Caregiving, Crime Scenes, and Canadian Geese

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There's so many different kinds of impairments. There's always a caregiver. How do you help a caregiver?

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PeterRosenberger.com and I will be your guide through all things caregiver related today. So buckle up and keep your hands and feet inside the car at all times. You must be this tall to ride this ride. No, it is not for the faint of heart, is it? How many of you all been doing this for five years? What about 10?

15? Couple of you are doing it for 20 years. I've gotten letters from folks doing it 30 years. Well, I am finishing my 39th year of doing this. And it has been quite a journey and we are in the middle of acute caregiving right now.

We've been in Aurora, Colorado for the last two months. We're going to be here for I don't know how much longer. This weekend, they're going to take Gracie back into surgery. And she's got an infection in her left leg, it appears, and that's the plan.

And they're going to go in there and clean that out. So this will be to my best count, number 90. How about that? 90?

Sorry, that's a good even number to end on, don't you think? I think so. And Aurora, Colorado. You've heard me talk about it. Parts of it are very nice. And parts of it, not so much. Where I am at the hospital, not so much. And it's been quite a journey.

And this is my third two month plus stretch here. And I've really got to fire my travel agent for booking me for vacation time in Aurora, Colorado. Because I wake up every morning and I see the news. And you've got, you know, Trende de la Agua, or however you say their name, and they're being arrested on a semi-regular basis here. And you're seeing things in Denver, which is, you know, right here at us.

And you're seeing this all the time. And I'm not in a very nice neighborhood. Gracie gets very concerned about me because she doesn't want me walking back and forth to the hospital, which I do quite often.

A friend of mine lets me borrow his car while I'm here. But the hospital is just across the street. And by the time I drive over there and wait to find a parking space, it takes more time. So it's easier just to walk. Well, Gracie doesn't like for me to walk because it's not exactly the nicest neighborhood.

I will give you an example. There's a beautiful little holding pond, beautiful, it's probably not the best word, right in front of the hospital. There are a lot of Canadian geese, and I'll get to them in a minute, that are out there.

And one day I saw a bald eagle, you know, flying over. Well, one day I was walking to the hospital, and again, it's just over the street diagonally, so a block and a half. Okay, so it's not that far to walk. On a cold day when there's a lot of snow, maybe I'll drive.

But so far we've had nice weather. But I'm walking across the street, and I never assume that I'm going to get safely across the street. It's not a great street to cross, and there are a lot of guys that like to drag race, it seems like, out on this thing, particularly at night. But I'm walking across the street, and there's crime scene tape all around this pond, and there are like 18 cop cars out there. And I'm thinking, what in the world? And I remember last year when I was here, somebody drove into that pond, and they had, you know, at night, and there were just tons of fire trucks and everything else trying to pull this person out. Well, evidently, somebody had fallen in there and died, and they'd been there for at least overnight, and they were pulling the body out. And you can imagine the response I got from Gracie when I told her that.

She's like, and you're walking back and forth? And then in the hotel I'm staying in, which is a nice hotel. It's not the Thunderbird or something, you know, a motor lodge. It's a nice hotel. I've stayed here many times before, and I know all the people, but sometimes homeless people kind of slip in. And three homeless people came in the other day, and one of them was going through the buffet, and he was causing a little bit of a problem. They asked him to leave, and he wouldn't leave, and he's trying to get his plate and everything else, and he created quite a disturbance. And the security guards there were, one security was the hotel staff, and they put him in a headlock and threw him out. And I'm sitting there just trying to have breakfast. So that was exciting. And then I came back one night, and marijuana's legal here in Colorado, which may explain some of their problems.

You do the math. But there were two people sitting on the little porch area. There's little tables and so forth out the veranda in front of the hotel, and they got a bong. And they're smoking weed right out there. And I'm just like, well, that's different, you know.

And they wonder why they have a crime problem, and bodies wind up in the little holding pond and all this kind of stuff. But it's quite adventuresome. Is that the right word? What do you think?

Is that a good word? And I have an app on my phone that tracks my steps, and I'm getting in about 7,000 steps a day. I don't know how many you walk, but when you're in a hospital situation, you tend to hoof it a good bit. And I'm briskly walking because I don't want Trente de la Agua.

