Spring Time in the 214

Doesn't quite have the same ring as spring time in the 509.

Any hoo.

After a short winter in Dallas, which did include a couple days of snow and an ice week that shut down the city and classes, we get to enjoy the beautiful spring time in February!  That is one thing that Dallas does well, Spring and Fall.  Gorgeous.  Can't beat 70 degree days in March.

It was not hard for us to adopt the Rangers as our new favorite baseball team.  The Mariners had just been bad for so long, that they had broken our hearts one to many times.  Now that we live in Dallas.... we had to become Rangers Fans.

Rangers Ballpark is beautiful.  Great architecture.

Not too much to complain about in the Spring... except I know Summer is on it's way.

I will be a blogger, I will be a blogger!

I did enjoy having a blog at first. I felt like it was the cool and trendy thing to do when you are newly married. I did ok at first, but Sean regularly made fun of me saying that no one wanted to hear about our boring lives.

But now, we are 2000 miles away. We don't do much, but it is more important to us now that we stay connected and share with everyone.

So here we go! I promise to write more often. I am also going to attempt to fill you in on the last year. There has been Rwanda for me, the last summer days at the the river, of course our move across the country, first couple weeks/months in Dallas and starting my new job. We are finally coming up on our first school year down here, so I better do my job and fill y'all in (in true southern fashion).

Christmas 2010

It was pretty fun getting to fly back to Washington for Christmas.  It was our first time, for both us, to be that far away from all of our family.  We no longer had the luxury of just driving to the other side of town to see the family.  We got to split up our time with both of our families and had some great food and time celebrating!

Heather was expected little Bayley at this time.  Heather was due in May, but delivered 5 weeks early.  Both mom and baby were healthy.

These are the sweet little jeggings that we couldn't wait to see her wear!

It wouldn't be a trip to Spokane without seeing snow downtown and also a trip to Madeline's.  It's our favorite place!

Somehow I didn't end up with any pictures of my family, but I promise we did see them.

This was one of the first times that we realized that we were going "home" to our new home in Dallas at the end of the trip.  We were still learning to adjust to that new normal.

The Move to Dallas

What a driving trip this turned out to be!  We left beautiful cool Spokane with 68 degree temps in the morning.  Little did we know that we were going to be entering the hottest place on the earth!  We took our Subaru and hauled a small U-Haul trailer behind us.  The rest of our belongings were shipped with a moving company the day before.

 This gives you an idea of our driving iteneray

 

We stopped in Nampa, ID and stayed with my cousins at Northwest Nazarene University.  They are Resident Directors for one of the all male dorms.  We got to stay in a dorm room for our overnight visit.  It was during the summer, so there weren't any students, but it was pretty fun  to get to relieve some college memories. Although this time we were married and sleeping in the same room, so not quite the same.

We then headed to Salt Lake City and saw the Mormon Tabernacle.  Pretty amazing, but Sean wouldn't let me stop to take any pictures cause it was rush hour and we had a trailer behind us! We stayed overnight in Grand Junction, CO.  The next day we had a short little drive to Pueblo, CO to stay with Sean's uncle.  That was a nice little reprieve after crossing the Rockies!  I thought we were going to blow up the engine! But the little Suby held up.

Wind energy is very common as we got into North Texas and Oklahoma.

After a short encounter with New Mexico, we grazed the top of Texas before heading to Oklahoma City.  Our first time in Texas.  Yeee Haww!

You know you have hit the Bible Belt when...... large crosses start appearing on the horizon.

We heard that the memorial for the Oklahoma City Bombing was something that we needed to see while we were in town.  It was well worth the time.  Beautiful and very informative.

We stayed overnight in Oklahoma City and were starting to realize that the humidity was going to be our constant companion.  It was unbelievable.  I don't think that the air conditioner in the hotel room turned off once that night.  It was on full blast and barely keeping up.

The next morning we headed off for Dallas.  We were fortunate that Sean had an old high school friend from Indiana who was now living in Dallas with her husband.  The graciously offered their place for us to stay that 1st night in Dallas.  We had a noon move in time the next morning and we knew that we were going to need to be well rested to move in with 100 degree heat.

This delightful little temperature was waiting for us the next day.  Talk about climate shock!

All in all, great road trip.  No break downs, no arguments.  We couldn't have asked for more!  The move in process was a little bit of a shock.  I believe that I started to cry when I realized that the water from the tap was very warm (no such thing as cold tap water in Texas) and tasted like dirt.  I was hot and tired, and just wanted things to be like home.

I can now look back and be thankful for the safety that God provided us during the trip and the relative ease of our move process.  God continues to keep us provided for.  He is good and deserves all the praise!

Rwanda February 2010

February, I had the chance to go with a team to Kigali, Rwanda to perform open heart surgery to 16 patients. I was on the recovery side of the process, not surgery. Our team consisted of about 45 people. 2 surgeons, 3 cardiologists, 1 physician's assistant, 1 surgical assistant, 2 anesthesiologists, 2 pump techs (run the heart and lung bypass machine), 4-5 OR RN's, 9 ICU RN's and 9 Step-down Rn's and multiple support staff. While we were there we got to travel the city, see a lot of genocide memorials, go on a safari, eat some interesting and great food and most of all help some amazing people. I was so lucky that I got financial support from people at my home church and also friends and family. God really blessed our trip and everyone did amazing. There is currently a team right now in Rwanda doing 17 surgeries. Our group name is Healing Hearts Northwest. Follow up at their blog http://www.healingheartsnorthwest.blogspot.com/

Sean and I saying goodbye for the next 26 days. He had just had shoulder surgery to fix a torn labrum.

