Back in December, we invited Kevin’s parents over for Christmas dinner and to exchange presents like we do every year. I’m going to be totally forthright here; when they arrived, we were more than annoyed. What could be so annoying about seeing relatives, having a wonderful dinner and exchanging gifts, you may ask. Well, the answer is simple, they were sick.

If there is one thing that we hate, it is when we invite someone over and they arrive sick. Yes, this has happened before. Several years ago, one of them was sick at Christmas. The next day, both grandkids had the crud as well because they had caught it from Kevin’s parents. I hate it that they were sick. I felt sorry for them. After all, no one wants to be sick, especially at Christmas, but if you are sick, do us all a favor and stay at home. Now that I’m thinking about it, Kevin’s mom did stay home one year because she felt so bad.

So, this past Christmas, in the front door they came, carrying festively wrapped packages, coughing, and immediately letting us know to, “stay away from me tonight because I don’t want you to catch anything.” Really? You don’t want us to catch anything and yet, here you are for the next three hours. We are sharing air and doorknobs for the next three hours. Merry Christmas!

Kevin’s mom was actively sick, fever and all, and his dad had “just gotten over pneumonia”, but was still feeling bad. Visually, he looked feeble because he had lost a lot of weight, plus he had just turned 79 a few weeks prior. He said that in January, he was having a lung biopsy because he had a persistent cold and cough.

We had a very nice time with them at Christmas and no one ended up getting sick, thank the Lord. We still believe though, if you are sick, stay at home. It’s seen as selfish to everyone else.

Jump to January. His dad had the biopsy. It wasn’t cancer, so they had to run other tests to see what could be causing him to be short of breath and keeping a cough. He got the results of those tests yesterday. They told him that he has Pulmonary Fibrosis.

Pulmonary Fibrosis is a lung disease that occurs when the lungs have been injured and scarred. The scarring causes the tissue to thicken which makes it harder to for the lungs to work. The doctor told his dad that if he were younger, they would put him on the list for a lung transplant. Since he is of an advanced age, they plan to give him medicine to slow things down and ease the symptoms. They said at some point, he will probably have to use oxygen. This is a fatal disease.

Pulmonary Fibrosis can be caused by a number of things, but the one that stood out to us was: exposure to bird and animal droppings. You see, we call Kevin’s dad a “bug man” because his career has always been in the pest control business. He has been exposed to animal dropping for over fifty years. Kevin doesn’t ever recall him wearing protective eyewear, a mask or gloves. Add to that, the fact that he was never a big hand washer. Any time we would offer him hand sanitizer at a restaurant, he would decline and say, “it hasn’t killed me in all these years”.

When Kevin called yesterday to get the results of the tests from his mom, they were working outside in the 20-degree weather. They park cars during events at their church for extra money. It’s something they enjoy doing and it allows them to buy what they want for Christmas. We found it odd that they had just received what we believed to be terrible news, and yet, they were going on about business as usual. I guess that’s all you can do.