Those of you who know my husband will understand. He is a motivated, driven, hard working never going to stop kind of man. Some would say a workaholic but to him his work is his passion, it challenges him and it keeps him going and he loves what he does.

Below is a post from 2015 and it is even more relevant today.

Once again he is home safe. Chrissie has always traveled a lot, I teased once that I’ve lived in Seattle 30 years but he’s only been here 15! It became common for him to be gone often. However, it seems now that whenever he is away, I am more concerned that he is well and taking care of himself and I am more thankful when he makes it home safely.

So you get the picture, he travels a lot and he works a lot. His last trip overseas was February 2020, just at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. Five days before returning home he became sick with what he felt was food poisoning. By the morning of his trip home he was pretty well depleted of everything as you can imagine after three days of dysentery. It was a grueling trip back, and because the food poisoning caused his GI track to react in a fiercely negative fashion, he neither ate or drank during the trip. Well that was a recipe for disaster, I picked him up from the airport and took him to an urgent care facility, who then in turn sent him to the Emergency Room. It was food poisoning caused by E-coli and Campylobacter infections which caused him to become extremely dehydrated (along with the no fluids on the flight). All of this sent him into acute renal failure and he spent four days in the hospital.

So in 2020 I was very thankful he made it home, albeit in rough shape. Then Covid hit and all travel came to a grinding halt.

While he was home all this time, from February 2020 to November 2021, he did not lay idle. As I said, he likes to stay busy and if he has 15 minutes of free time he’ll find an hours worth of work to cram into it. He became interested in the local homeless shelter organization. He eventually accepted a position on their Board and worked to help them find solutions to expand their capacity during the covid pandemic.

Last week was his first overseas trip in 20 long months. Believe me, he had been trying to organize me too and I was actually looking forward to a little “down time.” Although the covid outbreak in Eastern Europe was high, Chris had been fully vaccinated and received his booster in September.

Off he went into the skies. Traveling again but armed with tools for sanitizing and many cautionary words of advise from his dear wife. He arrived safely on Sunday and then on Tuesday he became ill. Almost a repeat of 2020 – this time it went on for five days. On Thursday he went for his required covid test to reenter the US, it was NEGATIVE, so he was going to try and get home.

He made the first leg of his journey, a five hour flight to Amsterdam and when he got off the plane he was nearly too weak to walk. His traveling companion, who was headed to Detroit, helped him to the KLM Lounge. He tried eating and drinking but his heart was racing and he was short-of-breath. After a very worrisome phone call, I called the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. I asked for the medical clinic and a very kind doctor answered in Dutch. I asked, “Do you speak English?”

“Yes of course” he replied. Of course he did, according to Language on the Move, 77% of people in the Netherlands are trilingual. In my panicked tone I explained the issue. He calmly told me to have someone from the KLM Lounge bring him over. The compassionate and concerned ladies at the KLM lounge took him in a wheelchair to the Medical Center – Schiphol. The medical staff there quickly assessed him and administered three bags of IV fluids. After four hours he was feeling a boost from that and was ready to go. The clinic wheeled him back to the KLM Lounge where they rebooked him on a flight home for the next day. They then took him to the hotel within the airport where he rested and spent the night.

The next morning, he woke up not feeling quite as well as he did after the IV fluids but because they had booked him on a direct flight to Seattle in First Class, he thought he could make the trip home. I was still very anxious about the whole situation but getting home was the thing that was driving him to press on. It was a long, long night. I kept tracking the flight and my heart skipped a beat when it no longer showed on the tracker, however it was due to the fact they were out of range over Greenland and Northern Canada. I tried texting him as some airlines offer free texting via iMessage but it was radio silence for ten agonizing hours.

When I arrived at the airport he showed up after only a few minutes due to the fact he cleared Customs with his Global Entry status. I have to say, he did not look as bad as I expected, although he was sweating profusely. We left the airport and went straight to the hospital skipping the urgent care step this time. After five hours we left the ER, we discovered he had similar issues as before but added inflammation and infection in his colon; again acute kidneys injury (although not as bad as 2020, I think due to the fluids he received at Schiphol) and again E coli plus giardia lamblia infections. The doctor said that because of his age they would ordinarily keep him to continue IV fluid so insure his kidneys recovered, but hospitals are not the safest places these days. We came home with two different antibiotics and stern instructions to return if he did not improve.

So there it is. Once again he made it home and although not completely safe, he had the prayers of friends I had called during my panic and guardians along the way to help him. Quite possibly guardian angels. He has plans to travel to Israel in three and half weeks. All I can do is pray he makes it home safely which is what I have done for the past thirty-nine years. I tried telling him that although he feels 35 his body is 70. He’s not buying it.