On Saturday, the nurse jabbed Ian’s right arm again and again, but his blood failed to gush into the testing tube.

We were at Quest Diagnostics for another blood test to determine if he had an adequate level of epilepsy medicine in his bloodstream. Too much medicine trashes his liver. And if he was failing to take his medicine again, we would know that, too.

The nurse said, “this isn’t working. He’s too dehydrated. He has to drink a lot of water and come back another day.”

Ian concentrates so hard on his computer stuff that he forgets to eat and drink. Meals come at regular times at school and at home, but not water intake. So he forgets.

I promptly drove him to the bagel store for a liter of Gatorade and then came up with some long term hydrating solutions for home and school. I made an appointment to retake the test next Saturday.

It’s lots of work managing a young adult with autism and epilepsy, but going forward, I’m going to get paid for this time. After two years of filling out paperwork, Ian is finally “in the system,” which means that I’ll get paid a small stipend for all this work.

It wasn’t easy getting to this spot. Sometimes I worked 60 hours a week on getting educated about paperwork and filling out paperwork, along with all the legal matters with our school district to get Ian properly educated. Finishing all that work and getting paid for his on-going support is a major milestone in my life.

So, I’m making lots of changes in my personal and professional lives.

I’m quitting freelance writing. No more pitching articles to editors and figuring out to make my words fit their magazine styles. Done with that.

I will keep writing in other ways. Opinion pieces will happen. My newsletter will happen and maybe expand to twice a week. I’m working on a book proposal. I’ll keep this blog, but won’t publicize it, so there will be no new readers. For my long time friends, I’ll have links to the newsletter and personal updates and pictures.

I’m running for our town’s Board of Education this November. I have a ton of paperwork to fill out by Friday. I’m having a great time figuring out how to leverage my writing skills and social media knowledge to run my own campaign. I’ll tell you more about this in the future.

Because I’m going to have a lot of evening events, we’re totally rethinking our family routines. Who’s going to cook dinner? Who’s going to drive Ian to all his different therapy appointments? All that still needs to be figured out.

I like change. And I just threw a cherry bomb into my life. So. Much. Fun.