Spring
break and other happy inventions have lured family and friends out of town,
except for my granddaughter Kristen. Her classes move her closer to her goal to
become a physician assistant. A
tough grad school program prepares students to “conduct physical exams,
diagnose and treat illnesses, order and interpret tests, prescribe medications,
counsel on preventive health care and…assist in surgery.”
She was up and out early this
morning, but left briskly-brewed coffee to help her grandpa float into the day.
It could not have been more mellow in its bright red Liverpool Football Club
mug. It is the morning after a 2-1 encounter with Sunderland.
All of a sudden everybody will be
back home. Matt will return to the University of Chicago with three national
swim meet trophies. Out in the state of Washington, Jacob and his high school
team returned home to Kirkland with first place honors in a mind-boggling robotics
competition. The next competition will be for Mike and fellow gymnasts, and not
long after that will be his MIT graduation. While all this is going on, Katie
prepares to be the fifth Veldman to graduate from Sandburg High School. She’ll
follow Dan, now a regional general insurance adjuster, and Kristen into the
University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
One reason I believe in God is that
I don’t know how else to account for the favors I’ve been granted, especially
Sally, my wife of constant memory, our children and their spouses, our
grandchildren and my choice kinship with moms, dads, siblings and other
in-laws. To believe in God, I might add, is to be hopeful.
Every once in a while I update you
about the progress of the rare disease I first acquired as OPCA, olivopontocerebellar
atrophy, a form of parkinsonism. It is now known as MSA, multiple system
atrophy, which is easier to spell but otherwise the same thing.
Less than a month ago I moved out of
my condo and into the cheerful home of my daughter and son-in-law, to which
they added a sturdy stair riser, a spacious bedroom and bath for the stair
riser rider, and plenty of space for my computer and its gadgets. Computers are
treasures for folks who seldom leave home. They enable imaginations to go
anywhere.
All the while that I become slower
and flimsier, I find that I have more time to be slow and more leisure to be
flimsy. Not the best deal, maybe, but a deal. I tell people that I’m dizzy, but
that’s because dizzy is the closest word I can think of to describe a complex
feeling of being dazed, confused while spinning in a whirligig and occasionally
tumbling. Bruises, yes, but nothing broken for the well padded.
Even headaches can be taken for granted, but some caution is
called for to reduce choking. There are ways to communicate when lips sag into
mumbling or the vocal cords freeze up, such as waving arms, rolling eyes or
scribbling notes. There are things to do when eyes won’t process printed words
for a while, or when a chapter just read vanishes.
People with incurable diseases are
not the only ones who deal with challenges. Everybody does, and everybody has
satisfactions . We don’t get to make all the choices.
We don’t always
know we’re making them.