How do you even say their name? But I don't want them to come after me. And if I'm going to stay at night, I'm glad the time has changed because Gracie at night, she doesn't want me to leave, but she doesn't want me to walk across the street in the dark. But now I can stay a little bit later to the shift change of the nurses so I can walk back.

I will try to drive over there even though it's a pain sometimes because of the long parking. And then there are a bunch of Canadian geese that hang out by this pond and this park that's across the street. And it's a nice park, but there were a lot of cop cars there at the other night.

I don't know what was going on there. It just never ends. And I hear sirens all night long and it's been quite an event. But these Canadian geese, with all the stuff going on with Canada, I'm like, you got Canadian geese and they're so beautiful. I said, Elan, do we have tariffs against the Canadian geese? They're beautiful. They're beautiful geese.

They're so beautiful. But they're going to have to pay. Oh, they're going to have to pay. So I don't know.

I just leave the geese alone. It's just a different world. And I got to tell you, I've said this before, I don't know who the mayor and the city council of Aurora is, but you got to ask, do they really want this place to be this way? I mean, is this necessary?

I don't think so. I think that we ought to demand a little bit more of our elected officials, but they keep having these pro criminal. I'm not saying soft on criminal. Some of them are pro criminal.

And you know, they're allowing this. I mean, the laundry detergent is locked up. Is that the way it is in your town?

Where do you live? Do you have to ask for a store manager to be able to get laundry detergent? And I got to ask you, why are they stealing laundry detergent?

There's other things that are not locked up. Why laundry detergent? And I don't know what the answer to that is. Maybe somebody does.

Let me know if you know the answer. Because what is it about laundry detergent that inspires people to steal? I don't, I don't understand because they don't have like, you know, brand flakes locked up. I mean, you know, I'm just throwing that out there. I don't know if brand flakes is something that people feel compelled to pilfer. Evidently not because you don't have to ask for the manager to get that. I'm not saying I'm buying brand flakes all the time. I just happen to notice the cereal just came to my mind.

You read into that whatever you want. However, it is really disheartening to see that you have to ask for a store manager. And there's two security guards, police officers that are there at the checkout line that are standing there watching over you in the checkout line and they're armed.

And I'm like, wow. And then they don't have bags. You have to pay for bags. If you want a grocery bag here in Colorado, or at least in Aurora and Denver area, you have to pay extra for a grocery bag. Just a brown paper bag. And, but they don't display them. You have to ask somebody to get one because too many people steal the grocery bags. It's a lovely place.

Put it on your list of things that you want to do for your next vacation. Has it really come to this? Yes, it has. This is Peter Rosenberger. This is Hope for the Caregiver reporting from the front lines of caregiver battles. War correspondent in beautiful downtown Aurora.

We have more to go. PeterRosenberger.com. Don't go away.

We'll be right back. Peter Rosenberger. He's Irish.

On his mother's side. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver. This is Peter Rosenberger. Thank you, Rob Galbraith and the band, and the Not Ready for First Service players.

We are thrilled to be with you. PeterRosenberger.com. PeterRosenberger.com and I am in the throes of a two month stretch of acute caregiving. But it's all good. Gracie, let me give you an update on what's going on with her.

Just a bit of review for some of you. Gracie, my wife, was hurt in 1983. She had a terrible wreck.

I didn't know her. And when they put her back together, in today's standards, they probably would have amputated both of her legs on the day of the wreck. By today's standards. Because prosthetics are so much better now. Her legs were crushed and horrifically damaged. One of them was all but severed. But they tried to save her legs. And the way they repositioned her and put her back together was... I'm not saying they did it wrong. It condemned her to a life of orthopedic trauma.

Most of her now 90 operations have been to try to repair her legs or mitigate the damage caused by trying to repair her legs. It is what it is. You can't play the if only game. Obviously, we would prefer a different outcome, but here we are.

And the question is, are we going to trust God or not? So when I met Gracie, she walked. Her left leg was kind of misshapen in the way she had to compensate for it. And then her right leg was kind of turned inward. Her right foot was turned inward. And so she had a challenging walking gait. Go back and Google, go out to our website and get her book and read the story about it.

