When I started this blog back in 2023, I didn’t really know what I wanted to accomplish with it. I knew that I wanted to become a more consistent and disciplined writer, but I wasn’t exactly sure what to write about. I figured my job as an OT Network Engineer and my experiences being a husband and caregiver to a critically ill spouse would provide all the material needed. However, it didn’t quite work out that way.

I launched the blog and wrote my first post, a simple ‘Spring Reading’ list with the books I hoped to read that Spring. The site was bare and the post was short, but it was a start. My enthusiasm for writing was so evident that before I even wrote a second post on this blog, my wife convinced me to start another blog that we would both contribute to, New Lungs Plz!

Unfortunately, thats as far as we got. Life threw a one-two punch of increased work along with my wife’s Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension progressing. The result was the last eighteen months being filled with ups and downs, successes and failures.

Our dog dies unexpectedly one month, the next month my wife’s echocardiogram and blood work showed a sharp progression and the need for Oxygen during sleep and exercise. A new drug called Winrevair is then approved for my wife’s disease and she begins treatment almost instantly, but the issues with her platelets and hemoglobin mean that she might not be able to stay on it. Thankfully, it her numbers even out and she is able to continue with injections.

A month after that, we get a new puppy and celebrate our daughters 22nd birthday, our 25th wedding anniversary and my wife’s 44th birthday, only to have a central line infection land my wife in the hospital for a week the very next month.

By the end of 2024, my wife was back home and healthy, our puppy had become a full fledged member of the family, we celebrated my other daughter’s 19th birthday and I celebrated several milestones as multi-year projects got wrapped up at work. December was so good in fact that I even spent a couple weeks at the end of it starting a new writing project, a collection of fictional short stories taking place in prohibition-era Chicago called Heeled. If you’re interested at all, head over and check it out.

As I look forward to 2025, I’m sure of only one thing. It will be a journey. I wanted to list my goals for the year and maybe I will at some point, but it seems a little silly now given that it’s halfway into January. The most important goal, the one that I had when I started the blogs, was to write more. If I accomplish nothing else this year, that seems like a goal I can stick with. I hope you’ll join me.

Terry / PHind A Cure