A Pause in the Fun

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A part of the reason for purchasing the RV lot at The Great Outdoors was to establish a primary care physician and dentist that we could come back to yearly or every other year. Knock on wood, but over our life, Chris and I have been very healthy. Even when we were working at Eastman Kodak and had an excellent health plan, we practically never went to see the doctor. We had done a full wellness visit with our previous doctor in western New York right before hitting the road in 2016 and everything looked good. But when we returned to that area for 5 months in the summer of 2023 and attempted to get in again, we were told that since it had been 7 years, we would be considered new patients and not be able to get an appointment for 4 months. We found a different doctor and had another wellness visit but this was the impetus for trying to establish a bit more of a routine for our health care since “we aren’t getting any younger”.

Over the summer while we were up in New England, we had investigated doctors and dentists in the greater Titusville area and had settled on ones and scheduled appointments with them for November when we returned to the area. The dentist visits were first and that went fine with the exception of Chris needing a new crown - nothing that a little pain and money can’t fix. We each had our wellness visit a couple days before Thanksgiving. Besides the visit at the doctor’s office, we needed to get typical bloodwork as well as a skin cancer screening, EKG and a calcium heart screening to help identifying coronary artery disease. We were able to get all the testing done except the skin cancer screening since the first appointment available would be in January when we are planning to be in the Florida Keys. Everything seemed good but a few days after Thanksgiving when my blood results came back, that all changed.

The doctor actually called me - not just the doctor’s office! She had looked over my test results from the bloodwork and was gravely concerned with my hemoglobin level of 7.3 as well as low iron levels. Of course that number meant nothing to me, but the doctor was convinced I should be feeling extremely lethargic and weak and that Chris should monitor me and take me to the emergency room if I show signs like this. I tell her I feel fine in that regard. But did mention that  when we were doing strenuous mountain hikes in New England this past summer, I was experiencing the inability to keep up with Chris without stopping frequently to catch my breath. She asked lots of questions about whether I had black or bloody stool or acid reflux and heartburn. My response was no symptoms like that whatsoever. She knew I have been taking ibuprofen for some pain in my midsection so she asked that I stop taking that immediately in case that was causing some sort of stomach ulcer and possible bleed.

Since I had a colonoscopy during the summer of 2023 with no issues found, my doctor wants to rush me into have an endoscopy done to find the source of what she assumed to be some sort of internal bleed that was causing acute anemia. For the next week or so, we get to learn the “joys” of the health care system. Even though I wasn’t feeling bad, all of the effort and concern about getting me to a gastroenterologist right away started to make me second guess how I was feeling. After lots of “hurry up and wait”, I finally had the endoscopy performed by mid December. The results showed no indication of active or recent bleeding in the upper GI. A good result except that there was still no explanation for the anemia. The gastroenterologist refers me to a hematologist and also orders a CT scan.

Of course now we are moving into the Christmas holiday season, so these aren’t scheduled until early January. So much for our plans to get our wellness visit done in November and December so we could head to the Keys. The series of 5 campgrounds where had reserved for early January through mid February all needed to be cancelled - one by one, in case I was given the all clear sign from the doctors. We also had the other issue of having told the rental office here at TGO that we would be gone for 6 weeks during the high season and they had booked our site out. Fortunately the staff in the rental office was very accommodating and was able to move the people earmarked for our site to other sites within TGO so at least we would be able to stay on our site.

The CT scan went fine but didn’t provide any help in understanding the anemia issue. The initial visit with the hematologist started to get a different take on my anemia. The suspicion is that rather than some sort of internal bleeding causing acute anemia, I likely have chronic anemia caused by not absorbing iron in my diet - possibly hindered by my ibuprofen use. Since the hemoglobin level drop was extremely slow, my body had mostly adjusted to having anemia and the only outward sign was the labored breathing during extreme physical activity. More blood was drawn in order to be scheduled for an iron transfusion. My hemoglobin levels had improved to 11.4 by this point with just stopping ibuprofen and taking oral iron tablets.

The iron transfusion was uneventful other than it was a 6 hour process! A follow up with the hematologist 6 weeks later has shown a hemoglobin increase to 13.0 with 13.2 being the low range of normal. My vitamin B12 levels are also low and can contribute to anemia, so I get to self administer monthly shots. The plan is to have bloodwork done a couple months into our summer travel plans and then follow up with the hematologist when we return to Titusville to see how I have progressed.

So the months of December and January were rather laid back with my sampling the various health facilities around the area and not being able to do much else. There were plenty of days where I didn’t even make it out of the motorhome. Once acute anemia was ruled out, Chris allowed me to do more things around the rig even if we weren’t going out for long hikes or bike rides. There were numerous little projects that we tackled both around our lot and on the motorhome. One of the first projects was to figure out why our front air conditioner wasn’t working. We seldom use the AC but when we need it, we will use it and the one had failed. Eagles Pride is the RV service facility on the grounds of TGO. Even if I had been feeling 100%, I doubt we could have managed to swap out the old unit with a new one. These guys show up to our site with the AC on the forklift and have no issue getting the unit swapped. I also had them replace a water valve on our fresh water fill. It had started to leak fairly significantly and after it was replaced, I discovered it also remedied the issue we had of the fresh water tank slowly filling on its own when we were hooked up to city water. A look inside of the valve showed some sort of plastic seal that appears to have unseated.

