WHERE HAVE I BEEN? My Solo RV Life Swerved Head-On Into Chaos

Hey everybody, thank you for all your questions and comments about where I've been the last week and a half. I'm okay, at least for now. I've had a rough couple of weeks, I have, and my family has, and I'm going to tell you all about it in this video, and also that I'm not out of the woods yet. Hey guys, it's Robin with Creativity RV, and I know that I normally put out videos every Wednesday and Sunday, and some of you noticed that I haven't for about a week and a half. So let me tell you what has happened. I had a family member that had a medical emergency, it was my mom, and I tell you this story with her permission. So one of the great things about this life is you get to go where you want to go, when you want to go, to a certain extent. So I was out on the Arizona-California border when I found out that my mom was having some heart issues. The electrical impulse in her heart just wasn't working. Her pulse had gotten down to like 30-something, and she went into the doctor and she needed a pacemaker. So right away at that point, I wanted to go home. But we did some research, I talked to my mom, and it was really routine. My gut told me to go, listen to your gut, but I didn't at that point. She said that she wanted to have the little surgery, and then as a fun thing to do after she recuperated, she was going to fly out and see me. So she had the pacemaker put in, and then a whole bunch of problems started happening, and I'm going to tell you what happened in case you know somebody that has a pacemaker. So, you know, she was really run down, and she had really terrible indigestion, and when she would press on her stomach, she would burp, and she had a zapping, painful sensation in her chest when she moved. I mean like a cattle prod inside her chest. Well, with the doctor, she went back for her follow-up visit, and they said she was fine, and the device people said she was fine, and all of her devices at home said that her heart rate was back down to the 40s. But the device company said, oh no, don't worry about it. Those home devices can't read a pacemaker. You're fine. She goes to the ER. They say it's indigestion. You're fine. Well, as you can imagine, she was not fine, and it turns out that the pacemaker, by the way, can zap part of your diaphragm and make it contract, which makes people retain air, which can be really painful. So we thought maybe that was it, but the zapping thing was totally wrong. Finally, she went back to the hospital, and at this point, they think everything's fine. They do a bunch of tests, and of course, they're making her feel like a crazy person, right? And after a bunch of the tests, they tell her that the lead in the pacemaker needed to be replaced, that the pacemaker was fine, no big deal. The lead, you know, is attached to the pacemaker. The pacemaker was implanted right here, and then the lead goes down into the heart, and it basically has like a hook on the end of it, and it goes into the heart, and it helps her heartbeat if she needs it. Well, they said one of the two leads needed to be replaced, and at that point, I was in Laughlin, Nevada, and I thought I should go home for days, and finally at nine o'clock one night, I just started driving. Not the smartest thing I've ever done, but I thought, okay, it's like 15 hours. I can do that faster than I could have gotten a plane, right? So I start driving. I drive till three in the morning. I get up at five. I drive more. Meanwhile, she's having more of these tests done. I get to the Petrified National Forest, where I pull over, and she says, oh, good news. We got all the test results back. It's fine. You don't need to come, and I thought, really? I'm halfway there, but, you know, the wind was starting to pick up, and she said, no, it's fine, so I drove 40 minutes in the opposite direction, and then she calls me, and she goes, it's not fine. It turns out that the lead wasn't faulty. The lead had gone down her heart and out the back. It was totally out the back of her heart, so as you can imagine, I cried, and then I got back in the car and kept driving. Well, rookie move, you guys. I did not check the wind report, and by the way, if any of you know a good app or website that gives wind reports on highways, I could not find a good one. There used to be one, but it's like nobody's manning the store, so I was driving, and actually, at one point, about two hours before I got to Las Vegas, New Mexico, I pulled over to gas station just so I could talk to a local, and I said, hey, is this normal here? Is this wind normal? I was kind of hoping he'd say, oh, yeah, it's a rough little area, and you're going to get through it, and it's going to be fine. He said, well, yeah, it's always bad on these mesas. We have to replace our fence every year. An hour and a half, and you should be out of it, but you guys, you guys. I was driving my new rig, which the tour is coming next week, so bear with me. It's a Class C. You know, it's a little bit taller and boxier than what I had before, and I was driving north, and the wind was going west, so I was getting impacted by these wind gusts, and you know, I have a dash cam, so in the future, I'm going to show you some of that footage, and