My favorite Christmas present

After this past week there's no doubt what my favorite Christmas present will be - good health for those that I love. I've never really taken it for granted, I've always known it's a blessing, but it's especially precious these days.

T was taken to the hospital last Monday with internal bleeding. There were a few scary moments that night, at home and in the ER, when I wondered about the future. Those are images that will be seared into my brain forever.

After numerous tests and many days he was finally allowed home. The bleeding has stopped and might never return. But once home things didn't return to normal because of his low blood count. We were informed that if bleeding returned he would need to get to the ER immediately for a transfusion or else. Plus, because of the anemia he was very weak so he spent several days just sleeping. Yesterday was the first day that even approached normal but even so, he hasn't been out of the house in days and that probably won't change through the holidays. Needless to say, our cross-country driving trip to Florida was canceled.

The good news that came out of all this was that we now know he has a clean bill of health for other things. His family cancer history had concerned us in other areas and the tests they ran for this bleeding helped ease our minds.

T's health isn't the only thing I'm giving thanks for this Christmas. There's another member of our family that has worried me this past year - my baby Jasper. This time last year he was in a bad way. He'd been getting older and weaker, not able to jump up on furniture, etc. Then we went away for several days last December and things got really bad. He didn't eat and barely drank while we were gone so that by the time we got home, he was practically a skeleton and couldn't get up from the floor without assistance. We had to carpet almost our entire kitchen area because he couldn't walk on the bare floor without falling. He was almost 13 and I was really worried that we would be saying goodbye to him soon.

With love, patience, care and lots of food, I am happy to report that (almost) 14 year old Jasper is doing great. He built his strength back up, regained the full use of his legs and is now jumping on the couch at every opportunity. He's found his joy again and acts like a puppy. We've learned that we can't be gone for long periods anymore (hence the cross-country driving trip to Florida so that he could come along and we could be gone for over 2 weeks) and we've found a type of food that he loves so much, he'll even eat it when we're gone so we never have to worry about him getting too thin.

We were recently able to travel with him, the picture above was taken during a trip to Yosemite in October. He had a great time on the trip, he was even able to hike up a fairly steep hill to see Bridalveil Falls. He was quite a hit with the other hikers and it was fun to see all that beauty with our best friend walking right beside us.

As for me, I'm doing well. I am very tired, a week of stress, worry and little sleep will do that to you but my job is quiet these days so I'm getting my rest at work. I still worry, things definitely aren't back to normal but I can see improvement and that's enough for now.

So I have a lot to be thankful for this Christmas and believe me, I am.