Finding home

As we prepared for a nomadic life 11 years ago, we named our blog Life: Phase Next since we wanted it to be relevant no matter which fork in the road we decided to take or what life threw at us.

Though we were fully nomadic for 10 years, nomad life had several iterations. We transitioned from long periods of time exploring the world with short breaks in our home country of Canada to long periods closer to home and family during COVID. We used to explore new places by walking many kilometres a day, but in the last couple of years we have sought out other ways to get around that allowed us to adapt to increasing gait and mobility issues. We also tried to handle a required monthly eye treatment while on the road, but found that being in our home country every four to six weeks significantly simplified the process.

A diagnosis for Ken of Parkinson’s Disease just over a year ago made sense of the challenges we had been dealing with, but also brought the realization that we would have to be prepared to modify our lifestyle even more as the disease progressed. We decided it was time to find a landing place of our own, but where?

We were able to coordinate our plan to set up a home base with our family’s plan to return to Canada from the Netherlands. We have rented condo in Victoria, British Columbia, and they will arrive and move into their newly purchased home in the same city within the next few weeks. We are thrilled that this phase of our lives involves living close to our son, daughter-in-law, and grandson, once again.

Very recently, another development arose on the health front–a new diagnosis of Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH) rather than Parkinson’s Disease (PD). The two have very overlapping symptoms, making NPH difficult to diagnose, but a positive High‑Volume Lumbar Tap Test (or CSF Tap Test) confirmed the diagnosis. There are certainly pros and cons between NPH and PD. Both are progressive, but NPH can be treated surgically to diminish symptoms, giving us hope that mobility and travel may still be a part of our next life phase. Ken will be speaking with a neurosurgeon later this month and then we’ll find out how long he will likely need to wait for surgery.

For now, we’ll be exploring our new home city the best we can, enjoying time with our grandson (who arrives first from Edmonton where he is visiting his other grands and family members), and hopefully contributing as his family turns their new house into a home

Tonight, we’re off to a free concert in the Inner Harbour, put on by the David Foster Foundation. We can’t walk or ride the short distance into town so we are going to see how a booked Uber works for us–dicey given the number of roads closed for the event, but a closed road is just an opportunity to explore a different route, right?