3R Home and Barn Project

[ShivasIrons]

Best wishes to Loretta for a speedy recovery.

 

[PAGUY]

Rob - Hoping Loretta is feeling better. Take it from someone who was there a year ago. I couldn't stand and felt like I was going to vomit which turned out to be dry heaves. I called 911 and went to the emergency room where the dry heaves turned into bringing up yellowish green vomit. I was admitted as they weren't sure what was wrong and proceeded to give me all kind of tests. The first was ultra-sound to eliminate heart attack. Then an ultra-sound of my gallbladder where the technician told me off the record hat I had gallstones. They then sent me to nuclear medicine technology to see if a gallstone was stuck in the bile duct. When that proved negative they informed me that I would need surgery to remove the gallstones and my gallbladder. My primary physician also ordered a nuclear medicine check of my lungs to see if I suffered from sleep apnea. That also came back negative. A week later I had the gallbladder operation and stayed overnight in the hospital because I lived alone. The next day the surgeon came to see me to release me and gave me the two stones he removed. One was the size of a marble. The other the size of an egg. I first thought that he was kidding about the size of the 2nd one by forming it from other stones but he stated that he removes them and not makes them. He told me he tried the usual 3 small incisions but could not remove the big one so he had to cut me above my belly button and it took an extra 1/2 hour on the operating room table to get it out. During home recovery I had a lot of puss ooze from the 4 incisions but everything finally healed up fine.

Looking back I realized that each morning I would wake up tired and suffer dry heaves when in front of the bathroom sink. I took it as part of old age but now know it was caused by the gallstones. Those symptoms disappeared but to this day when I roll around in bed I feel something (not pain) when I roll from side to side as I have always slept this way. I believe it to be my internal organs still not used to the missing gallbladder w/stones. So if Loretta has any more symptoms tell her to have the surgery. They do it as same day surgery in most cases.

 

[3RRL]

PAGUY,
Wow, you are fortunate having stones that big! Those are enormous. I learned a little about the stones and gall bladder in the hospital, but your story is unbelievable. Glad to here you recovered from that.

Thanks for the well wishes everyone.
Loretta is doing fine and will get some medication to treat the gall stone.
Right now she is working on her tractor and also shoveling dirt for the rock wall we are building together. She has not had any recurring symptoms. It's a little cooler these last few days so working in the heat isn't as bad as it was. We are having fun together now.

Eddie, sorry to hear about you parents and friend house value being way down like that. I am in the same boat, except maybe even more of a loss? That's why we are going to wait or rent it or live out of it for a couple days a week.

I'm still up North so no photos to share yet. I haven't moved up all the computers because I keep on at the Rancho house to pay bills and use when we are there. That one has all the pictures in it. Plus it is faster to upload and dow up here is working great off the air card today. I noticed TBN loads slower that some of the other sites I use... quite a bit slower than them? Oh well, I'll get used to it.

 

[charlz]

I had my gall bladder taken out a few years ago. It slowly progressed from 'bad indigestion' to feeling like someone drove a 2 inch pipe through my chest over about 1 and 1/2 years. I would be up from about 1am to 3am almost every night with an attack and throwing up before I finally got tired of not getting enough sleep

Fatty foods trigger the attacks, the gall bladder stores extra bile and when you eat fatty foods it tries to contract and dump extra bile into the intestines to help with the fat. (so tell her to stay away from fatty foods, ice cream etc.)

My surgeon was recommended by all the nurses etc. that I talked to. He was very up front and to the point. His belief is that once you start having attacks they will slowly get worse and worse as scar tissue develops in the gall bladder. I was way to far gone to try the medication and 'watch your diet' route so I elected for surgery. He has a technique where he gives you a local anesthetic around the incisions before closing you up to help manage the pain for the hours right after you come out of surgery. I had almost no pain and told my wife to stop giving me the pain medication about 24 hours after as I didn't need it. I just felt like I had really, really over done an ab workout for about 3 days.

