Enough Already!

It’s Thursday, February 17, the day after my birthday. When I arrive at Fleet Feet for my training run, I get out of the car and smell hot metal. It’s a familiar smell to me, and very troubling, because the last time I smelled this I ended up having to spend more than $1000 for brake pads, a caliper, a bearing, etc.… I tell Derek about it later that night, and we agree that we can’t take my car on our trip home for the weekend as planned. The following week, I take the car in to have it checked out. They find that I have no brake pads left, which explains the metal-on-metal smell but not why the new pads I’d gotten a year-and-a-half earlier would be gone already. After they replace those, they discover that, once again, my caliper (though probably the one on the other wheel) is sticking and needs to be replaced. I get my car back on Thursday, February 24. It kind of stinks that we have to use $717.60 for car repairs that we were planning to put on a credit card, but it’s not the end of the world.

A few hours later, I get a call from Derek. He’s been in a car accident. He’s o.k., but he can’t tell me more yet because he has to go talk to the police officer who arrived at the scene a few minutes after the crash. Later I learn that a woman in an oncoming car ran a red light and hit the front end of Derek’s car. Again, he’s fine, and the car doesn’t look too bad, but I’m freaking out because we just spent all that money on my car and I know how expensive collision repairs can be. He takes Friday off work to figure things out with his car and our insurance, and we receive some good news: the estimate for his repairs are only $780.10, much less than the $2500 estimate I received when I hit a guard rail a year or two ago. Still, it’s a lot of money, but nothing we can’t handle. It’ll just push our get-out-of-debt plan back a month.

On Saturday, February 19, I take my computer to a repair guy I’ve worked with before to find out what’s wrong with my DVD drive. It hasn’t been working for a while, not recognizing any discs I put in, and when I bought and tried a new drive that didn’t work either. So I’m hopeful that Matt at Midwest Protech can help. When I arrive, he opens up my computer and it won’t start up. It says there’s a problem with the hard drive and it starts trying to repair itself. Of course, that can also make it destroy what’s left of the hard drive, so he stops it. He tries a few things and concludes that my hard drive has died. Thirty minutes earlier, the computer was working fine for me, apart from the DVD drive, so I’m kind of in shock. Fabulous, another unexpected expense. I manage to hold the tears in until I get back to my car, at which point I start bawling. I call Derek, and we decide that I need to go computer shopping. Sure, I could use his computer for work for a while, but his machine is also four years old and not sounding very good. Fortunately, I find a great sale price on a new laptop and pick it up later that night. On Sunday, I drive it out to Matt, along with a new external hard drive, so that he can move everything from the old computer onto both the new machine and the backup hard drive. It costs $531.94 for the new computer and hard drive, plus $117.52 for Matt’s services, plus $79.95 for MS Office (since we couldn’t get that off the old computer for some reason and I can’t find my original install disc), for a grand total of $729.41. What’s up with all the $700 emergencies? But they come in three’s, right? So we should be done now.

Fortunately, once I get the new computer back with its working DVD drive, I can finally install TurboTax and get started on our 2009 return (the very thing that prompted all of this in the first place). On Tuesday, March 1, I quickly input all the data and discover that, rather than receiving a $1000+ refund like we did last year and were counting on again, we actually OWE $1019 for federal and state taxes. What?!? I still need to check all the figures, but I’m pretty sure it’s right. See, Derek changed his W-2 to “married” after we got married, so apparently they haven’t been taking out as much as the previous year or as much as they should have been. Yeah, this is all starting to get pretty old right about now. I ponder 1 Cor. 4:8-9 – “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” It does bring a bit of comfort, because I know that God has always and will always provide for us. But it doesn’t make it any more fun.

And finally – for now… – I take my cat to the vet yesterday, Wednesday March 2, to find out why she’s not eating well and throwing up more. We suspect her kidneys are failing, but that wasn’t entirely clear from her last batch of tests a few months ago. I wonder if perhaps she has more tooth decay, making it painful for her to chew. Well, the vet sees a little redness in her mouth, but doesn’t think it’d be bad enough to make it hard for her to chew. She suggests we run the blood and urine tests again, as well as take a couple of x-rays. I reluctantly agree, as this all costs $286.02, which we obviously don’t have at the moment, but I have to take care of my baby and find out what’s wrong. The blood tests show that certain levels that indicate kidney failure are a little higher than last time, but they’re still not terrible. The x-ray, on the other hand, reveals a mass in her chest, near her lymph nodes, which is most likely lymphoma (cancer). In order to find out for sure, we’d have to pay another $300 for an ultrasound, but we don’t see much sense in that since we wouldn’t pursue chemotherapy anyway. I’m actually really glad we paid for the x-rays, though, because at least now I know that there IS something wrong with her and that we can’t really do anything about it. So we’ll just wait till she stops eating, or starts coughing or throwing up more, or in any other way appears to be uncomfortable or in pain, and then we’ll say goodbye. It won’t be easy, but she’s had a good long life. She’s been with me through it all, and I’ve enjoyed her immensely over the last 12 years. For now, I’m just going to make the most of the time we have left and pray for peace for us both as her time comes to a close.

So… yeah. We were thinking we’d have all the credit cards paid off by this summer, but $3500+ of unexpected expenses in the matter of a week will likely push that back to the fall. Still, we’re o.k. We’ll make it, it’ll just take a little longer. Plus, we get some more practice in trusting God, which is always good, and we’ve been blessed immensely by the love and generosity of our dear brothers and sisters in Christ who have come alongside to support us through all of this. God is indeed good, all the time.