I can't remember the total travel time there, but I think it was something around 48 hours. Lots of lay overs and long flights.

100$ = 56,000 Rwandan Francs

Our awesome hotel. I was just expecting to sleep in a cabin. We were treated really well.

We got a little lost and went for a fun walk around the "residential" neighborhoods

Nice little walk

Hole in the wall place that a local told us to go to. Definitely the first white people to ever go there.
Pretty typical Rwandan food. Plantains boiled in tomato sauce, beans, rice, potatoes, some kind of fibrous root, and salad that does not have one piece of lettuce in it. Honestly, pretty good for a bland diet.

While the first patients were going through surgery and then the ICU, that gave some of the step-down nurses a chance to go on our little day trips. We went on a safari on an wildlife reserve. It was a great experience. We woke up on the edge of this lake where our lodge was at. Not a bad view.

Baboon! and baby

Giraffes!

Zebra!

On our way back to our hotel, we saw this truck full of prisoners. Our tour guide explained to us that the people who were convicted of war crimes during the genocide have to wear pink and then the ones who have actual sentences wear orange. I was a little nervous taking this picture.

Back at King Faisal Hospital, the OR team is working on the patients.

Brooke was showing one of our two pediatric patients what a normal heart should sound like. These two girls stole our hearts.

We would work a couple of days and then have a day off. On one of our days off we went to see a couple genocide memorials. This whole country was rocked in 1994 when close to a million people died in 3 months! This is a picture of the building where the UN Belgian Soldiers were murdered.

Inside this church, they brought people in telling them that they were going to be safe. They locked the doors and then threw in grenades and shot them with machine guns. Approximately 10,000 people were killed in this small church. You can still see the bullet holes in the baptism basin and the blood stained walls. This was a very emotional part of our trip.

This sign says something to the effect of, "If you would've known me, you wouldn't have killed me." The people running the memorials kept telling us that if their fellow countrymen had taken the time to realize that they were killing their neighbors, they wouldn't have committed these crimes. The country has really come a long way since '94. It appeared very safe and clean and everyone was so welcoming. When you think that most of the people that we were operating on were victims or had their parents killed by the genocide, it puts things into perspective. There are not a lot of people who are older than about 40. There were deep scars on the backs of some of the women patients and one woman even had terrible deep white scars across her lower back. She said that they were from the belt that she cinched around her waist to stop the hunger pains when she was hiding. Amazing resilience and belief in God.

On a lighter note, on our way home we kept seeing billboards similar to this. Yes that is condom that the singer is holding. They are trying to say "I wear one, so should you." Pretty brazen by our standards, but the country has about a 3% HIV rate, so it must be working.

Nothing surprised me by the end of the trip. Typical travel.

Those precious girls. Ester and Rebecca.

Dieudonne was the most fluent in English compared to the other patients. He was studying to be an accountant when he had to stop because he was too sick to keep going to school. He was so happy to tell me, "Now I can go back to school to do what I love." Amazing what open heart surgery can do.

A little free time to go to the market.

Some of the ICU and Step-down RN's

Sometimes the power went out. Thank goodness for headlamps on night shift.

They loved having their pictures taken.

The woman on the right, Joyuese ended up with a flair up of Malaria. She was doing fine by the end of the week.

The equipment was rough...

Interesting part of the trip when we were invited to go to the US Ambassador's House.

Not a bad view for the ambassador

Wrapping up our week of surgeries with lots of pictures.

After a night shift, nothing is better than real hot chocolate and french pastries at a fancy hotel on the way to our lesser hotel.

It's a big ordeal getting everyone on the buses and to the airport. Gotta clear customs. Most of the team left a week before us. 5 RN's and a MD stayed to make sure all the patients finished their recovery. We had our little scare when one woman had a 9 second pause and ended up getting a pacemaker. Fun times!

So we moved from the hotel to stay in the guest house of the hospital. Such a juxtaposition seeing a nice house next to poverty.

All in all, wonderful trip, great people and an amazing experience. Hope to do it again someday... especially this time with Sean.

Sorry this post is such a long time coming! The move to Dallas really put other things as a priority above blogging.

Visting Dallas for the 1st time

We left to see Dallas the first week of January. It was actually warmer in Spokane (40-50's) than it was in Dallas (30's-40's). That was when they were having that cold snap in the south. About a week later, it even snowed.

We visited the school of course and met with a counselor to talk about being a student at DTS.

Sean saw this as a "sign." No pun intended.


What else do you do in Dallas.... see the MAVS!





All in all a good trip.

At this point, I was still holding to the fact that Sean would never want to move across the country for school.... We told each other that we would make a decision after I came back from Rwanda. Needless to say, we are in Dallas! ahhaha. Well, all in God's Plan.