It's Gracie standing with hope. It's a powerful story. I remember I helped her write it. And they asked for about 60,000 words. We didn't write her book until she was 25 years into this journey. Which was really quite unusual because sometimes when people have a sensational event, however tragic, they'll have a book out in six months.

We didn't do that for 25 years. So we had several people that approached us. We had some writers that wanted to write it.

And nobody could really capture it. And finally the publisher said, hey, to me, they said this to me, why don't you write it? Nobody knows their story better than you. And I said, me?

You might want to talk with some of my English teachers. I graduated, thank you, Laudy. And they said, no, no, no, we've seen your writing. You can do okay.

It will help you. I said, all right. So I took a stab at this thing. And speaking of stab, my first manuscript had so much red ink on it, I thought it had been stabbed. And I turned it into a manuscript.

I worked on it pretty hard. And I knew Gracie's story. I knew it better than, in some respects, I knew it better than she did. Because I was there watching a lot of the events when she was recovering from surgeries.

And I was there to observe and I know her chart very well. And they asked for about 60,000 words, give or take. And I turned in over 85,000. And the publisher, this was Liberty University Press, they said, we don't know where to cut.

We're not cutting any of this. It's a good-sized book. And I think it's a pretty gripping book. And you can read about it, how we got here, what happened to her.

And I would recommend you do so. There's some painful things. There's some hilarious things. There's some not so flattering things about me, which was kind of weird because I was writing it. But it is what it is. And I remember two people helped mentor me as I wrote it.

It'll surprise you. But one of them was Joni Eareckson Tada, which would not surprise you because she is, you know, you would think with Gracie that would be such an amazing connection. And it is. And she remains a dear friend. I text with her every day, updates with Gracie.

She texts me back and forth and wants to know how things are going. She called up and sang to her in the recovery room. And the other one though was Jeff Foxworthy. And if you know Gracie and me at all, then that makes perfect sense to have those two people because that sums us up. And both of them were incredibly gracious and helpful.

And Jeff ended up writing the foreword to this book. It's an exceptional account of what happened to this young woman when she was just 17. So when I met her, she had her feet kind of all misshapened and eventually she ended up giving up her right leg. She had several surgeries to try to mitigate the pain from her right leg particularly. And finally there was just nothing else to do and she ended up having that leg amputated. And her prosthetist, Jim McElhaney, and we've known him since 1990, and when he first saw her he said, you know, you're going to lose that left leg too.

And it kind of caught her by surprise. Now Jim's an amputee himself and he's been doing prosthetics for a very long time and he's quite good at it. And he knew what she would learn is that there are worse things than amputation and that his skill as a prosthetist could help her have a better quality of life.

And it did. But she ended up giving up the right one in 1991, the left one in 1995. But her body was still misshapen and Jim adjusted prosthetics to compensate but her left leg particularly, her left hip area, that whole, the femur and everything else going up into her hip was very misshapen. And over time her back paid the price for this and so they fused her back back in 2002. And the way they did it back then is they kind of pitched her forward just a little bit. Well, she kept going over and over and over and to the point where the last six to seven, eight years she's been almost 45 degrees over.

Now you can imagine the kind of pain that that's in because she's like, you're yoga planking at that point the whole time. And her neck, she had to look up to be able to look at you and it was extremely painful for her to walk and everything. And we knew this back surgery was coming that we'd have to repair her back. And we started that process a dozen years ago, give or take, in Nashville at Vanderbilt and it just wasn't the right time. There were a lot of other things going on with her. And when we moved to Montana, it became apparent that this was going to have to happen.

And that's when we connected up. Montana doesn't have a hospital facility that's big enough to do this kind of surgery. It's one of the biggest back surgeries you could do. And so we met with a neurosurgeon and an orthosurgeon down here and there was a conversation about what goes first. Do we repair the back or do we release her hip flexors? Because she'd been over so long everything was contracted and she couldn't straighten back up with her muscles and tendons and everything else. And they released hip flexors for a lot of kids with cerebral palsy, for example.

They do that because of the spasticity of the limbs. And so the orthosurgeon said to the neurosurgeon, you go first. I think we need to fix the back first because that one, even though it's much more involved and it's a bigger surgery, it's more predictable. And then we'll see where she is and then we'll look at the hip flexors.

