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Friday, December 28, 2007
well!
After making a big deal (to put it lightly) out of how miserable I was, I feel compelled to post and inform my vast Internet public that I feel all better now.
Thank you for caring.
P.S. It warms the cockles of my cockle-laden little heart (whatever cockles are) to see that the Gospel of Nikon is spreading among my friends. Congratulations!
Thursday, December 27, 2007
four out of six
...of us are sicksicksick. It started last night with Mom and me, and then today Dad went down and now C is starting to. I think it's only a matter of time before we are all incapacitated by this terrible bug that sucks away all our energy and makes our bodies do unmentionable things at all hours of the day and night. SOS! SOS! Send soup! Send fuzzy pajamas and slippers! Send people to empty our storage unit, which must be emptied by the thirty-first and there's a very cold, wet storm slated to last through the twenty-ninth, while T does not have Monday off! And for pete's sake send someone to do laundry or we are all doomed!
Me? Hyperbole? NEVAH. (Just in case you wondered where C got it. You didn't wonder? Oh.)
But seriously, ohmygosh I haven't been this miserable in YEARS. Ugh.
Friday, November 09, 2007
relief
The doctor says it's a keloid scar, slightly inflamed. Completely harmless, although we're to watch it in case it turns out she's wrong, and it starts oozing or anything sinister like that. It's already getting slightly smaller, so odds of that are slim. Thank you all for praying and caring.
This was good enough news that the fact that my beautiful Dart has started spewing oil from its innards for some completely undiagnosable reason (this, in case you were unsure, is a Very Bad Thing) is almost insignificant by comparison.
(Poor T... the guy never gets a rest. He is the one who hired himself as the family mechanic, though.)
Thursday, November 08, 2007
fear
C has this... abscessy THING on the back of her right earlobe next to her piercing. I just discovered it tonight. It is about the size of a pea, and it looks exactly like the pictures of the early stages of MRSA infection that are all over the Internet right now. We are planning to be on her pediatrician's doorstep when the office opens tomorrow. If they refuse to fit her in to the schedule, we'll be going to the ER. Please pray. Not just for her, and for accuracy in diagnosis, but for me, because I am simmering silently at a level just below total freakout right now and I know sleep won't come easy tonight.
I can't think of anything else to write. Just please God let this all be a huge overreaction on my part, that's all I ask.
Friday, November 03, 2006
aren't emergency rooms fun?
We spent the afternoon at the ER, because all of a sudden in the past two weeks T has started to have episodes of cardiac arrhythmia -- as in one or two episodes a day -- when he had previously had no issues in that department at all. When he had one today we didn't have anything else pressing to do, so we thought, hey, let's pack everyone up and spend the afternoon watching cable TV. Or rather the kids and I watched cable TV in the waiting room* while T sat on a hospital bed wearing a fetching gown (Angelica: Always Rented, Never Sold. WHY is that a selling point? Cleanliness? Someday when I'm a nurse I'll find this out), rigged up with a maze of wires and tubes and stuff, with his heart behaving perfectly normally, because of course the episode ended about three minutes before they got him into a room, but after he had been called back into the check-in and prep area.
The kids were very good. Eventually my parents were able to pick them up, but they spent a good solid two or two and a half hours sitting quietly and behaving. And I knit for a while on the back of a sweater I'm trying to make for C with the bouclé yarn, which I have tamed to such a degree that I can knit OK with it (although I am still very obviously a total beginner. The woman sitting next to me in the waiting room watched me knit for a few minutes and then asked politely, "Are you just learning?" Maybe it was the tongue sticking out of the corner of my mouth that gave it away), but heaven forbid I drop a stitch or have to backtrack for any reason because then I'm just totally lost and I can never get all the stitches back on the needle right.
Anyway. So now T and I will have coordinating Heart Issues. Me with my tachycardia and he with his arrhythmia. Boy will WE be a hit at parties. When I realized that T is only three years younger than my dad was when his episodes of arrhythmia became severe enough to warrant medication and then a pacemaker, it made me feel like we're maybe a little bit... mature. Not in a bad way, just in that dang-we-are-really-not-kids-anymore way. At least he'll always be five years older than me, so that I have plenty of time to adjust to the idea of being whatever age he happens to be before I actually reach that age. Thirty-one, for example, felt way older when he was thirty-one than it does now that I am.
*get this: because the window between the waiting area and the work area is not soundproof, the TV has to be on constantly for patient privacy purposes. It's a hospital regulation that you have to sit there and let TV drone on and on at you, or else go outside. At least we got them to change it from CNN after a couple of hours of one political ad after another -- plus the commercials which were just as bad -- when the newsperson decided it was time to give my children an impromptu education about g a y s e x, so we could watch an episode of "Little House on the Prairie" and then a show on Animal Planet about animals in Namibia hosted by some guy with a death wish.
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
out of practice
I've had a lot of little thoughts buzzing around in my head, but I'm having a hard time writing about them. So here are a few little tidbits, none of which is worthy of anywhere near an entire journal entry on its own.
- I'm feeling SO MUCH BETTER. Seriously, yesterday was, like, the turnaround day for me. I was able to take not one but TWO (very short) walks yesterday; I am not up to my normal levels of activity yet, but I'm acting a lot less like an invalid and I'm not suffering for it like I did even on Monday when I decided to just live normally. I'm glad T has stayed home, because I am not supposed to so much as lift a gallon of milk, and he's handy for keeping me from OVER-doing it (plus, hey, we've blown our entire vacation budget for the summer on this surgery, so T being at home for these three weeks is pretty much all we're going to get; might as well enjoy it, right?). But he doesn't have to be constantly at my beck and call now, which I think is probably a good thing. And that's hopefully the last time I'll write ANYTHING in this journal about this whole recuperation thing -- I know everyone must be bored with it by now.
