V-Day

My apologies for being a day late on this week's post. I was a bit turned around by the President's Day holiday, which I had off, and thought that today was Sunday.

This past Saturday was Valentine's Day, exactly two year's to the day that Kristine was taken into the Aspen Valley Hospital and diagnosed with cancer, ironically in the veins leading to her heart. It wasn't until I sat down to right this post that I even remembered this fact -- neither Kristine nor I mentioned it all weekend long. I guess it's the kind of anniversary that you try to suppress from your conscious memory.

Kristine and I agreed when we first met that Valentine's Day was not a holiday that we were into celebrating. To us it is just a marketing hoax to sell chocolate and flowers. Not to mention it's impossible to get a reservation anywhere unless you book months in advance. So Kristine invented our very own day, "I Love You Day." It is once a year on any day we choose and it's always easy to get a dinner reservation.

Ever since our approximately 8 year boycott of Valentine's Day and the genesis of I Love You Day we have not ventured out on the holiday. This year, however, we got tickets to see Rufus Wainwright at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. We have been looking forward both to seeing Rufus in concert and to experiencing a show at the Kimmel Center for a long time. The only problem was that the show fell on V-Day, forcing us out into the mayhem of couples scrambling to make their reserved dinner appointments with flowers and chocolates in hand.

The concert was great but it was a challenging experience for Kristine to fight the show crowds. Upon entering the center Kristine became anxious and a bit panicked. She struggles to remain stable while walking as it is without the threat of being bumped by a sea of hurried people moving in all directions. We made it through unscathed on the way in and left a little early on the way out to avoid the crowds. All in all, I think it was good for Kristine to build some confidence in physical abilities.

Thing are well otherwise. Kristine is making good progress in therapy. This is especially true in aqua therapy where she has been seeing a measurable difference in her performance in just 4 sessions, which has had a positive affect on her motivation and attitude. Kristine continues to fight the bug that is going around. This has exacerbated her cough and caused several fever spikes in the last couple of days causing us both a great deal of concern. So far though we have managed to keep the fevers down and she has bounced back quickly.