by the end of the day that Pha had had a stroke, but it wasn’t clear how bad things were.  He remained unconscious and the medical staff assured us that that was common in situations like these.  “Give it 48 hours before you start to worry”, they said.

Sister Piel was in Boston at this point, great with child.  She couldn’t fly, so Paul began scheming about how to get her down to be with the family.

We had meetings with various doctors on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, but not much progress.  Pha continued to be non-responsive.  After I asked the infectious disease doctor a couple of questions to clarify things, he asked if I was a physician.  I did manage to respond “No, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night”.

We had a very subdued Thanksgiving in Pinehurst.

By Friday morning, we were past the point where it was normal that Pha remained non-responsive.  I was in the room with him, talking to him as we had all been doing.  I explained that Piel couldn’t fly, so Paul had rented a big van with a reclining chair and that if Pha didn’t get better, Piel and Paul and Max were going to have to drive down I-95.  Given Piel’s condition and the long drive, they would probably have to pull over at South of the Border.  If Piel happened to go into labor there, the new baby would have to be named “Pedro”. At that moment, TGP moved his head from left to right and said “Pedro”.  I’ve never heard anything better.

Piel et al did fly down that Sunday.  Piel hid her Lucy belly with a very large Starbucks bag as she boarded the plane.  Max was 25 months old at that point, but under two flies for free, so Piel and Paul wrapped him in a baby blanket and kept him in their lap.  

Pha’s recovery was slow, and included a 4 week stay for M and F in Atlanta with us the next spring for him to have heart surgery.  

He did recover though, and somewhat surprisingly, it was not his heart that got him in the end.

And I never look at Lucy without wanting to call her Pedro.

Lucy holding stuffed Sparky