Update

The latest I heard on Tre from what I’d call a more reliable source, her son “Tall James”, is that he never mentioned the word pneumonia, he just said “infection”. She has some kind of infection that was causing her altered state. But her white blood cell count is better, and her supplemental oxygen has been turned down, and she’s apparently swinging towards getting better. She is aware of Nathan’s passing. No services information is available yet because she’s still in the hospital. We are aware they may likely do it over Oshkosh, which isn’t the best plan if they want the aviation community friends to be able to attend, but they don’t know or care about Oshkosh, and putting it off past that week might be too long anyway. Either way, we will be attending the funeral, whatever that means for us at OSH.

I went down the rabbit hole last night and looked through many years of photos to find some with Nathan to pass on for the funeral slideshow. James added us to a Google Group where we could upload our own photos, so I did that, and I hope they’re okay with them. I put some I found of him with Jamie and Gwenie and Tre too, and then a couple with Chuck, me and Steve. And airplanes.  It was weird and sad and happy and sad again looking at all these years of aviation photos. The constant airshow circuit and events we used to drag Kaylee to, and she loved it, she was always wiped out by the end. The experiences we had, the fun and adventures we had. Haven’t done hardly any of that in awhile, and a LOT of the people in those photos are dead and gone now. I opened up one of our BBQ Bash photos sets and the first 10 people I saw there were “former” people. It’s just…wow. It took me hours to go through and find about 20 photos, and those are just photos from when I used to put stuff up on my website that is now defunct. I know I’m missing a lot more, and I may put a few more recent ones up when I get up the energy to look again.

In the meantime, yesterday I had a trip to Casey, Illinois. We get there, and there’s one room with a black leather couch and a lot of windows, and no air conditioning. No thermostat at all. No water, no food, no car, no Door Dash, no wifi. Just a very hot couch. I ended up being there for hours. You guessed it—I got a good headache out of it.

So today I had a trip back to Casey with another guy. We were going to be here 5, 6, 7 hours starting at 1 pm. I told him I was taking the plane over to Mattoon, where they have an onfield restaurant and an FBO with air conditioning and wifi. I didn’t ask, I just said that’s what I’m doing, so give me a heads up before you’re ready to come home as it’ll take me an extra 15-20 min to get back to you. 

I am in Indy Exec’s Cirrus today, and I can’t hardly remember how to operate all those screens and buttons again. It’s different from Ethan’s and at first I stumbled around on Ethan’s and now I’m stumbling around on this one again. lol But I get there, and it’s parked clear in the north 40, at a maintenance hangar, with a sign on it saying it needs more oil and is “returned to service”. Don’t know why it was there, but my preflight was pretty good. And I added oil. But the hard part was walking all the way up there. Knee. And then getting it out of a tight space without blasting the other airplanes that were parked RIGHT in the blast path and turn path. But I didn’t put it there, so…

I’m at Mattoon, and I walk in to eat, and three older ladies at a table next to me asked me if I flew that plane in. I said yes, and she said they saw me get out of it and kept waiting for a guy to get out of it too but no guy got out of it! I’m like nope, just me. lol They thought it was cool though, they talked for awhile to me about it. Then another guy came up who said he had a Piper he’d flown for years and liked my Cirrus. Pilots are such friendly lots. ;)

I told T-6 guy Bob today that I didn’t think I could fly his airplane up to Oshkosh. First, I don’t even know what we’re doing or when. Secondly, work wants me to do a trip Monday and Tuesday both, so now I can’t go till Wednesday anyway. Do I care? I don’t know, not really to be honest. Thirdly, I don’t know when Nathan’s services will be, don’t know when we’ll be able to go up, if we’ll be able to go up, what’s going on. Fourthly, I don’t want to mess with my knee taking his airplane up there and trying to do rides.

Speaking of my knee, my MRI was today. She asked if I’d ever had one and I said no. I had marked ‘yes’ to claustrophobic but ‘no’ to having taken any meds for it. I told her that I could usually control it and that I assumed my head wouldn’t need to be in there for my knee, and she said I was right. It only came up to my chest. When it got up to my chest I felt twinges of freak out but it stopped there so the twinges went away. ;) She had asked what music I wanted to listen to, and I blanked out. She looks at me and says “We had 80s queued up for the last patient”. So apparently I look old enough to choose 80s music. Not that she’s wrong. I said that was fine, and laughed at my Gen X self. 

The results showed up on my patient portal within 2 hours or less. I read it and didn’t understand a word of it so I put it into Google. I won’t see the ortho until the end of the month for him to explain to me what I need to do with that info. But it basically said my meniscus is I THINK fine, but I damaged the cartilage in my knee. Cartilage doesn’t have its own blood supply so it’s very hard for it to heal. I also have effusion, or fluid, which can be from the injury and inflammation. Dr Google talked about anything from injections to PT (which I called and set up for the end of the month too) to bone marrow treatment to surgery if nothing else works. So we’ll see. Oh, the scans also showed that I have a bit of arthritis in the knees too. So anyway—that’s the updates as I know them.

I won’t get back until maybe 9 pm or so tonight, and then tomorrow I have to get up at 5:45 am for a trip right back to this area, going to Peoria this time. Then I don’t think I have any more trips this week, just other stuff I’m trying to accomplish, like meeting with a guy who has a Luscombe and wants to get his Sport Pilot in it, who I don’t want to mess with, but we have to because he came to us through friends who want us to take care of him. And I was going to try to fly Bob’s T-6, though maybe the urgency of that has faded.

Ope, my guy texted. Time to get moving. Talk at you later!