Kidney Failure And, so, things continued about the same Through 2022. Lockdowns and masking slowly eased up and things looked like they might get back to normal. In March of 2023, we got a snow storm that lasted about a week. We live on a private road that is down hill to my driveway and I couldn’t get up it even with chains. I thought this would be a great time to catch up with some things that needed doing around the house and spend some time with Yvonne. But she was staying in bed most of the day, claiming she just didn’t feel well. After consulting with Laurie and Shawna, I called her doctor the next week when the snow had cleared up enough to get out and made an appointment for her. The doctor ran some tests and told me she needed more testing than they could do in the office. The nurse said they could send her to some lab, but the fastest thing would be to just take her next door the the hospital emergency room and they could do it all immediately. So, we spent the next couple hours at the emergency. Finally, a nurse came into the waiting room and told us she was in acute kidney failure and they were admitting her to the hospital right away. Thus began a couple weeks with Yvonne on an IV to flood her kidneys and get them working again. She got so bloated she could barely talk or move. So, they gave her a diuretic for a couple days and then right back on the IV. Laurie came the second week and began monitoring her food and applying charcoal patches to her kidneys. Finally, they said her numbers were improving and she could go home and continue treatment from there. Shawna came down from Wenatchee, Washington to check on her and she and Laurie tried to convince me it was time to retire so I could stay home and take care of their mother. Laurie decided to take Yvonne back to Idaho with her since I was too busy to take good care of her, and I told them to look for a house we could buy. The next day, Laurie called me about a house in town that sounded interesting. I told Yvonne to go look at it and she thought we could make it do, so we put in an offer. We found there were two offers ahead of us, but they each had contingencies and we ended up getting it after a couple weeks. I went up and brought Yvonne back so we could put our house in Grass Valley up for sale. We had a home inspection and the inspector said the deck had dry rot and needed to be completely replaced, along with several other things. I said I wasn’t doing that and we dropped the price instead. Of course, I had a business to sell, too. I advertised it for a couple months in the Recorder and on Facebook and Craig’s List with no interest being shown at all. Our house sold right away and was in escrow and I decided to park my motorhome at the shop and move Yvonne to our new house as soon as it closed and come back and operate my business until I could sell it. This was July, 2023. We made one trip to Orofino the sign the papers on the house there and haul up a trailer load of household stuff. Our house in Grass Valley closed escrow in August and we rented the largest U-Haul truck we could get and spent a couple days loading it. We got off around noon and made it to Winnemuca, Nevada, late in the evening. We rented a motel room and after eating supper at a restaurant we returned to the motel. Yvonne wanted something out of the truck and I climbed over boxes and furniture looking for it and finally found it. Climbing back out, my foot slipped on the bumper, and I was off-balance with my arms full of stuff and ended up falling back and sitting on the cement. When I tried to get up I felt a sharp pain in my hips, but finally managed to get up and lock up the truck and hobble into the motel. I told Yvonne I must have broken something from all the pain I was having and she wanted to find a clinic to check me out, but I told her I wasn’t stopping for any treatment until the truck was home. I tried soaking in a tub of hot water to ease the pain, but it didn’t help and I spent a wakeful night unable to find a good position to sleep. The next morning I managed somehow to carry the suitcases out to the truck and climb into the cab. Once I was seated in the cab, the pain wasn’t bad and the cruise control helped a lot. Climbing out to put gas in was quite a chore, though. We made it to Orofino around 6pm, and Laurie and Dan were waiting to take over unloading the truck and take me to the hospital to get checked out. They x-rayed my hips and determined that I had broken the ball of my right femur right off clean. Surgery was was the only option, but they didn’t do that in Orofino. The closet hospitals where I could get that done was Lewiston or Moscow, but they were booked up for the next several weeks. The hospital in Coeur d’Alene said they could do it the next day, so they insisted in calling an ambulance to take me there, a three hour trip. As I suspected when I first broke it, once they got me down they wouldn’t let me up again. All the ambulance drivers had gone home for the day and I offered to drive myself, but they soon found someone and I was in the hospital in Coeur d’Alene by midnight. The surgery at 6 the next morning went well and I was back home 5 days later. I couldn’t put any weight on that leg for the next six weeks, so it was interesting when I returned to Grass Valley with Laurie a month later to try and operate the machines. When I was getting ready to move from Grass Valley, I had been in touch by email with a guy in Corning, California, who saw my ad, but just wanted to know if I would machine a transmission for some modifications he was making. I told him when I got back from moving Yvonne I would meet up with him and see what I could do. He said he wasn’t really interested in buying the shop, but I showed him how to set up the milling machine to do what he wanted done and kept urging him to buy the shop from me. He finally said he would think about it and after several weeks I finally talked him into buying it. It was November by this time and by the end of the year Darrin was the new owner.