Apparently, I’ve been a little “quiet” lately. It has also been brought to my attention that with my situation, it hasn’t gone completely unnoticed.

First, some candid honesty. I’ve hit a difficult stretch health wise. I cover that in my latest Fight For Your Life blog, so I’m not going to dwell on that here. Instead, I’m going to write for fun and tell some stories about other things that have been happening.

For starters, we just celebrated our sweet Elphie’s first “Gotcha Day.” This loving, affectionate, dog that loves to play, has been the brightest spot of the past year for us. We see her as the embodiment of the best qualities of all of our past dogs. In over twenty years, she’s the third “only dog” we’ve had joining the dog Jenifer had when I met her and Chloe from when Luci passed until Elphie joined us. It’s weird for us to only have one dog, so she is spoiled rotten. Not only does she have every inherited toy from before we got her, but we have easily tripled that amount over the past year. And as a completely biased dog dad, I can say with a great deal of certainty that she deserves every bit of it.

We still have one last holdover from a crew that at one time reached five dogs, five cats and two sugar gliders. Not known to many, but Elphie was adopted right around the time our cat Mo turned 15. So that means if Elphie had a one year “Gotcha Day” that Mo has just tuned 16.

What you need to know about Mo is that getting to 16 has not been easy. He barely made it past 16 days. He was found abandoned as a week-old kitten and brought to the vet Jenifer was working for at the time. She offered to be his surrogate and bottle feed him until he was old enough to be adopted. Very early on, he became dehydrated to the point she had to (with permission) go into the clinic after hours to get him subcutaneous fluids. After that, she bonded with him in a way that cannot be properly articulated through writing. Needless to say, he was never available for someone else to adopt.

Two years later there was another serious issue.  It was Labor Day weekend, and something was severely wrong with Mo. We needed to take him to the Emergency Vet. It turns out his urinary tract was blocked (not uncommon for male cats) and he was very close to being lost. I remember Jenifer being inconsolable after the vet told us not to get our hopes up. But somehow a miracle occurred. These are not my words. These are the words of the vet after seeing where his lab levels were. He was hospitalized for a few days but made a full recovery.

It turns out, this would not be the last time he was blocked. It happened two more times over the next five years. Through some dietary changes we’ve avoided more repeats, but again, for him to get to sixteen has been a blessing we do not take for granted.

Since his birthday corresponds with Elphie’s Gotcha Day, we’ve said that she was his birthday present. If he could talk, we’re certain he would ask to return her for a different gift. Maybe some catnip or a new blanket that he can “make biscuits” with. If you have a male cat, you probably know what I mean by that.

These milestones were celebrated while we were on a camping trip in our travel trailer to Hot Springs, Arkansas. I bring that up because there is a story from our return trip home that is worth telling.

Let me start by saying that the trip began on the same day that I had a tenth and final cycle of radiation therapy. While you don’t feel anything during the treatments, it does take a toll on your body. I was also on an oral chemo medication with the trip occurring in the middle of that cycle, meaning my energy and stamina had its limits. Plus, I was still experiencing chronic pain in my lower back throughout the trip. Safe to say, I was operating at something less than 100%.

We did break up the trip. From Hot Springs, we stopped for the night in Texarkana which made it a bit more digestible. The morning we headed home, we left around 9am. We estimated about 5 hours with slightly slower speeds pulling the trailer and stops for gas and restroom breaks.

Everything was going just fine until we were just over an hour from home. That’s when the trip decided it wasn’t quite done with us yet.

Just south of Livingston, TX, our tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS) for the trailer started beeping. We were fortunately near an exit on the highway. The pressure was decreasing, but at a slow enough rate that we were able to find a big empty parking lot to pull into and be able to safely change the tire.

We parked and got to work. The gash in the tire was noticeable, and it was hissing like an angry snake. Thanks to our preparation and some previous experience with changing trailer tires we managed to make the change and were back on the road in just over 30 minutes. It might have been quicker, but we had to add about 20 psi to the spare with our slow air compressor.

Back on the highway, we were feeling proud of our teamwork and looking forward to being home after the unexpected detour. Then the beeping started again.

