Transfer Week #8, New Missionaries Arriving, Urgent Care Again For Me

The assistants say the best part of transfers is the French toast breakfast their mission president fixes them on the morning we go to the airport to pick up new missionaries.

Our newest batch of missionaries consisted of only two elders and two Spanish sisters. The other sister arrived several hours later from the Mexico MTC. We sent a set of sister training leaders to the airport to pick her up. 

Once we get to the mission office church building, we get the new missionaries busy filling out paperwork and giving them instructions.

We usually wait until two days later when we bring them back in for training to take their picture to send to their parents. 

But this time all three of us had the polka dot theme going on with this particular sister, so we decided to take the picture that very day. 

Here's our other new missionary (on the left) eating her lunch very late in the afternoon. 

That evening we had our outgoing missionaries come to our home for dinner, testimony meeting and to spend the night. The assistants did their usual good deed of cleaning up the dishes and the kitchen after dinner so we could start right into the testimony meeting part of the evening. 

Elder A. Allen, Elder Payne, Elder D. Allen, Elder Wight, Elder Nokes

Sister Benware, Sister Middleton, Hermana Briscoe and Sister Timmons 

Elder Romney is teaching Elder Horton and Elder Higginson the art of taking selfies when I hand them my phone to take a photo.

Here's the group at the temple.

Now J-U-M-P!!!!!

 

More assistant selfie action going on at the temple grounds.

We got the missionaries deposited at the airport, ate our traditional In-N-Out lunch on our way back home and had just gotten settled at home when we got a phone call that a flight back east had been canceled which affected three of our missionaries. WHAT?!?!?!???

My first thought was their poor parents who had been anticipating this day for a very long time and now it was looking like they weren't going to be getting their missionaries home that day. 

How could this be? It wasn't even winter, bad-weather-delay season. It was a mechanical problem. Sheesh!!

Glen got on the phone with the church's travel department and the missionaries trying to figure out what to do. The elders decided they were going to take red eye flights. 

Sister Middleton had two layovers and Glen didn't want her dealing with that in the middle of the night, so she got booked on the morning 8:20 a.m. flight. We drove back to the airport to pick her up. 

She is such a sweet person and was taking it all in stride. She joked with her companion about how she had told her that she was just going to show up on her doorstep one day back in the mission. Little did she know it would be that very evening. 

After I fixed her some dinner, I took her over to the sister training leaders near us (one of them is new and is Sister Middleton's old companion). She was able to spend the night with them and they took her to the airport the next morning. 

We were unable to keep her with us because we had an appointment at Urgent Care late that evening. I would have gone in the night before if we didn't have a house full of missionaries spending the night.

I coughed what felt like all night long. Glen was even awake much of the night due to my coughing.

Our mission doctor is an emergency room doctor who works at Urgent Care in La Jolla, which is close to the temple and not too far from the airport. So we made a third trip down to that area that same day and arrived shortly after he started his shift at 9 p.m.

He had some concerns about the fluid in my lungs and wondered if it was my heart not working properly. He wanted to rule out some other things as well, so he ordered a CT scan with contrast of my chest.

I was dreading it because I knew an I.V. was involved.

I'm not opposed to an I.V., in and of itself. It's the many attempts it takes to get an I.V. in a vein that I am vehemently opposed to!!!

One person tried once in my left arm and gave up. The next person tried my right arm and got it right in. HALLELUJAH!!!! I don't even wish for one stick anymore. I'm extremely happy with two!!

I got wheeled away to the room with the big machine and got settled on the bed which put me into the doughnut hole. Then back to my room I went for us to wait and wait and wait to get the image read by someone.

When my doctor came back with the results, I see now why he was so relieved to give me the real diagnosis. When I looked up the first things on the diagnoses list, they are pretty scary problems.

He was worried that he might have to tell me I had something horribly wrong with me. Instead, things look great and the scan ruled out all the horrible problems I could have had and he landed on reactive airway disease.

My lungs had a hard time during my bout with Influenza A and then I got the second upper respiratory illness that really hit my lungs hard.

I have a lot of mucous in my lungs and so he added another medication to use in my nebulizer breathing machine and gave me a cough beadlet medication to see if that would help dry up my cough.

We arrived back home in the wee hours of the morning.

Glen has had his fair share of ailing missionaries keeping him up at night and here I was doing it to him again. But we both felt it was worth it because our doctor is very efficient and very good at diagnosing missionaries with troublesome issues.

We also like the facility where he works and the access he has to the adjacent hospital to get tests done on the spot.

After getting to bed after 2 a.m., we were jarred out of a very sound sleep 4 hours later with a phone call. The sister training leaders had Sister Middleton at the airport and they were informing us she had missed her flight. WHAT?!?!?!

She had walked out of the airport the day before with a ticket after having been told her flight was at 8:20 a.m. That's the flight she was supposed to be on, but they had given her a ticket for a much earlier flight. NIGHTMARE!!

Glen immediately got on the phone once again with the church's travel department and was finally able to get the problem resolved. SIGH OF RELIEF!!!

It was a double sigh of relief when we got notification later in the day that she had indeed made her way across the country safely and into the arms of her family. WHEW!!! Crossing our fingers we never have this fiasco ever again with departing missionaries.

We put on our happy faces to hide our lack-of-sleep and went about our usual activities. This particular day we had a new missionary training meeting with our four newest missionaries and their trainers.

Our mission office couple arranges the meal for this meeting and this time they got Costco pizza complete with ice cream dessert.

All of our senior couples (past and present) love our missionaries and always want the best for them. 

Quotes of the Week

Why me?  Why our family?  Why now? are usually unanswerable questions.  They detract from our spirituality.
--Robert D. Hales

Regardless of our current state, there is hope for us.
--Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Our earliest missionaries concentrated their message on the Restoration.
--Dallin H. Oaks

Sacrifice motivated by faith and hope produces increased commitment and a desire to obey.
David A. Bednar

Jonah Jeffery Excell, Mormon Battalion, Chalk Sayings

It was fun getting some pictures of newborn Jonah Jeffery Excell from Sarah. What a cute little guy!

He is an absolute picture of perfection!

Now back to the missionaries...

Glen had nine hour-long exit interviews last week. He did several of them up in Temecula. I was recruited to take a picture of this Temecula district after their district meeting.

Nice mission vehicle one of these companionships gets to drive, agreed? We have areas in our mission where it is necessary to have a 4-wheel drive to get around.

While Glen was interviewing, I went back to the doctor I had seen the week before to tell him I was still really struggling to breathe. I had been on an antibiotic and prednisone and I was still feeling pretty worn out and weary from all the coughing and being out of breath so much.

They gave me a breathing treatment in the office.

Here I am--just me and my nebulizer. I was told to just relax, sit still, and breathe. Quite honestly, it felt comparable to a spa treatment--just sitting there relaxing and the only thing I was expected to do was breathe. It seemed to help a little bit to make me not quite as short of breath.

The doctor said I was doing better than the week previous. He suggested I get a nebulizer to use at home and hopefully that would get the medication down deeper into my lungs than my inhaler can get.

I was off to the pharmacy and to a medical supply store to try and get the nebulizer during the time before Glen was finished with his interviews.

We had to be back at the mission office building for our new missionary follow-up training that afternoon. It was a wonderful meeting. They each did a 3-minute role play on something they had been training on. These missionaries are going to be fabulous!

Then we had to do an ode-to-the-pinkie photo in honor of the sister missionary I ran into at the doctor's office who had a p-day accident and was getting her pinkie splinted.

She's proof it's not just the elders who get injured on p-days.

This dear sister requested a picture with Glen. When I saw the reason for the request, I must admit, I was not all that thrilled at what I saw.

Their zone had made what they think are cool-looking t-shirts with their mission president's head on it. They are all working together in the spirit of working hard to see miracles in their zone, so I guess if a head gets them motivated to go out and preach repentance and baptize converts, then so be it...??!!

It was that time of the transfer cycle again when we took a group of missionaries to the Tequila Factory for lunch and then to the Mormon Battalion.

We are still trying to get the missionaries who will be going home soon and have never been to the Mormon Battalion to have a turn.

But mostly it is for the newer missionaries and their trainers who have just finished The First 12 Weeks of training. It serves as a bit of a celebration of achieving that goal. It also helps them know what the Mormon Battalion is all about so they can recommend the site to members and investigators.

Just entertaining ourselves under the shade while waiting to pay the bill.

After Glen finalizes transfers, he notifies the new leaders he has chosen to join us in a new leadership training meeting. This time we had two new sister training leaders (back middle) and six new district leaders (seated).

There were several baptisms on Saturday, but we had to pick and choose because we had stake conference meetings and baptisms scheduled at the same times.

When we pulled into this church parking lot in Escondido, it was fun to see all the general conference sayings in chalk art all throughout the parking lot.

We went to another baptism in Oceanside. Glen had to leave early to go to the Vista stake priesthood leadership meeting. Turns out nobody informed him that the meeting started an hour earlier than usual. Glen felt like an idiot walking in an hour late. SHEESH!!

He made sure to double check to make sure the evening meeting started at 7 p.m. He was told yes. We arrived and saw a full parking lot and nobody walking in. We suspected it, too, had started an hour earlier than usual. 

In we walked to the meeting half over. We were sitting out in the foyer to listen to the rest of the meeting when an usher insisted he walk us up to sit on the second row in the chapel. So embarrassing!!

Then the stake president got up to announce we had just arrived and invited us up to the stand. WE WERE DYING!!!!! There was no excuse for our tardiness. We had just been chilling at home. Waiting for the meeting to start. Or so we thought. We could have been there an hour earlier without one single conflict!

I was coughing so loudly and obnoxiously and so frequently that I was going to be perfectly happy to sit out in the foyer. Instead I was hacking up there on the stand for everyone to watch and enjoy. Thankfully there was a printed program and we were not on it.

Next morning we double checked the times. The first meeting was in Vista at 9 a.m. and the other meeting was in Fallbrook at noon. We were on time.

NO!! We were EARLY!!!!

We had been assigned talks during both those sessions. The stake provided box lunches for all of us who were speaking and those who were in the choir to eat on our way to Fallbrook.

I was totally miserable sitting on the stand coughing. I did huge coughs right before I spoke and was blessed to speak with my croaky voice for the 6 minutes without coughing and then coughed it out as soon as I got to my seat. Rough day of not feeling well, but beautiful meetings.

I shared the story of my Mom's 9-year-old friend inviting her to church with her and that was the beginning of my mother's conversion story.

I also told about my youngest brother Mark's friend Lucas who became interested in being baptized because of the influence of the teenagers he was spending so much time with and he wanted to be like them. 

Matthew 5:16 "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."