I should note the general practitioner I first saw didn't believe that I had gall stones. I had done my research and was pretty confident on my diagnosis but he stated that they look for the "4 F's" in gall stone diagnosis:

Fat
Female
Forty and over
Flatulent

but he sent me for an ultrasound and ta-da, there were the stones.

 

[3RRL]

Thanks for the added information and Loretta has read all your responses. She has an appointment with her Dr. to follow up on this.

OAN, I promised some updates and photos of what's happening at the 3R Log home. Aside from moving stuff into the home, we have been concentration on grading the homesite for proper water run off. Our rainy season will be here in the late Fall, so we have to get everything ready before that. I'm sure there will be adjustments after we see how the water reacts.

First thing is Loretta got a new Kodiak boxblade for her 284 Jinma tractor to help me with the dirt work. We looked at several models and decided to get the Kodiak 5-1/2 footer from Agri-Supply with fixed front and rear blades. With her wheels set at maximum width, it sticks out about 3" per side. It weighs 480lbs so it's a medium weight box, but the construction is very good. The only thing I did to it was to add a couple 1/2" thick plates to capture the lift pins. She has Pat's EZ change so there's no problem there.
She didn't waste any time getting to work with it either.

 

[3RRL]

There will be about 4 levels in the front of the home, each having about 2 to 4 feet of elevation change.
The highest level is where the RV parking will be. The next level is the garage level and then the level to the front porch stairway is the 3rd. The 4th level is even with the basement/crawl space door. From there, we plan to divert any run off away from the home and away from the septic field.
You can see the grading and levels starting to form and note also the barn and solar shed are out of the way and we will not do any major leveling or grading there, at least until we get the house grading done. The last photo is of the basement/crawlspace door and the entry we built up to it.
Here are some shots, but it's not complete yet, of course.

 

[3RRL]

Being loose dirt and decomposed granite, all that stuff needs to be watered and compacted about every 3" lift. We do that by driving our tractors over it back and forth.
Then next thing we wanted to do was make some sloped walk ways from level to level and separate the levels by making a rock wall so no one drives off the level. We have plenty of big and small rocks to do this. The wall will eventually slope down to nothing as the levels meet near the circle drive. Loretta is clearing an area next to the garage. She has her tractor with a dump trailer on it and I have the backhoe on mine. We will go around the property and pick up rocks to build the walls. Our plan is to separate them by size so when we get ready to place them, we can pick and choose which one fits best.
You can see we have a lot of work to do with this project yet.

 

[3RRL]

While on the subject of gathering rocks, I thought it would be interesting to show how my dual grapples operate when picking up objects of different size. Each one closes down to the smallest object under it, so the two can pick up large and small objects on either side of the 72" bucket, even to an extreme.
That Kama sure has been a work horse for us and it's lifting capacity is great.

 

[3RRL]

While doing all this work outside, we noticed the Turkey Vultures were in full force circling the homesite and adjacent meadows ... all around for that matter. There were hundreds of them! These photos were all taken in front of the home, but it was pretty cool sitting on the back deck watching them since at times they were eye level or below us in the drop off and meadow below. I never did get a shot from that perspective though.

 

[3RRL]

In order to finish up the terracing in the front of the home, Loretta and I had to go around the property picking out large rocks. There was a pile behind the garage that we got a few from too. This was very enjoyable to do together. We used the Jinma 284 to tow the dump trailer and the Kama 554 with backhoe on to pick up and load it. Some of the bigger ones you saw in the earlier posts were too big for the Nardi backhoe, so I had to use the FEL and grapple set up. I think we made about 5 loads that way, but only had enough to do 2 rock walls.
BTW, I left my camera battery at the Rancho home so I when I picked up my camera to shoot these photos ... nothing. Loretta left hers at the Rancho house so all these photos were taken by my new LG camera phone. They didn't turn out too bad ... better than I thought they would anyway.