And that's what we did. So several years ago we did the back surgery, it was about nine hours, and it straightened her back up. But she had a complication, what they call a kyphosis, at the top of where he did it so he had to go back in and redo the whole thing and go a little higher. And in the process she got a post-op infection, there were some challenges and so forth. But we got through it and everything worked. Then it was time to sit down with the orthosurgeon and we met with him and went back through it again.

And he decided to go ahead and do this, Gracie commissioned and said, look, we've got to do it. Because when she laid on the table, for example, and she was wearing her prosthesis, she had about six to almost eight inches of gap between her heels and the table. Her legs just would not bend down. And so, did you ever see that episode of M.A.S.H. with whiplash wang? And there was this old man that pretended like he got hit by a car and then he would get a little money for it.

And he was laid on the table and they pushed his feet down and his head popped up and they pushed his head down and his feet popped up kind of thing. That's what was going on with her. Now, before you get all upset, she's the one that referenced that, okay?

She does, she references that. And so, the decision was made to come down here and fix the hip flexors. They did the left one first and that was on January 23rd and then the right one three weeks later. But in the process, the left incision site, which he had to work a whole lot more to reposition her leg, has had a very difficult time closing. So, they went in two weeks ago and re-sutured that and they went ahead and preemptively did the right one just to be safe.

But this left one is still being a bit of a booger. And so, that's what precipitated this surgery for this weekend. And I'll let you know next week how everything turned out. I anticipate it will be fine, but it's a bit of a challenge. Now, that's the bad news, okay?

Here's the good news. She's walking. She gets up with her physical therapist and she's walking and she's straight. And I sent the picture to her prosthetist back in Tennessee and he said, I've never seen her this straight. And he's known her since 1991. Well, I've never seen her this straight and I've known her since 1985. So, she's not been as straight standing as she is now since before her wreck. That's 42 years.

That's a long time. And it's been a horrific journey for her and it's very painful. And yes, she is straight. However, all of her muscles and tendons and everything are just screaming at her.

Because they haven't been in this type of alignment. Then we had to get a prosthetist from here in Denver to come and adjust her legs because her legs were adjusted to her old way of standing. It's not like she can move her calves and her ankles. She can't do that to compensate. So, she was standing there with her knees kind of bent and she had about a two inch clearance between her heel and the floor. So, we had to lower those legs down so that she could stand flat-footed. And she's still got a little bit more to go and she's probably going to have to get new sockets. Which is something that happens a lot with amputees about every seven years.

And these are about six or seven years old. So, time-wise, we know what to do. It just takes time. And it takes patience. And it takes endurance on her part. And so, that's, and mine, but we're in it to win it.

And her face is set like flint. The pictures, I sent some to the family and I posted one on Facebook. I'll try to post some in our Facebook group if you want to go out there and join that group.

If you're not already there, it's Hope for the Caregiver on Facebook group page. And you have to ask for permission to join it. And if you want to see what a real champion looks like, I'll show you. Because her face is set like flint. This girl is tough. I mean, tougher than trained smoke. And they're strong and then there's Gracie strong. And you've got to give her props.

But she is a bit tired. And 90 surgeries. That's a lot of lifetime surgeries, don't you think? And, you know, and they haven't been, you know, tiny surgeries. They've been extensive. And they really worked on her left leg. So, she's pretty sore. But the docs and everybody have been great.

The nurses. And I'll talk about that in the next block. Some things I've learned, even after all these years, I'm still learning. And I should have gone to medical school.

But, you know, then again, go back to my grades. Thank you, Lottie. This is Peter Rosenberger. This is Hope for the Caregiver. We'll be right back. Don't go away. We've got more. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver here on American Family Radio.

Also being broadcast on all our affiliates, the Truth Network and so many others. And I'm very grateful to have you all spend some time with me and get to spend some time with you. Thank you so much.

You make this possible. And I love doing the show. I love being able to talk to fellow caregivers like this. There wasn't anything like, as you heard in the last block, the long journey we've had. There wasn't anything like this for me during all those years.

That's probably why I'm so, you know, whacked. But here we are. And I'm trying to offer a lifetime of experience as a lifeline to my fellow caregivers. To let you know, number one, I do understand. I understand the challenges that you have.