I'm sure that I'm going to have to bleep myself out. It was the scariest, slowest driving I've ever done in my life, and finally, I pull over about 20 miles outside of Las Vegas, and I look at the wind report again, and the National Weather Service had issued a high wind advisory, not a watch, not a warning, for the entire area I was in. They said there were sustained winds of 40 to 60 miles an hour, I think, and the gusts were even faster, so I thought, you can do this, you can do this. I wanted to get there in time for her to have surgery. Now, my mom is also on blood thinners, and what they said they needed to do was just pull that lead back out through her heart, and the best case scenario is that the heart would close over it, no bleeding, but they had the people in the room to do open heart surgery, and I really wanted to be there. You guys, seriously, I was going 45 miles an hour with my hazards on. The wind was, I don't know, 30, 40, 50 miles an hour. The road had potholes. The semis are going by me. It was like a car was hitting the side of my rig. Literally, the sound, the impact was like I was getting broadsided, so I pulled over in Las Vegas, New Mexico at a gas station, and I had no internet signal, and I just started to bawl. Seriously, I wanted to get there. It was very, very frustrating. I was only five hours away, and I literally could not keep driving, so I pulled over at a KOA for a day and, of course, found out after that that it had gotten even worse. I had to go over a mountain pass where the gusts were going to be 75 miles an hour, so I decided to leave at four o'clock in the morning the day of her surgery, which I did, and I got there just in time for her to be released from surgery and up in her room. So, yes, you can go anywhere you want to go when you have an RV, but we are at the mercy of the weather, and I have to tell you that I was frustrated and in tears and just wanted to get to her. I felt completely out of control of the whole situation, but in the end, she was just fine, you guys, and I have to tell you it's kind of a miracle. She came through that surgery with flying colors, and, I mean, within a day she was, like, up and just better than she had ever been. Her heart was working great. Her energy is great. Her color is great, and I could not be more happy, and I would not have changed anything for the world. I'm so glad that I could be here for that, but, you guys, I got a problem here because I'm in Colorado, and, of course, this is not a great time to be in Colorado, and, you know, like I said, everywhere that I was going, there was a severe wind advisory. Even on the way to the hospital, I was still being, like, jerked around, and I was just hell-bent on getting there, but now my mom's all better, but I am in a state park in Colorado so I could stay close to her, and now a blizzard's coming in, and it's too late for me to get out. So I was at this state park today, and my parents were here visiting. They saw the rig for the first time, and the ranger stopped by and said, Do you know what's coming? And I had seen that it was going to be about 15 degrees here for about half a day, and I was going to get a little bit of snow, but now, thanks to my new rig, which I'm going to show you guys on Sunday, I have heated holding tanks. The tanks are inside instead of outside like my Leisure Travel Van, and I was pretty sure I could handle, you know, temperatures below freezing for a few hours every night. That is not what's happening. The storm has shifted, and the ranger came by and said that starting tonight, for the next two days, two and a half days, oh, it's starting to snow right now, I can see it out the window. I am looking at sustained winds of 40 to 60 miles an hour, and gusts of 80 miles an hour. It's going to be a blizzard, and, you know, it's possible that I'll lose the power, and I'll lose my cell service, and the ranger wanted to make sure that, you know, anyone who was staying in here, and I'm one of like five other people, that we all had food and water and knew what we were getting into, because at about 100 miles an hour, they've had RVs flip over in here, and I'm looking at about 80. So, I'm going to go ahead and take this opportunity while I'm sitting here to do the tour for you guys, which is going to be coming on Sunday, but look out for the video right after that, because I'm going to write out this storm, and I'm going to bring you guys along with me. Hopefully, I didn't just, you know, get out of the frying pan into the fire. I was so determined to just get here for my mom that the weather was absolutely secondary. I appreciate you guys so much. Thank you for being concerned for me. I am fine. I hope I'm the same next week, and I'm hoping to get out of here in just a few days and head back west, but I have to go over a mountain pass any way I cut it, so that's going to be a little bit tricky, but I'll talk to you guys about that when it happens. I appreciate all of you so much. If you haven't subscribed already, please do. If you know anybody that has a pacemaker, tell them about this video. Share it if you want, and give it a thumbs up if you like it. It helps other people discover the video. I appreciate all of you. Have happy travels and be free.