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November 12
Church of Our Lady of the Lakes, Spicer
Built in 2003 according to its cornerstone, Our Lady of the Lakes, was one of the newest churches I visited and the first in the Diocese of New Ulm. Honestly, I could not tell the difference, but that’s the goal, the Catholic Mass is the same throughout the world. One feature I liked was when the priest asked the congregation for their prayer intentions. Usually these are silent, but I liked hearing them offered aloud too. “The souls of the just are in the hand of God,” was a line from Wisdom 2:23-3:9 that Father Jerry highlighted and elicited the picture of God’s hand as painted in The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo. Strong yet gentle. Maybe this image prompted the attention I gave the communion distributor. Regardless, he was the personification of sheer unadulterated devotion; he took his time, made eye contact, and offered the Holy Eucharist with such meaning. It added importance and depth to the already spiritually-intense Eucharist. As an added bonus, when I turned around and extended my own hand to offer peace, I looked up to see dear Uncle Jack, Scott’s godfather, sitting directly behind me. We were both surprised to see each other and caught up a bit after Mass. I had a unique connection to Jack. His sister, his daughter-in-law and I were diagnosed within a month of each other and just weeks later we met at the Kotten family Christmas gathering, filling the back of Lake Henry’s Sportsman’s Den. We three ladies had an instant and deep bond and tried as best we could to support each other with calls, cards, emails and prayers.
A Storm in every Port
Thankfully, I never had an aversion to needles; however, I was a tough blood draw. When I was pregnant with Mack, I had a glucose test that checked for gestational diabetes. After gulping a sickeningly sweet beverage and the set time for it to metabolize had elapsed, I was prepped to have my blood drawn. The nurse tried to find a vein, tried another vein, tried a third then called another nurse who repeated this process. Time was of the essence so they sent me around the block to another medical facility and a nurse there had success on the second try. I did not have gestational diabetes, but did have bruised up arms. This happened again with other lab work. Each clinic could only have so many attempts before I was sent to another facility. I tried the advice: keep your arm warm, drink plenty of liquids, but my veins had their own aversion to needles and seemed to be too shy/stubborn to play nice with others.
In February 2009, before my first chemo treatment, Dr. D ordered vascular port placement because the Adyrimicin in my chemo regimen was among the most caustic, a drug if splashed would eat through skin. The port access would protect my veins.
Port #1 procedure. It was love at first twilight. Twilight sedation. Ahhh. After all the prep work I shuffled over to the surgical suite, crawled on the unusually long but very thin surgical bed w