I get this journey. And I'm able to talk with so many people, not just through this program, but just in everyday life here in this hospital environment. The hotel I'm staying at, even in beautiful downtown Aurora, is filled with people who are here at the hospital, family members of those here at the hospital, and the children's hospital down the street from it. And so you see a lot of very difficult challenges here. And I'm very moved to be able to talk with folks and say things in a way that I wish somebody had said to me. It's very meaningful to me to be able to do that.

Speaking of saying things, I wanted to address a few things. There are a lot of medical staff involved in Gracie's care, as you can imagine. To my best knowledge, we have soared past her being treated by more than 100 physicians. It's really hard to keep track of all the physicians. I'm not talking about just the ones that were rotating out, you know, if this guy was on call. I'm talking about actual physicians who treated her and took her on as a patient kind of thing.

And she's got some very good ones here. This is a teaching hospital, so you're dealing with some very, very good surgeons. And you have the attending surgeon, and then you have a bunch of residents under that surgeon.

Then the nursing care is very specialized. For example, after surgery, she goes to, it's basically in between the floor and ICU. She's been in ICU, then there's a step down.

It's still considered ICU, but it's not quite as ICU as ICU. And then she goes to the regular floor, but it's not just a regular floor, it's just for ortho. When she had the big neurosurgery, she went to the neuro floor. So these are all specialized at dealing with the kind of things that she deals with.

But even still, Gracie is an anomaly. You will never find another patient like her. I've been told this by more than one in her medical journey. Because, like I said in the previous block, if she'd had her rec today, they would have most likely amputated her limbs. And she wouldn't have a fraction of the things going on with her.

But here we are. So there are multiple things to consider when you deal with somebody like her. And some of these nurses, in fact, I can't think of any nurse that she's had in this whole journey that Gracie wasn't dealing with this reality 20 years before some of them were born. You know, I mean, you've got a lot of nurses that are 25 years old. And they're good. They're very well trained. But the experience of dealing with a patient, now we've got a couple of them that are a little bit older and saltier in their early 40s.

But even still, she was dealing with this when they were toddlers. And, you know, so it's a conversation that I have regularly. And here's something that I have put into practice in my life that may be helpful to you when you're dealing with a hospitalization. I introduce myself to every one of these nurses.

Every one. And, by the way, all the doctors and so forth. You know, I've even got to know the housekeeping staff and everything else. They know I'm here. And they know that I know what's going on.

Okay? And that's what I call caregiver authority. You and I have that. And I want to really challenge you to use that. Now you may feel a little bit timid. And you may feel, you know, a little bit awestruck when you're dealing with some of these people who are high-powered surgeons and so forth. And it's very intimidating. I admit it.

It is. We don't have the education they have. But we have the knowledge of our loved one. I know my wife.

I know her journey. And I've asked many of them when they first met her, what were you doing in the 1980s? And they weren't born yet. And most of her doctors weren't born yet, quite frankly. Or if they were, they were just toddlers. Like I said, toddlers. And it gives them a moment's pause to realize how long we've been doing this.

We've been doing this since Ronald Reagan was president. So that gives you a bit of perspective. And the fact that I can articulate what's going on with her. I've done my homework. And I would encourage you to do yours. Make sure you know enough of a summary that you can talk with these doctors. You don't have to talk at their level. Okay?

You don't have time to go to medical school. But you are the primary person in your loved one's life. And you may not know the science, but you know them.

Are you advocating in that regards? And if they talk down to you, or try to condescend you or talk over your head or whatever, then you push back on that. They don't talk down to me. And I know it's a man's world as James Brown said. It's a man's world. I know I understand that. There's a lot of misogyny out there. I get that.

But it still has to be done. And the more we educate ourselves so that we can effectively communicate. You can go online and look at a lot of things going on with your loved one. And then ask, you know, Siri or Grok or ChatGPT, any AI program, to write a one paragraph summary of what's going on with that particular disease in layman's terms. So that you can digest it and repeat it back and understand or that affliction or whatever. If I need to know something, it's literally in the palm of my hand with my phone. But philosophically, I'm the guy that they're going to look to because I understand her journey. And I've told you this many times before, sometimes in the army, they used to say that the leader is often the guy that remembers where the jeep is parked.

