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In the Hospital: Tiny Blessings

09 Monday Dec 2013

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So there I was, having what might most delicately be called Pee Issues. Cranberry juice didn’t help, and I was starting to feel really run down. I figured the latter to be a) lingering depression over Not Moving, and/or b) fatigue from Finally Moving last weekend, both exacerbated by the stress of having Comcast screw up transferring my Internet service for over a week. But they turned it on at last, and I still felt every bit as crappy, and besides . . . Pee Issues . . . so I did what my urology team told me to do like a good girl and popped into the ER yesterday.

My expectation was to be seen promptly and sent home with a prescription for some Macrobid for a run-of-the-mill bladder infection. One out of two ain’t bad–I have a groovy ER and my butt didn’t even touch a waiting room seat. But part of the grooviness included a conscientious doctor who had recently seen somebody with my exact presentation (urine clean, but a stone is [painlessly] blocking my right kidney somewhat) take a turn for the worse and get very, very sick. And the worst part is that I myself have been very, very sick. Twice. (I’m a kidney stone gravel pit. Had ’em for my entire adult life, although for years they masqueraded as Mysterious Female Problems, as “women don’t get kidney stones” was long the prevailing belief–until only a decade or so ago, in fact.)

Goethe’s wife died of pyelo, I hear, and he had to spend three days in the kitchen listening to her scream. And in my own experience it does count as “no sheep, really sheeping sick.” So I didn’t really want to argue with her, and here I am in the hospital. And although I know the symptoms of pyelo and they would have scared me into making a beeline back here, maybe it’s just as well.

They gave me a bolus of a strong IV antibiotic, and I swear I’m feeling better already, despite a special hospital Night in Hell: At around 11p, they admitted a 97-year-old lady with mild dementia and apparently no bladder control over even more pee than I make. They spent all night changing her bed, trying to get her on the bedpan, and cleaning her up (which made her screech like a parrot). And by all night I mean about hourly.

So this morning I am counting my blessings, which I habitually do in the hospital:

Yeah, I make many little trips, but making them hooked up to an IV pump and fitting it into a bathroom the size of an average stall added to the challenge of the night. I’m currently not hooked up, and going on such a plebian trip solo is a big treat.

So is finally being put in the johnnies (one front, one back) meant for BIG people,  so I don’t feel strait-jacketed. I guess I’m fatter than I look or something; don’t know why they didn’t start me in ’em. But I yowled a bit about it when made to take the hospital’s extremely hot shower, and now I am steam-cleaned with full shoulder movement. Bliss!

My hospital has wifi, and my very nice daughter schlepped in my laptop so I can blog to you, watch Netflix, and maybe even work a little.

And blessing the greatest: They’re letting me go home today (albeit with prescriptions and the usual command to drink tons of water) And I have a home to go to. This has been made particularly meaningful after yesterday in the ER, watching an endless stream of street people being carried in with hypothermia. We have adequate emergency shelter in Cambridge/Boston, so most of these folks are the hardcore who are on the street by choice. Chronics make me sad–I spend much of my life invested in my own mental health and that of others; I have to believe that they can recover too, but they have to make the choice themselves.

I chose. Blessing!

 

A Quick Catchup and Mumbling About Things Bought Over the Internet

25 Sunday Aug 2013

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Yarrgghhh. Where did that stressball summer go?

Let’s see:

My son is still on the couch and we are still waiting to move. What had been conceptualized as a July 1 move to a three-bedroom apartment has been beaten down by the realities of market demand and people dallying about actually moving when they tell their landlords they are. We are now looking at a damn-near-sure-thing on October 1, which would have thrown us all into hysterics had we known at the outset of this adventure. The new apartment is supposed to be bigger than this (other than just adding a bedroom, smarty-pants) and we are crossing our fingers.

But it almost definitely lacks a ferret room, which is to say a chamber which is far too small to be a bedroom by modern building code standards (else it would be marked as one and we would be charged accordingly). So in preparation, we got a new ferret cage, which has about a 3′ square footprint instead of the 10′ square they’d been in for the past several years. Nobody has come right out and said it, but this has been an epic disaster; an unheralded mustelidean misery which we are now stuck with. I’ll just leave you with the phrase, “Oh come on, they’ll figure the slide out!” and we’ll move on. (We ended up making them little fake staircases out of unloved textbooks.) But it looked GREAT online!

To add to the furry fun, the cats have fleas. So after the flea bath was the usual waste of time, my daughter ordered them flea collars, as for some reason our local pet store is in denial about cats in fact suffering from fleas just like dogs. The picture on Amazon said “flea collar.” What came yesterday was a calming collar, all covered in copious powder smelling like everything but the lavender it claimed it was. I wish they’d invented these back when I had the cat who chewed all of his own fur off because he needed to be an only kitty–but I really wish they’d just sent us the flea collar they charged us for.

My daughter’s laptop is dying and she is now sharing mine pending the probably dim hope that the guy in Dudley Square will fix it, unlike Microcenter, which smugly told us that they were only told to put in the part–diagnostics as to whether they put the part in correctly would have cost extra. (Really. Literally. I am not making that up. Never go there.) I am spending big wisdom points on not going all banshee on they ass.

