Dr. Pat’s Travels, Late Start Explained

As Ricky used to say to Lucy, “You’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do”. I had promised many of you that I would be writing about the travels of Sheila, my partner and myself. Obviously, it has not yet happened. We had scheduled to begin our travels with a cross-country car trip on October second. We had been refining plans for about three months.

As happens in life, things don’t always go according to plan. Sheila began to have difficulties with a pounding heart and pressured breathing a couple weeks ahead of departure. Sheila is one of the healthiest people I have known with no previous problems like this. She has lived a very healthy lifestyle, except when I get her to drinking wine. As the doctor told us there appear to be no predetermining factors for what she is experiencing.

Bottom line, the day after we were supposed to be traveling, we were getting an echo cardiogram. We lucked into a cardiologist consult the same day (rather than waiting until October 29th as we had been told). We were shown she has a rogue nerve in the heart that prevents adequate blood supply when she exercises beyond a mild state. Here’s where October 29th comes into play again. We could not get in for the 10-minute procedure to correct the nerve circuit until then. We did ask to be on a waiting list for that.

We chose not to be on the road as planned with that information in hand, better to be closer to home in case an earlier procedure date became available. We did fly to Michigan for 5 days last week and I will make a blog entry on that excursion. A 2-day trip to Portland is scheduled for October 23-24. We had also signed up and paid for a 3-day event in Las Vegas that begins October 26th and ends on the 28th. That event is a symposium on how to travel abroad and buy a home abroad. Whether or not we get in early for the procedure, we have some rearranging to do.

As things stand currently, I am about to start the process of rearranging airline tickets that were scheduled from Denver to Vegas with a return to Denver on the day of the procedure. We are in Spokane, that’s not going to work! Once the procedure is done (we were assured 99.9% success rate without residuals) we will decide how to handle our time. We may travel to Denver still, or we may opt to immediately get on with winter in Mexico and Central America.

As noted above, I will write an entry on Michigan soon. For now though I am going to take a paragraph or two to say thank you.

I have been blessed to go to a job I love that supported and grew me for 3 decades. One of the reasons it was a blessing is the people I met and was privileged to work with. Our health partially depends on community. You are my community. Even during covid I was able to see and have interactions with people when so many were deprived of this. The unbelievable faith and trust you gifted me spurred me to embrace hope when so many have embraced cynicism.

Cynicism is addictive and destructive and runs wild in our world. Hopefulness is the warrior emotion to combat cynicism. It can feel indefensible and lonely at times. It understands a world crying out for help. But with every loving act we declare the world and its inhabitants have value that is worth defending. That is the reward for hopefulness. This is something you helped me understand and practice.

Those of you who trusted me to guide you also guided me. Every day I received little lessons, or big ones, that made me a better chiropractor and person. Priceless, and difficult to walk away from, but expansion is a huge part of growth and health. I chose to walk in a new direction, to expand and take care of Sheila, my love.

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