I took Buddy back to the vet this morning because he's still sneezing and has too much nasal congestion. She took Xrays of his nasal cavities and they showed no abnormalities. That ruled out any cancerous growths on those bones.
The next likely culprit is one of four fungal infections and there are two tests that could be done to find out if any of those are the problem. She could sedate him, take tissue samples from his nasal passages, and send those out for analysis. That test also gives a definitive diagnosis of soft tissue cancer. Or, she could draw blood and send that out to a lab. That would identify any fungus present and also identify an auto-immune condition if that's the problem. The former costs $750 and the blood test costs $450.
That's just the beginning. Because a diagnosis identifies the appropriate treatment. She told me what those would be for an auto-immune disease and for a fungal infection but all I could hear was "ka-ching."
He's some better. He doesn't wheeze nearly as much as he did a week ago and he almost never coughs anymore. She said a fungal infection will "wax and wane" but not go away. Same for an auto-immune condition. She suspects this is a wane.
We can't afford the diagnosis never mind the treatment, regardless of what the problem turns out to be.
Stewardship. Sometimes it's hard.
I'm proofreading - or am I editing? - a booklet the staff at UFC created to guide the discipleship program. It has seven short chapters and a pretty extensive set of appendices. The intent is that a mentor and mentee work through it one chapter per session to cover key elements of being a disciple of Christ.
It's what I've been using with the three guys I meet with. By the end of the week I will have worked through the first three chapters with each of them.
Oh my.
I am NOT qualified to edit anything, but because the men's mentoring program is now my responsibility I was tasked with doing something akin to a beta test of this booklet. They've been using it in an unofficial way as individual staff guys meet with another guy they've "taken under their wing." But I'm supposed to refine and systematize the use of the booklet and develop a plan to extend its use into a larger part of the congregation
Hot mess.
I learned today that the booklet was the product of a committee with about four staff guys each writing a section. Then they worked together to assemble it into a single document, revising each other's work. It reads like there was a primary author with identifiable writing habits like sentences that include a list of six or seven examples of the subject. Sometimes several of those on the same page.
And colons everywhere.
Personal pronouns for God sometimes capitalized and sometimes not (He, him).
No Harvard commas anywhere.
Upper case Gospel when it should be gospel.
And a lot of just clunky, awkward sentences.
Oh, and diagrams that are really confusing. So confusing that when I asked one of the staff guys who was a writer what one of the diagrams was meant to communicate he shrugged and said, "I don't get it either."
I've been through it with a red pen and I'm now re-keying the whole thing because it was done in a weird piece of software I don't have and don't want to learn.
The good news: One of the ladies at church has a degree in journalism and used to work at the Eugene newspaper, The Register Guard. She's agreed to go through it after I've done my bit. My concern is that she'll think I'm fine with the doc after my changes. NO! I just don't feel the freedom to do a rewrite. I'm afraid that would put me at odds with four or five staff guys at UFC, including my boss.
Help!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment