The last weeks

August 23, 2009 Sunday

It has been a while since I’ve written. I really need to catch you guys up on what has been occurring in my life. I have been working on getting materials ready for me to compete in the Miss Wyoming USA pageant. Also I took a week and a half off to do a few things.

On Tuesday, August 11th, I went to go to Laramie and picked up some books from the library to add to my bibliography for my internship class. On Wednesday, my parents and sisters met me and we drove to Denver to fly out to Minnesota for our family reunion. It was great this year because all of the Botham side of the family was there, girlfriends and all. We stayed at my Uncle Brian and Aunt Lydia’s cabin that is on Big Island in Lake Minnetonka. We went tubing, read, played dominoes, and took nightly cruises around the lake. A very relaxing vacation.

When I got back to Riverton on Monday night, August 17th, I learned that a lot had occurred. There was a fisherman killed up in the mountains and the man that had drowned and we had launched a huge search for last week had finally surfaced and the coroner’s office was called in to do the recovery. So I missed a good amount of interesting cases.

I got back to work on the 18th only to have a very calm week. We did have some cases this week but all of them were individuals who had been life-flighted to the Wyoming Medical Center in Casper and had passed away there. With these cases we send two deputies to Casper to transport the body to Loveland if we feel an autopsy needs to be performed, but the main information we have to collect to help us identify cause and manner of death are the medical records. I was given one of these cases by Ed so that I could get more experience reading through medical records, in particular, medications prescribed by doctors. This is not an easy task.

The other case that has caused a bit of an uproar around the county, due in large part to misinformation spread by the newspapers, was of an individual around my age that had contracted swine flu, the first death from swine flu in the state of Wyoming. Now to clear this up before it gets too far, the person had a lot of medical issues and was very susceptible to almost any other disease around, so the swine flu was not the only factor in his/her death.

As for Ed, he had to take Thursday and Friday off to go to Denver and get cardiac tests done to learn more about how he should approach his heart issues, or at least that was what the VA doctors here in Riverton told us. When he got to Denver for his 3:00 appointment they had him sit in the waiting room until a quarter to 5. Then when they finally called him in, the doctor told him he should continue doing what he was doing and told him that it was too late in the day to do an EKG so he should spend the night in a hotel and wait to the next morning when the EKG technician would be back. It was ridiculous in my opinion and it really angered Roni and I. However, Ed (being Ed) was very calm and did not express his disappointment in how this office had treated him. Instead, he kindly told the doctor that he could not stay and wanted to go home. He drove to a hotel that night and was back in Riverton on Friday to go back to work as normal.

While Ed was gone Roni and I got out her work out tapes and began a workout schedule to help me get toned up for the Miss Wyoming USA pageant. We worked out for about 2 hours to get a feel of the tapes and to see what we could handle. Needless to say the next day my abductors and my stomach were incredibly sore! However, I pushed through the pain and we started a routine of walking in the morning and then doing a 10 minute workout before going to work. This week over the lunch hour I have been tanning in the backyard, and I can already see the results; I’m a little tanner and I am becoming more tone in my legs and my stomach.

Well I think that’s about all I have to say right now about my life. Except that I am still trying to figure out what I’m going to do this fall. I really want to take an EMT course and am waiting for a response from a teacher at Laramie County Community College (LCCC) in Cheyenne to see if I can join his class for paramedics. The class has already met 2 times and I would have to move out rather quickly from Ed and Roni’s to attend it on Tuesday but where there is a will there is a way. So that’s what is going on with me.