Ann's Words

This last week we’ve had a great time hosting two of our beloved missionaries from the Abidjan East Mission.  Jonathan Binene is the son of our first Mission President there.  He’s from the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Yordanos Beyene arrived a few days later from Ethiopia.  This is their first time to America.  They’ll both be attending BYU Idaho, starting next week.

Here are a few of the things we did while they were with us.

Yordanos prepared some traditional Ethiopian food.

This flat type of bread is plant-based, made with yeast, left a few days to ferment.  This is a traditional meal–served with different types of sauces made from lentils and dried yellow peas, eaten with your fingers.

We enjoyed spending time in the Provo City Center Temple.

We walked around the BYU Provo campus.

And we invited other Abidjan East returned missionaries over for pizza.

Yordanos enjoyed meeting my quilt group.  We’re preparing to show our quilts in Thanksgiving Point’s Quilts in the Garden show next week.  We all brought quilts to hang.

They really enjoyed driving up into the canyon to Sundance.  The mountains, aspens and pines were beautiful, not at all like where they come from in Africa.

Then yesterday we drove them to Idaho and helped move them into their apartments on campus there.  It was a fun and exciting day.  After 2 days of orientation, they’ll start classes on Monday.

We did a little grocery shopping and got a few warm clothes for the coming winter.  This is not Africa!!

And then we ended the day with some all-American burgers–a real feast–before we drove back home.  As they say in Africa, “It’s no small thing” to come to America, to be accepted into a university, to get the visas and necessary sponsors, and then to succeed.  We are excited for these two and wish them great success!

This evening we had another fun ward activity–an Ice Cream Social.  We have 2 ice cream shop owners in our neighborhood–Leatherby’s and Handel’s.  Tonight Leatherby’s provided the toppings to put on Handel’s ice creams.  It was fun and delicious!   Rain at the last moment moved us inside, but didn’t dampen anyone’s spirits.

These are some of our neighbors and friends:

My hand was completely numb after this morning’s surgery, but not my tastebuds!

Last March, almost over night, my right hand started falling asleep all the time.  It woke me several times each night.  My fingers felt odd, like something was off, out of joint.  I wondered what was happening to my hand.  I need my hands.  I stitch, I type, I pull weeds.  It was all feeling wrong.

Then during our General Conference broadcast, on Saturday April 2nd, I was listening, and enjoying the discourses, thinking, “I have no burning questions, or answers to listen for, I am content.  I’m just going to enjoy the words this weekend.”  Then in the middle of a talk, these words came into my mind:  “Look up Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.”  I was taken by surprise–there was nothing the speaker said that had anything to do with my hand.  I immediately googled “carpal tunnel” and read the symptoms.  I had them all.

Shortly after that I made an appointment to see an orthopedic hand doctor.  He ran some simple tests, determined it was carpal tunnel syndrome.  He sent me to a neurologist who ran shocks down my arm to my fingers (not pleasant) and he confirmed the problem.

The doctor told me I had two options:  live with the problem, or have surgery to fix it.  After living with it a few more months, I was ready for a fix.  This last week I had the surgery.  Now I am healing and slowly typing again.

I’ll have 2 weeks with my hand wrapped.

The incision is about 1″ long.  They went into my palm and cut the ligament that runs across the base of my palm from left to right.  That will relieve the pressure on the nerve running into my hand and fingers.  I watched lots of YouTube videos of the surgery to see what it would look like.  The ligament is left hanging, cut.  Before the surgery, I asked the doctor what would become of that cut ligament.  Was it not needed for my hand to work?  He said that’s a question I’ll have to ask our Creator someday.  He said in 17 years of doing primarily this surgery, he’s never known a hand not to work because that ligament is cut.

Here’s what the incision looked like after 1.5 weeks:

I like that the life line on my palm is now a bit longer!

Here’s what it looked like after pulling the stitches out at 2 weeks:

I am so happy my hand is healing and will be back to normal soon.  You realize what a gift your dominant hand is when you can no longer use it.  I’m grateful that when I wear out my hands, they can be fixed.