New AC Installed

Old Valve Seal Failure

Chris Finds this Ringnecked Snake While Gardening

One project that really need to be done was to paint the outdoor table and chair set that we had purchased during the area wide garage sale in March 2024. It is made of aluminum so rust was not an issue, but the paint was failing and the previous owner had tried to brush some white paint over the more severely peeling parts of the four chairs and table. From the looks of the paint job, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had let their young grandchildren paint them! Like any good paint job, the toughest part is the preparation, but over the course of a couple weeks, I was able to sand them down and take advantage of the nice paint booth we have at the Sawdust Club. The nylon straps for the seats were in good shape and all I needed to do was learn that the straps just need to be heated up in boiling water to allow them to be stretched back in position. The whole thing was a tedious project but not overly strenuous so it was within my capabilities at the time.

Chair with Nice Paint Job

Table Looks Like New

One other project in the rig was to deal with the door pulls and drawer handles. They were fairly nice but many of them had started to wear through the finish, especially on those that get used multiple times a day. It’s a 13 year old rig and we have been living in it full time for over 8 years. I suppose we could have just found suitable replacements but we were fine with the style but they needed to be refinished. I practiced on the door knobs first. Removing the old paint was relatively easy. I simply chucked a knob into my cordless drill and sanded them down. A wire brush and steel wool finished them up nicely. I was inclined to simply get some paint but Chris had a different idea - one we have never tried but were willing to give it a shot. We got a small bottle of gun blue which uses a weak acid to chemically color them. At first we weren’t pleased with the look but discovered that if I simply use a little paste wax, I can get them to look really good. And by sanding them down in advance, the knobs are incredibly smooth to the touch. The only question was how well with they wear over time? It’s been 2 months as of this writing and so far so good.

Nasty Knobs

After Sanding

Gun Blue Applied

Waxed and Ready For Install

The drawer pulls were a bit more of a challenge to remove the finish and get smooth. I did one by hand and decided that doing over a dozen of these handles was going to be a real pain. Then I remembered that the Sawdust Club has a sandblasting cabinet. It wasn’t big enough for the patio furniture but was perfect for this size of part. It only took a couple days working on and off to complete them as well.

Dirty Drawer Pulls

After Sandblasting

Finished and Installed

While I believe my anemia issue is understood and recovering nicely, I did have one other issue that cropped up from the CT scan from January. That scan was ordered by my gastroenterologist to help determine if there was something going on in my GI tract. And while there was nothing found to help understand my anemia issue, there was one section of the report from the radiologist looking over my scans that caught my attention. “Bilateral renal cysts are seen with the largest at the left inferior kidney measuring 9.2 cm in size.” I had initially overlooked this finding since it didn’t seem relevant but then I started thinking about how big 9.2 cm is. I know how to convert from metric, but my brain doesn’t “think” in metric, so that number didn’t register until I realized that is over 3.5 inches!

I have been experiencing pain in my midsection for a few years but have never been able to figure out where it was coming from. The doctor in western New York during the summer of 2023 attributed it to back pain likely because I was carrying a few extra pounds. But over the past 18 months, I have lost 40 pounds with no real improvement in my pain. I started to wonder if these kidney cysts may be contributing my pain since they seemed to be in the correct location. I went to the lab to pick up a disc with my CT scans to have a look for myself. After figuring out how to use the software to navigate the images. I was astonished by what I saw. The larger cyst was a nearly perfect sphere hanging off my kidney and about the size of a softball. The cyst on the right kidney wasn’t much smaller. Coming in at roughly 7.5 cm or the size of a baseball! It would seem plausible to me that having things this big taking up space in my body might be contributing to my pain. It takes several weeks to get into a urologist and have a referral sent to a type of doctor I didn’t know existed - an interventional radiologist.

By late February I go into the hospital to have the larger cyst drained. They use a CT scanner to guide a needle into the cyst and remove around 450 ml of fluid! By mid March, I go back in to have the smaller cyst drained. This one only yields 140 ml and was not completely drained. The procedures were pretty straightforward and handled as outpatient. While my pain level has improved, the outcome wasn’t as “day and night” as I had hoped. I suppose that since these cysts likely took many years to grow to such a large size, it may take my body some time to readjust to normal.

Since I was beginning to get back into the flow, I upped my work level a bit. One project that Chris started was to deal with the several planting beds that are lined with rocks. We have 3 smaller of these beds with river rocks but they have accumulated so much debris over the years that they have a fair amount of dirt and the grass and weeds love to grow there. To fix the problem, Chris started to remove the rocks and clean out the dirt down to the landscape fabric lining the beds. To improve the odds of getting the dirt out, I was hired to wash the rocks. It’s not a glamorous job but I became very proficient at the task. It’s hard to say how many hours were spent and how many pounds of rocks were moved. The neighbors likely thought we were crazy but the beds look much better now and the weeding should be eliminated for a while.

L to R - Original Rock Condition, Rocks and Dirt Removed, Washed Rocks Returned

One other larger project on the property was a small stoop off the rear of our shed. It only measures about 3 foot by 7 foot but it was in very rough shape. The wood deck boards were rotted to the point where we were concerned we would fall through at some point.

Deck in Tough Shape

Having access to to a various tools at the Sawdust Club made tackling this job possible. After removing the rotten deck boards, I saw that the 4 by 4 framing underneath was reasonably sound with only one section needing replaced. In order to get the deck up a bit higher and have a secure platform for the new decking, I built a pressure treated frame and secured it to the old platform.

Subframe Installed

Ready for Deck Boards

We decided to go with a composite decking to make sure this outlasts our ownership of the property. Borrowing the chop saw made the construction project much quicker and produced better results than I could have gotten otherwise. I think it turned out quite nicely and we now find ourselves sitting on our mini deck in the afternoon since it is in the shade of the sun.

Perimeter Installed

Finished Project

We did eventually get out to enjoy some sights from the Titusville area at the end of our stay this winter. We've also decided on most of our route for this upcoming season - covered in the next post.