Hello again. Guess what? I broke my visitor record yesterday and I like it. Today I feel like doing the Rocky and Bullwinkle thing. “When we last left you Frostbite Falls was falling into …” The real from yesterday, I was talking about how I quit working to go back to school and ended up with a 1 year old in the hospital for Kidney Failure.
Today we will start there. For 16 weeks I went back an forth between the hospital with my wife and 1 year old, and home with my 7 and 5 year olds. School had not started for the little one so babysitters were plentiful for a few hours each day. That kind of contradicted our “We will raise our kids” mantra but it couldn’t be helped. I was still home with them at night and as much as I could be.
After she got out of the hospital, she didn’t have kidney’s any more. The disease that she had was a genetic mutation and required removal of both kidney’s before they became cancerous. Without kidney’s my little one year old needed dialysis daily. At first I took her 20 miles every day to the University of Utah to get dialysis. We tried dialysis at home but it didn’t work after 3 months of trying.
As of September 2007 she needed dialysis 4 times per week and it was my job to take her. My wife had to work to keep the insurance that was paying for all of this. One month of dialysis treatments was almost $22, 000. Insurance is good. There was no way that I could make enough money to pay the mortgage and no way I could get insurance to cover her medical bills. They ended up at around $900,000 for 2007.
So my job was to take the baby to dialysis and be the stay at home parent for the other kids so my wife could work. That lasted 2 years to the day and I cannot for the life of me decide why I never got into blogging before. I had looked into several “make money on the internet with my scam” programs but didn’t find anything useful. I had heard about blogs, I was writing several times per month on a blog (I didn’t put the two together before. I had a blog in my thoughts as a bad thing). That whole time in the hospital and through dialysis to her kidney transplant is all recorded at www.carepages.com with pagename ameliarosematthews. That should have been a clue to me that I could do something else and blog elsewhere.
Now all of the doctor visits are once a month and not too big of a deal to get to. I am still home taking care of the house because I still haven’t finished school. We are trying to decide now what to do in July when baby #4 comes. I think I will have to work for a while to pay the bills and leave the wife home and maybe I can get back to school. That is why I have started working so hard here, on this blog.
I can see there is money making potential. I don’t need much, just to be able to pay the bills and some tuition to an online college. I still want to stay home. Who in their right mind wants to go work if they don’t have to? If it takes 3 months to start being successful as a blogger, then I am 1 month into it. I have taken loads of expert advice and I think I am doing the things that need to be done. I love to write and am still writing a couple of books but they are not going to be published any time soon.
I think I have what it takes to break that 3 month “barrier” and be successful. I don’t have many distractions, no work to get to or a pile of things to do. I will still be here in April, well past 3 months, and then well past then. And I plan on making money about that point so that I can still stay home.
I am a stay at home dad. I am a blogger. I will be good and successful at both.