You and I know where the jeep is parked. And they wanted to do something, and I said, let's take a beat here for a moment. I said, you know, I know I've only been doing this for, you know, 40 years, but maybe I have some insights.

And that gives them a moment's pause to realize that here's somebody who has lived with this woman and watched her journey for all these years. Well, what about you? Haven't you done the same thing? I mean, you may not have done it as long as I have. Some of you have done it longer. But you've lived with them.

You know them. You don't know necessarily the intricacies of all the stuff that's going on with it, but you know enough to raise your hand and say, hey, no, no, no, this is not right. What's keeping you from doing that if you're not already?

If you are already doing it, great. And we can be gracious when we do it, but we can be firm. And I've had a few nurses that wanted to, sometimes there are some, you'll see it, they're lazy. Or they just want to cookie cutter it. And there are some that are CNAs that just, you know, they just phone it in. I've seen them do it. I'm a glorified CNA on a normal day. And I've washed her hair three or four times now in the hospital.

They've done it a couple times, but I've done it myself. And I'm okay at it. I'm not very good at combing it.

Gracie has beautiful hair, but when I comb it, there's some tangles and, boy, she'll fuss at me. And I try to be careful, but I'm not very good at that. But I can wash her hair and I can get things done. And I know how to do a lot of things. And they know that when I'm there, that I'm watching and that I'll say something. Do they know that about you and your situation? Do they know that you're there, that you're watching and you're going to say something? I personally don't know how people do it in today's world that don't have an advocate, a caregiver there on site in the hospital with them. I cringe for how many people, when left alone, you know, when they don't have anybody. And I've got to tell you, it's a bit frightening.

And it's not that people want to do something wrong, it's just that human nature is what it is. And you're going to have some people that just phoned it in. I've seen it. And there's a couple of doctors that come in. At the beginning of this journey, a couple of years ago, one doctor came in.

He was the, I don't know what he was, this is when she was in ICU. And he came in and wanted to talk about her getting up after this first back surgery and starting the rehab process. And I looked at him, we're in the ICU, she's still under. And he said, well, we want to transition her from this so she can get into the rehab. I said, do you need me to go across the street and get her legs? And I just let it hang there for a moment. And he looked at me and he just realized the reality of what just happened. That this is a woman, he wasn't even thinking that way. He was just thinking it was a normal surgery. He said, you know what, I'm going to back out of this and let the rehab people take lead on that.

And I said, yeah, I think that would be best. People don't pay attention. They're coming in and it's a cookie cutter, it's assembly line.

And so you have to be willing to hit that machine and stop the belt. I said, no, no, we're going to have a conversation. I didn't do that the other day when a chaplain came in to pray for Gracie. She was very sweet. She worked for the hospital and she came by to pray and she was a very nice lady. And I'm not impugning anybody, okay.

I'm just going to put this out there. But she wanted to pray for Gracie and she prayed that God would bless Gracie. She was holding her hand.

God would bless Gracie from the top of her head to the tip of her toes. Well, I almost said, well, I better go across the street and get her toes. But I didn't.

I bit my tongue and learned to like the taste of blood. I didn't say anything. Because I understand that people get in a situation like that and I've been guilty of it myself. I've said stupid, stupid things. And I know, your first reaction is no, Peter, not you. You haven't said stupid things, have you? My friend Betsy is listening in Tennessee, she and Tommy. And Betsy right now has just testified. Oh, yes, he has. I was there when he said it. So Betsy, yes, I admit it. I own it. Yes, I have said stupid things.

We all do. That's not to impugn this chaplain, but it is to draw attention to the bigger point. People are going to come in and they're not as aware of what's going on. It's your job as a caregiver to make them aware of that. I'm sorry, it just falls on you to do it. And if you need some help and if you need some courage and some fortitude in that, you know what, borrow some of mine.

Until you are able to, as we had to lower Gracie's feet, then we'll lower yours so that you can stand flat on that and solid. And know that you have caregiver authority. Okay? You really do. And I'm proud of you for doing it.

I really am. This is Peter Rosenberger. This is Hope for the Caregiver. We'll be right back. The hills are alive with the sound of music. With songs they have sung for a thousand years.

Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver. This is Peter Rosenberger. And you know, 60 years ago this month, The Sound of Music came out and it won best picture. I don't know how many Oscars it won, but certainly our culture has declined significantly in 60 years because that was the best picture.

This year's best picture is just, it's abominable. But The Sound of Music was just, I mean all of you, you've all seen it, we all know it, we all love it. Mom and Dad had this record of the soundtrack of The Sound of Music. And I used to listen to it like, I don't know, I learned how to play listening to that record. It was, the orchestration, everything about it, it was such an inspiration to me as a musician just to hear the soundtrack of this thing.

It was phenomenal. We didn't have many records going up. Mom, you want to do something about that?

You have anything to say about that? Mom listens to the program every week. We didn't have a lot of records. I mean, Gracie's dad was a huge jazz fan, had all kinds of great vinyl records, I mean that's what we had back then. And her mother was not really into it and she like gave them away one day.

He didn't know, she was cleaning out a bunch of stuff and gave them away. It was like Cole Porter, Nat King Cole, I mean just Ed David, he had some of the best records. It was not a good day at the house that day, Gracie said, but Mom and Dad had, The Sound of Music soundtrack had a record player that had headphones. And I would listen to this repeatedly and I had a little tiny keyboard that had the chords that you would press a button and it would play the major chord. And if you press another button, a black button, a minor chord, a major chord was a white button.

And I figured out what those were, I taught myself music theory on this and this was before I was 10 years old because I didn't start taking piano lessons until I was 10. And I would listen to this record over and over and over trying to figure out how the melodies went and the harmonies and so forth. And it was just an extraordinary, and to this day I'll still watch the movie, I mean it's just a flawless movie and Gracie has been over there to Austria where they filmed it. And she said we got to go back and I said okay well let's get through all these surgeries. Right now we're spending, instead of Austria, we've made it to Aurora and that's as far as we've been able to get. It's not quite the same, I just want to tell you. I see snow capped mountains there here west of Denver and Aurora where we can see the Rockies there. But it's not the same as Austria, I've got to tell you.

Nobody would ever confuse Aurora with Austria, I promise you that. But we'll get over there Gracie, I promise. We're going to go and it's an extraordinary movie but it was 60 years ago this month and I love the movie.

You know what else happened 20 years ago this month? We treated our first patient with Standing With Hope. First leg that we provided at Standing With Hope this month. I had never dreamed I would go to Africa and do this. This was not on my list of things that I felt like okay I need to do this.

I need to go to Africa and launch a prosthetic limb ministry but my wife envisioned this and Johnny Erickson-Tada and her team with Wheels for the World said we need to start there. And it's hard to argue with Johnny but on the plane on the way over there, over the Atlantic and I'm saying I'm not going to Africa and I'm on the plane, I'm over the Atlantic. I'm not going, I'm not going.

I kind of wondered should I have argued with her a little bit more? Because I just, it was so out of my comfort zone to go and do something like this. This was just not on my list. And now I cannot imagine not going.

I want to go so bad I can't hardly stand it but I haven't been able to because COVID and then Gracie's been so sick and I'm ready to go. Now we just shipped a bunch of stuff over there and we've got more to go. We're purchasing more materials. We recycle prosthetic limbs through a prison in Arizona where inmates volunteer to disassemble these limbs through a program we have with CoreCivic, a company out of Nashville that manages correctional facilities around the country.

And this is one of their faith-based programs. So we have all these limbs that have come through this system that get disassembled and then we send the feet, the pylon, the knees, the screws, the adapters, connectors, prosthetic socks, liners and sleeves, name it. Anything that can be recycled will recycle it. And then we'll purchase carbon fiber and acrylic resin and other things that cannot be recycled.

And we just shipped this over there. 20 years we've been doing this. I used to recycle all the limbs myself. I would collect them and I would go around to prosthetic shops in Tennessee, Middle Tennessee and sometimes even Alabama and Kentucky and I would get a lot of used limbs that they had or parts or whatever and I'd bring it to our home and I would sit there by the fire when it was cold or out there in a carport and I would disassemble limbs. It looked kind of like a horror show at our house sometimes, but eventually, and it was 14 years ago this year that CoreCivic said, look, we have programs that we'd love to be able to partner with you guys on and inmates volunteer to do this. It's an exceptional program that we're very proud to participate with and I've had inmates tell me things such as, you know, I never did anything positive with my hands until I started doing this program. One inmate said, you know, I never even thought about people with disabilities until I started doing this program. Another inmate whose wife was an amputee got involved. When he heard about it, he said, I got to do it. My wife's an amputee and I want to be involved in this.

