Bob's health has always been excellent.  It is amazing, because he was born with cerebral palsy and didn't walk until he was five years old.  But he rejected the braces and other devices to help him along.  He wanted to play baseball so badly, but was always the last one chosen for the team.  But he kept at it, sometimes spending all day playing.  And that was the best physical therapy he could have had.  His grandma who raised him said he would come home at the end of the day crying because his legs hurt so bad.  But the exercise stretched the tendons, and by the time I met him when I was 16 and he was 18, you wouldn't have noticed anything but a slight limp.  He has had MRIs and CT scans through the years which shows that the hydrocephalus in the brain has not changed and he has compensated for it.  So I asked the neurologist if that had anything to do with the dementia, and he immediately said "no".  He also injured his knee playing football in high school and that same knee has bothered him all his life.  We met our junior year in high school when I moved from Idaho to Baltimore and started in the new school on my 16th birthday.  But we didn't start noticing each other (he says differently, that he knew that first day he liked me) until our class trip our senior year camping in the Shenandoah National Park.  Schools back then didn't go to England or France on their class trips, or at least ours didn't!  We went on a hike and he was so intent on the hike that he didn't notice the girl behind him doing her best to keep up!  Maybe he was trying to impress me! We started dating on graduation weekend, but then our paths separated and he went to college in Michigan, and I started nurses training in North Carolina.  But we kept in touch by letters (when I could read his handwriting).  We married in 1963, and moved to Hinsdale, a suburb of Chicago, where we both worked at the Hinsdale Hospital.
We always enjoyed hiking. When we moved back to Silver Spring, Maryland for 8 years where our children were born, we would take them to our beloved sentimental Shenandoah National Park and camp and hike, even though we would end up carrying them!
After we moved to Shawnee, KS, a suburb of Kansas City we looked for places to take the children to camp and hike.  We fell in love with Colorado and made sure we went there every summer.  We would be on a trail, and another trail would branch off from it and we would look at it longingly.  We would say "When we retire we will come back and do that hike"!  Laugh out loud!  After the children finished college and left home we started traveling more and it usually involved hiking.  One of the most memorable was on the Napali coast in Kauai, Hawaii when it had just rained and we came back covered in mud.  Another was at Machu Pichu, Peru where we climbed the centuries old Inca Trail, still very much intact, up to the Sun Gate and looked down on the ruins, just tiny little structures below, but with snow capped mountains in the distance.  Then we discovered Arizona, in the good ole USA!  We have done so many hikes there.  One was in Catalina State Park near Tucson, and we were on a trail trying to reach the Seven Pools before sunset.  Bob either fell and twisted his knee or twisted his knee and then fell.  Long story short, I had to run back to the ranger station (thankfully downhill) and they sent a helicopter for him.  They radioed which hospital they were taking him to, and I frantically drove the rental car back across town to the hospital, which was very near the hotel where we were staying.  They already had the surgery crew called by the time I got there, but Bob told them they had to wait till his doctor got there to approve it.  They asked who his doctor was and about that time I walked in and he said "There she is"!  I told the orthopedic surgeon I was sure he was good, but please just put a brace on it, give him some crutches and let us get back to Kansas to the hospital where we worked and to TJ, the surgeon that I knew and wanted.  He ended up only needing physical therapy.
Bob only missed three days of work in his whole career and that was due to a kidney stone that wouldn't pass on its own, and he had to have surgery to remove it.
On my next post I will write about some of the things we have tried hoping against hope they would help.