This time, it was not slowly leaking. A quick glance at the TPMS showed the same tire (we had swapped the indicator cap) was below 10psi. Not wanting to do damage to the wheel or the trailer, I looked for the first available place to stop. Unfortunately, we had just passed an exit for a truck stop. Even more unfortunate was that where we did exit, all traffic was exiting due to construction on the main lanes. We got to the far right lane of the highway access road in a spot where the lane was ending and traffic had to merge out of the lane anyway.

Jenifer jumped out to check the tire and reported back that the spare was leaking from the valve stem. This was not good. Traffic was flying by us at 60 plus miles per hour and the trailer was rocking with every passing vehicle. The only thing we could do was manipulate the valve stem to stay closed and add air back into the tire hoping we could get to a safer place.

Over the next 25 minutes, we managed to get the psi to 75 (max was 80) and we got back in the truck and started moving. Almost instantly the pressure started dropping again. We noticed a side street and turned down hoping to find a safer place to figure out what was going to be next. Being a sparsely populated area between Shepherd, TX and Cleveland, TX, our hopes started dwindling the further we went down this road. Not only were there no parking lots to turn into, there didn’t seem to be many options to turn around at all. We hoped the road would lead somewhere but when it turned to dirt, we opted to stop – in the middle of this road in what felt like the middle of nowhere.

We started troubleshooting the best we could. We considered the truck’s spare tire to get us to safety but learned it was a completely different size and would not work. We tried taping the valve stem and adding air. That seemed to work a bit, but after getting it to 60psi or so, our last battery for the compressor ran out of juice. We were about 75 yards past a clearing with a gate, so we backed up along the road, maneuvered into the gap and got going back towards the highway. The pressure had dropped to 53psi or so, but held there. We moved along at about 20 mph until we got back to the main road. From there, it was just under 6 miles to a Love’s Truck Stop in Cleveland, TX. That was our target.

With one eye on the TPMS, the other on the road and our hazards flashing, we merged back into traffic and were able to get up to about 45 mph. We kept it there and got to the truck stop without losing any more pressure. We backed into a spot in the rest area of the truck stop and made our plans.

We decided that we would take the original bad tire (which was in the truck bed) to a tire shop and get it replaced. We did have road hazard insurance that would reimburse us after buying the tire, so at least there was that. But that meant leaving the trailer at the truck stop. On top of all of this, Mo and Elphie are in the truck with us. Each time we’ve stopped for a tire issue, Jenifer had taken Mo into the trailer to let him try to use the litter box. Obviously, based on the earlier parts of this story, his bladder function is very important to us and we have very high awareness of his bathroom activity. Of course his stubborn butt refused to perform at any interval.

After making sure it was okay to drop the trailer with the manager at Love’s, we headed to a local Walmart as it would be the quickest, if not best, option. Clearly, it was not meant to be as Jenifer noted three techs on their phones, but not a single person that would acknowledge her or ask if she needed help. As she had already confirmed a Discount Tire 18 miles south in Porter had the tire we needed, we headed there.

We had much more success there as we were in and out in around 20 minutes. With my limited energy, I was told to stay in the truck with the cat and dog while she took care of business.

Thirty minutes later, we were back at Love’s performing our second tire change of the day. It was around 1:30pm when we did the first one and now, closer to 5:30 for the second one.

With the new tire on the trailer, and both the spare and the damaged old tire in the bed of the truck, we finally finished the last leg home, arriving around 6:30pm. I did my best to help with the unloading, but was obviously quite gassed from the day’s adventures. Big props to Jenifer for bearing the extra weight at a time we both wanted to become one with the couch.

So that trip home was quite the adventure. Was it tough? Yes. Were there times we almost lost our cool? Absolutely. But I cannot express how grateful and proud I am that we worked together to overcome an extremely difficult situation with extra variables that could not be planned for.  The day turned out to be about 4 or 5 hours longer than we wanted, but we survived and all four of us were very happy to be home.

I hope you enjoyed story time. Please let me know if you’ve enjoyed this alternative avenue for my writing as I would love to do more writing that deviates from the other stuff I’ve been focused on for the past three years. Thank you for taking the time to read.