Home MTC, Lights, and Coco (Not the drink)

Garrett officially started his mission on Monday, December 1st. He had one week of online/home MTC (missionary training center) where he attended a two-hour class each day Monday thru Friday on Zoom. We continually had trouble with the Zoom application on my computer and the camera. He could see the other people in the meeting but for some reason his camera wouldn't work. They tried to walk him through how to fix it but without much success. There were a few times I was able to do some things, and it worked for a little bit during his meeting and then it would quit working. It was frustrating! Besides the Zoom meetings, he also did scripture study over the phone with his new companions. There were three of them put together. I don't know if it's still that way. Companionships for service missionaries are mainly just for scripture study. It's not like proselyting missionaries where they have to be with a companion 24/7. 

The following week his advisors picked him up to take him to see different places that he could volunteer at during his mission if he chose to do so. His schedule after home MTC week was over included a bread run on Mondays over in Pasco (11am-12pm), temple worker on Tuesday morning (6:30am-12pm), 7th Day Adventist food distribution on Wednesdays (8am-12pm), bread run (11am-1pm) and Family Search Center (1-4pm) on Thursdays, and helping at the Hermiston Regional Bishop's Storehouse on Fridays (8am-4pm). Then a meeting on Sundays that is online at 7pm. The only thing that has changed in his schedule is that Garrett decided he didn't want to do the food distribution on Wednesdays. He wants to go to the temple on Wednesdays as a patron, although he hasn't been able to the last two Wednesdays because of Christmas Eve and today being New Year's Eve. He did, however, get Curtis and I to go with him to the temple a couple of Saturdays ago at the 7:15am session. I think that's the earliest session I've ever attended. It was a little hard to get up that early but at the same time nice to start the day with a temple session and then get busy with other stuff later. 

We did upgrade Garrett's phone from a Gabb (that does not have social media or internet browsers) to a regular phone that does because it would be better for while he's on a mission as far as people being able to contact him and having a better map for directions, as well as needing Facebook messenger for missionary group messages. Since he has the new phone, he also added the Duo Lingo app so that he can teach himself Japanese. He may not have been able to go to Japan like he wanted, but he still wants to learn the language and go there some day. Maybe we'll take him after his mission is over. The things he does when he's not out doing the service things are really up to him. I just hope he's making good decisions and doing things that missionaries should be doing. I'm trying not to pry too much because he's 19 years old now and a missionary. He needs to learn to discipline himself. 

First day of home MTC in his bedroom.

The first week of December my kids helped get our decorations up. The girls did the Christmas tree and then Garrett decorated the remainder of the inside of the house. Alice and I finally broke down and bought some new outside lights for the front door and yard. Curtis later bought some blue and white icicle lights for the roof. It felt good to have lights this year!

A couple of weeks later with the added icicle lights and wrapped chimney.

The day that we had returned from Lewiston and gotten Garrett set apart as a missionary, was also the day that Curtis discovered our cat Coco had something going on by his left shoulder. There were a couple of scratches there that must have been from a cat fight and there was pus coming out of an abscess that had formed. We were fortunate to find a stack of animal cones hanging out in the garage that the previous owner had left there. They were small enough to fit Coco! We put one on him that night to keep him from licking the abscess and causing bacteria to get in. We got advice from my friend, Whitney, and from Curtis's coworker, Elise, who used to work at a veterinarian's office as a vet tech. We were told to use warm wet compresses, and I also saw online to use a saline solution. We didn't have any saline solution, so I used Epsom salt in the warm water compresses. Curtis squeezed most of the pus out the first couple of days, but then it filled up again. By Wednesday that week I decided to take him into a vet. The problem was that our vet we have for Milo hasn't seen Coco yet and they were booked out until the end of December. I called a couple other places and was basically told that I would need to take him to the Horse Heaven Hills Pet Urgent Care/Hospital. The people there were super friendly. They wanted to give him meds for the infection and to insert a drain tube and clean him out, but the fees for all of that would have been about $1400! Fortunately, because of the cost they gave us an alternative to just get the meds that he needs today and try to do the rest from home. We opted for the home care and meds and paid around $330 (for the visit and the meds). They had given him a shot for antibiotics that would last two or three weeks. They also gave him pain pills and a pain pill that also relaxed him, for while we cleaned the wound. We were able to get him to take those pills by putting them in his wet food. He and Sage both got a lot more wet food than we normally give them because of this.

One thing I didn't realize until the vet tech got Coco out to look at him, was that he had peed in his carrier, so he was wet on his rear end. After getting him home from the vet, the first thing to do was give him a bath, or at least a half bath (cleaning the bottom half of his body). He still had the cone on and when I put him in the water he started twisting everywhere. The next thing I knew, he had peed in the water, his abscess ruptured and squirted pus and blood everywhere, and then when I got him in the water again (after draining it and refilling), he proceeded to poop. It was quite a little fiasco that I had to deal with myself because Curtis was at work, the kids were at school and Garrett was in his MTC meeting. After cleaning up the poop mess and getting him cleaned up I had to clean his carrier and the tub with chlorine bleach water. I think we unintentionally cleaned most of the pus out of his wound during that bath session. Curtis only got a little more out the next day and that was it. I was so worried that we were going to do something wrong and that we would need to reopen the abscess area to make sure it cleaned out, but in the end, we did not need to take him in again and he's healing up just fine. I did use scissors to cut hair back and then animal clippers to shave his hair down around his wound, so now his hair is slowly growing back in.

What it looked like a couple of days after we discovered it.

At least he could still eat with the cone on.

He didn't like the cone, but he got used to it.

This is when it was healing and doing better. It did cause some bruising, but he was fine by this point. He wore the cone for about 2 weeks total.

We know better now how to take care of him if he ever gets an abscess again. I just hope he doesn't. This is the first time it's happened, and we've had him for 5 years.