Just My Opinion - By Mary Kilen
When The Crud Comes To Visit
Life around our house has been challenging enough with my broken foot, but the last two weeks had been even more difficult. It started with Dale not feeling well over the weekend of September 16. By Tuesday he was pretty sure he was coming down with a cold. That progressed over the next week and didn’t seem to be getting any better. I started showing some of the symptoms too, but apparently there must have been some sympathy with my already existing issues and it wasn’t as bad.
Last Tuesday, it had gotten so bad that by Tuesday evening, I was calling Kris Halvorson and asking if he could help me take Dale to the ER. The cough, the body aches and everything else were just getting no better and in fact I was really starting to worry about what might be wrong with him.
ER visits are never fun, but the staff at MCMC was great that night considering they appeared to be having a fairly busy evening.
They took Dale for a chest x-ray first and drew some blood. The chest x-ray came back clear of pneumonia. They shoved the test sticks up his nose and I think halfway to his brain. They came back negative for both covid and influenza. The blood work came back fine.
That’s when Tara told us he had the crud. The viral infection is going around and knocking people on their rear ends just like covid and influenza. She gave Dale something to help relieve some of the coughing and that really seemed to help.
As I’m writing my column on Monday, we both seem to be on the upside of this virus. It has been no joke, though. I see some of my Facebook friends posting about having it. It wears you out. If you have the misfortune of coming down with it, I can only recommend you try to get as much rest as possible, use cold medicines that work for you and lots of fluids.
Swifties and The NFL
If you watch the NFL or are on any type of social media, you have likely seen the coverage of Taylor Swift and the Kansas City Chiefs Travis Kelce. If memory serves me correctly, it started with Kelce’s comment about wanting to meet Swift and has snowballed from there.
Now Swift is attending Chiefs games and the announcers can’t seem to get enough of it. Watching Sunday night’s football game, they even had The Voice’s Carson Daly do an intro that broke down quite a bit of the Swiftie language for those people who are unfamiliar.
I laugh and talk about this because you have to understand that my granddaughter Jozie is a Swiftie. She loves Taylor Swift. She will sing the songs all the time.
On Friday night, we were using the portal to talk to Amanda, Zach and the kids because it was my birthday.
We got to talking about football. Amanda had been at the NISC MIC conference in September where their keynote speaker was Emmitt Smith. Having been a Cowboys fan forever, I was more than a little jealous that she got to meet him and even more disappointed that I didn’t.
That being said, Jozie pipes up with she’s a Chiefs fan. We all laughed and looked at her and asked was she really a Chiefs fan or was this about Taylor Swift. She looked down, smiled and said “maybe”.
True story here. I saw a headline after Swift was at the Chiefs home game that said Kelce jersey sales had increased 400% after that game. I’m guessing that the majority of them are Swifties who may have no idea who he is or even much about football.
You know, it’s kind of a silly story that is getting lots of attention. I don’t know if they’re actually dating or just building their fan bases. Not that Taylor Swift needs to increase her fan base if ticket sales for her recent concert tour are any indication.
As Seen On Facebook
On a slightly more serious note, I saw this one on Donna Ashworth’s Facebook page this week. It is included in her book ‘Wild Hope’. If you have not seen any of her page posts, she has some wonderful posts, especially for those going through tough times and loss. This one, titled “Dear Daughter”, may be one of my new favorites. It reads:
Dear Daughter, I hope with all my heart that I showed you the real me, that I didn’t pretend I had it all together or that life was not hard.
I hope I gave you the belief of you in your core, that I loved you enough, albeit messily, to code a blueprint for life to show you what love should look like.
I hope I let you see me break so you could understand it’s not an ending, rather a step and it’s vital.
Dear daughter, I could not possibly gotten everything right and perhaps that’s the best thing I have given you: the knowledge that no one gets it right, we are not here to be perfect, we are here to grow stronger and more bright with every generation.
Grow brighter my love, brighter than me, as it very much should be. And when I can no longer be here, remember my cells live within you. You cannot ever lose me, not really.
We are a deal, a two-for-one, I won’t ever be far.”
While it might seem a bit like a good-bye, instead I think it should be words we live by and share with our daughters as we look to raise strong, independent women.