Stress, stress, stress. On top of everything else, we had a personnel shakeup at work and I ended up being the only person on the team with Web skills. Such as they are. True, I was out carving out niches in HTML back when pappy was a brat, but over the last ten years, we’ve moved to the CSS Internet. So I went out and got a book which spoonfed it to me, and everything was fine, until the site which looked awesome on the Mac was broken on the PC, meaning that once again I had to break out tabling and faking a lot. But in the end my new site looks one hell of a lot better than the old one, which was put together by a committee of mentally ill people–and looked like it. (I’m mentally ill. I can say this stuff. Sort of like the N word.)

I offered to do a similar redesign for somebody else on the team, but communications broke down because I wouldn’t let her hang on the phone with me while she supervised me making her changes live. This woman, known henceforth as The Client because she flashed me back to my early agency days, is unclear on what the big megilla is making PDFs so different from Word documents and was miffy because I couldn’t edit one of her pre-existing PDF bits. (They wouldn’t spring for the $30 CSS book [“We thought you already knew all that!”]; there’s no way they’re getting me Acrobat–I’m just glad that the Mac does basic PDFs natively.)

She also put up a downloadable document in Word. And I used my nice words and everything, but no dice. Webmonkeys are webflunkies, and as soon as she realized she couldn’t micromanage the entire rebuild, she faded off to a corner. This is swell with me, as Clients get charged Real Money, instead of the we’ll-pay-you-for-a-sick-day method we use around here, and I already have *ahem* a job. THAT at least has been going smoothly, which of course now has my paranoia radar blinking.

So there have been days I’ve been holding onto my recovery with all my fingernails, and I won’t deny that there has been crying. (Crying’s OK. It’s when I start walking around randomly singing all the time that it’s time for the men with the net.)

Writing: Well, you’ve already noticed the lack of blogging. But I did *drumroll* finish the epsilon draft of Max, meaning that as soon as the beta team does this one last crawl, it’s time to figure out what to do next. I was planning on sending it out the old-school way, but I have to talk to an expert on disability before I do that–heaven forbid it actually sell for too much money and I end up shot in the foot. I might end up self-publishing after all, who knows?

Meanwhile, I’ve been plodding along on Max Draconum and lazily wondering what to feed you nice people next. I think I might just rewrite the rest of the Damascus thread after all, seeing as I’ve decided to simplify the book it used to live in and focus instead on another of its plots.  We shall see, we shall see.

But for now I wanted to pop on, tell y’all I haven’t gone back to the hospital yet, and now consider myself poked about the blog thang. Peace, y’all!

Waiting

29 Wednesday May 2013

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My 22-year-old son moves in with me tonight. As I write, he is boarding in Cincinnati and will show up at Logan in about two and a half hours. I hope. My son is a lot like me; he has adventures, and with the whole state of Ohio to have them in–whoa nelly! Anything could be happening, and since “phone” is still an exotic concept of which we speak, there’s nothing I can do but wait.

As always, there are complicating factors–maybe it will thunder, maybe it won’t, and maybe Logan will get a wild hare up its ass and throw down some dramatic security measures for Mrs. Obama, here today to talk to the Marathon Bombing survivors.  But as of now Delta assures me things are A-OK, and I refuse to hear any threatening music in the background. Instead, I wait here at the office until it’s a reasonable time to go wait at the airport.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ve been waiting for eleven years. After a court battle, custody of my two children was split between the parents, and through an unusual combination of power, spite, and the judge’s overlooking the concept “visitation order,” I’ve seen my son four times in the last decade. I can never forget burying my face in his curls that one last time before getting behind the wheel to take his silent and gray-faced older sister back to what used to home, and would be spun into a two-person home again, but for a while was just the place where we lived with an empty room.

That was eleven years ago, and after adventures, my daughter and I now have a happy (if too-tiny) home which we share with a cat and two ferrets. The adjustments will now have to go the other way: buying more food and toilet paper rather than less, having to house him on the couch instead of letting odds and ends fill a room without an occupant.  No more slouching around our bachelorette pad semi-clad. Our family is bigger now, with all the excitement and stress that entails.

My own adjustment has to go the other way too. In order to keep it together at least for a few months, I sat as hard on all that horrible ugly pain as I could. I’ve survived many nightmares, but this was the worst.  I couldn’t dissociate away from it, and nothing helped–nothing except focusing on my daughter, who was dealing with her own trauma over a judge who hadn’t believed her and had taken her little brother away. Shutting myself down was all I had, and it wasn’t healthy.

I have to open the cupboard, now that it’s safe, now that it’s over. As I write this, my Pandora is playing the title music from Star Wars–which seems only appropriate. I’m one of those annoying people whom John Candy apostrophized at the end of Planes, Trains and Automobiles: “What? Was your mother a key grip?”–I have to sit through all the titles or It Doesn’t Count. The resolving chord, that weird little MPAA symbol. (My tribe has no apologies now that movies have occasionally started rewarding us with extra scenes as Easter eggs. Bwah ha, oh daughter pacing in the lobby!)

I waited. Am waiting. They’re running the list of post-post-production assistants, and my son’s plane has left Ohio (with him on it oh please) and is in fact running twenty minutes early. Tomorrow I will have the nuisance of tiptoeing through a morning routine that doesn’t involve lolling on the couch, and in the days after that, so many little annoyances involved in getting my country mouse installed in the Big City. Many annoyances. Sibling opera. Crowded house. Can’t wait.