Although Richard and his wife had to make many arrangements in order to travel, they still went on trips.
Transcript
By that time she was not able to eat any solids. She was only able to eat liquids, and they put her on something called TPN—total parenteral nutrition—and it’s a very expensive therapy. And fortunately, we lived in Canada and it was covered by Medicare—although it’s not true in every province, but it certainly was covered in Ontario when they started out. So that entered a whole new stage where we became a team so to speak; I was the person that organized the ordering of the supplies and of setting it up for her to have her nightly infusions of TPN while she slept. We had arrangements if we travelled. We had to bring all the supplies with us. We had to keep them refrigerated so they wouldn’t spoil. She would have a bag of sugars and a bottle of fats, lipids, and that was our lifestyle for 3 years. I can remember one incident where we, tried not to make it stop us from travelling. We both liked travelling. We went down to the States and at the time the war on drugs was very big and we stayed in this motel, came in, pulled in late at night. I hooked her up, and of course when you do that you’re using lots of needles and other medical equipment. I had this all wrapped up in newspaper and was looking for a garbage can, and we also hadn’t eaten—it was not good. But I was looking for a place to dispose of this medical waste, and of course motels don’t have a box that says “put it here”. So I went to buy pizza, I took this stuff with me, because I didn’t feel good about leaving it in the motel room garbage and first thing I see outside this bar and pizza joint that I’m going to buy food at is a poster about the war on drugs and if you see anyone with needles report them. And so I put the whole bag in the garbage and tried to sneak in, incognito. Nobody spotted me for what I was, a user, apparently.
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