My husband, Lou, and I will be heading up to Pennsylvania for a week at Thanksgiving to spend time with my mother, brother and his family and our kids. We leave on the 22nd and return on the 28th. We have our supply delivery scheduled with NxStage the day after we get there. We are staying in a rural cottage outside of Gettysburg. We are just finishing up training with NxStage. Things are going well, but I'm a little nervous about taking our first long trip so soon after Lou started dialysis.
I have to laugh, this trip has turned into a REALLY BIG EVENT! Lou promised our daughter, Liz, last Thanksgiving, that we would come up this year,since she couldn't get home (she is in school in PA, we live in Georgia). We thought we would be staying in a guest cottage at the retirement place my mother lives in, but she is battling lung cancer and we weren't sure she would still be here. So we rented a cottage for a week. Now we have lots of stuff that has to come with us for dialysis, so, of course we needed a bigger car. So we now have a new (to us) Ford Freestyle (drives like a bus!) and car payments.
We decided to do a car swap; giving Liz my car and giving her car to our son who has been having lots of trouble with his. So now we get to drive two cars up to PA and take care of all the paperwork while we are up there.
Liz will actually be cooking Thanksgiving dinner at the cottage; I'm supposed to just relax and visit with everyone. That will be a big change - Thanksgiving was always at my house and I always did the cooking. We will be doing Lou's treatments in the early morning (no sleeping in for me
) so we will be free to do things the rest of the day. It will be a big shock to everybody, I think, to see the machine and realize what life is like for us now. Most of my family is still getting to know Lou. It will be interesting.