And so it's been an extraordinary journey that Gracie envisioned when she gave up her legs and I've been very grateful to participate in this because I look at the change in my life. Our first patient named Jonathan. Jonathan Anukwa and just an amazing young man. He was a cartographer there in Ghana. He worked for their government.

He helped do maps of the regions and so forth. Great guy. We gave him many years of being able to walk and leap and praise the Lord. He ended up contracting malaria several years back and passed away and it was heartbroken with that because he was such a wonderful guy and I remember him running in the parking lot there after he got his leg.

It was an astonishing moment and I'm grateful for it. The ministry Standing with Hope has morphed into two program areas. One is the prosthetic limb outreach and the other is the caregiver outreach of which you're listening to right now. You minister out of your wounds for that is where you meet the healer.

Where are Gracie's wounds? Well, they were her legs and she saw prosthetics as a way of being able to offer the same hope that sustains her. Put legs on somebody, raise them up and point them to Jesus and that's what we've been doing for 20 years. The caregiver outreach, that's where my life intersected with God and His provision in my life. So our mission statement at Standing with Hope is for the wounded and those who care for them and it's been an amazing 20 year ride. I cannot believe it's been 20 years. I remember when we first got there and it was such a brand new world for me.

It opened up so many things. We've gone on to treat patients. We hub out of Ghana but we've treated patients from Togo, from Nigeria, from Kenya and Cameroon. I've provided parts through the ministry.

We've given parts and shipped them to Trinidad and I think we were able to help a patient in Jamaica once but most of it is in sub-Saharan West Africa. If you want to be a part of this by the way, we'd welcome the help. We're just a mom and pop, mostly pop right now but we'll get mom back into it but it's a mom and pop and it's something that came out of a felt need in our own life that was addressed by God. Gracie was able to be equipped to stand with hope and I was able to understand what hope for the caregiver really is all about and this is what we do. If you want to be a part of this, you can go out to standingwithhope.com slash giving. You can see the pictures of the patients that we treat. You can see what we do. You can see all that's going on with it and we have a campaign this year for 25 for 25. If you want to do 25 a month just to support us monthly with it, we'd welcome the help. It's an extraordinary ministry that was birthed by an extraordinary woman who had this vision, I want to help lift my fellow amputees up. And that's what we've done, 20 years.

It's hard to believe that, 20 years. While you're out there, sign up for our e-letter. We only do these once a month. It's not like we do tons of emails. You sign up for some people's emails and my goodness, they'll send you one every four hours. We don't do that because again, mom and pop, I don't have that kind of bandwidth to do that but every month we put out different things that tell you about what's going on. We've got a song that we'll do every month.

You'll be hearing about that here shortly if you sign up for it. Gracie has a blog post that she does every month. I help her write that. Her right hand doesn't work very well so she can't write very well but she can dictate.

Oh honey, she can dictate to me. These are conversations she and I have had over a lifetime of dealing with chronic pain and what she's learned through it. She's got one out there now on our blog post and it's exceptional. All of that can be found at PeterRosenberger.com. I think it links to it from Standing With Hope but it's all interchangeable. StandingWithHope.com or PeterRosenberger.com. Her blog post this month is exceptional. I'll have a post out there and then we'll have a patient that we feature every month that you can see. There's all kinds of ways to get involved and we'd love to have you be a part of that 25 for 25. It's the gift that keeps on walking and they go walking and leaping and praising God and it's extraordinary to see.

20 years, how about that? Well, the hills are alive with the sound of music and you'll be also hearing more of Gracie's music. We've got some songs that are coming out from her that are brand new that I think you're going to love.

There's a lot of exciting things. We've got to get her through this stretch right now and we will. We're going to get her through this thing. God knows. Thanks for the prayers on that and more to follow on this. I'll let you know next week. Thanks for spending the time with me today. This is Peter Rosenberger, PeterRosenberger.com. We'll see you next time.