- LT has decided to spend all of his money (that's $110, $50 of which he just got for his birthday) on a Father's Day present for T. He's actually been planning this for quite some time. I would say "there's not a selfish bone in his body" but that's not QUITE true. But there are certainly fewer selfish bones than there were in my body when I was nine.
- Also about LT: doesn't this look... vaguely disturbing? Or at least decidedly uncomfortable? He was just lying like that, all ho-hum, writing in his journal during school this morning. (I remember being a kid and sitting on my bottom with my knees splayed out to the side like an M and hearing similar comments from adults about that. I guess kids are just made of rubber.)
- I have a whole post about Hosea 4 written but I set it aside until I can read it with some objectivity because right now I think it seems really scattered and nearly pointless.
- I haven't done nearly as much reading this month as I had thought I would. I've only read 4 books. I can't even remember finishing anything before I went in for surgery. And everything I've been reading has been rereads, except for one book which I'm not sure I'm going to finish called Theodora's Diary. It's supposed to be a kind of Christian Bridget Jones. Except that it relies a wee bit too heavily on the kind of bland humor that gets passed around via email -- you know, the whole funny-mistakes-in-church-bulletins stuff -- and on caricatures of various Christian fringe-ish sorts of groups. I think the author (and publisher) figured she had a captive audience, consisting of all these Christian women whose consciences won't let them really get into the more vulgar humor on the market today -- and hey, she's British, so that's a plus, right? All I can say about this book is: YAWN. The four books I've finished are two Austens (S&S and P&P; I'm on MP now) and two L.M. Montgomerys (Anne of the Island and Anne of Avonlea. Neither of those last two is doing anything for me this time around either, which is sad. Must be something wrong with me.)
- Um, I think that's finally all. Cripes, SHUT UP, Rachel.
Monday, April 18, 2005
this is what being laid-up gets me
I guess all I need to get a piecework project actually put together (my least favorite part; has taken literally years on this one) is major surgery. Who knew? And what will I have them take out next? ;)
Saturday, April 16, 2005
Thank you
thank you for all your nice thoughts and prayers about my surgery. I'm home, about to take a nap, but I wanted to post about how wonderful my family is. I came home to a huge WELCOME HOME MOMMY banner across the front of the porch (pictures later), a sparkling clean house, with THE LIVING ROOM REARRANGED (have I mentioned how much I love rearranging furniture?) so as to allow me access to books, light, pens, paper, the computer, the remotes and a view of the TV (meaning as soon as I wake up from my nap I'm starting a Jane Austen marathon), all from my recliner. Everyone is being so nice to me. I am in some pain, not as bad as after the c-sections I don't think. Thursday was awful, Friday was bearable, and today is fantastic by comparison with the other two, although I still have that feeling like I will never again feel normal. Will be glad to prove that wrong SOON. :)
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
the best-laid plans...
Well, here's a list of things I meant to do before I went into the hospital:
- Get fully caught up on laundry.
- Make the house spotless.
- Find a picture of the kids together to take with me. (one of the few evils of digital photos is that they're seriously less portable, unless you print them, which we can't since our printer hates us.)
- Make a new journal template.
- Write at least one journal post that wasn't full of whining, so that newcomers to my blog wouldn't run screaming the other way at the first sentence written by a person who gives Cousin Gladys in The Blue Castle a run for her money in the whining department. (Read This Now. This Means You.)
- Go to the library and get some light-but-not-hilarious (because I know from experience that laughing after abdominal surgery is a huge no-no) books to take with me in addition to the stack I've already got going.
- Wash my bathrobe. (this takes a load almost by itself. It's huge and blue and terrycloth.)
Now ask me how many of these things I got done. Go ahead, ask.
Maybe the BIG FAT ZERO you just heard has to do with the fact that I spent Monday in Yosemite, Tuesday in the valley doing pre-op stuff, and today working my hiney off (ha! I wish) helping to fell about 20 trees, and pulling brush, and stacking logs. T's dad (the realtor) had a client who wanted some property brushed and cleared a bit before he would agree to buy it, so T's dad hired us to do it. Today was the only day that my dad, T, and I could all work on it. LT and C helped also. I AM SO SORE OH MY GOSH SO SORE AND I CAN'T TAKE ADVIL. At least I'll have morphine tomorrow. That should knock out some muscle soreness pretty effectively, wouldn't you think?
Anyway. Ahem. This was supposed to be a NON-whiny post, wasn't it. Whoops.
Sunday, April 10, 2005
bye-bye, Snickers (and Special Dark and big bowls of Rocky Road and...)
T has hypoglycemia, specifically reactive hypoglycemia, or if you want to get really technical, he has "nonhypoglycemic hypoglycemia", since when he goes in for a 3-hour glucose screen, even though he's very nearly comatose about fifteen minutes after the glucose hits his system and he stays that way for the entire three hours, nothing shows up in his bloodwork. For quite some time, maybe two or three years, he's noticed that if he eats sweets, especially on an empty stomach, he gets a) very tired, sometimes to the point of literally HAVING to go to sleep b) a thudding headache in his temples and c) extremely irritable. Nowadays if he even eats, say, not-sugared but not-whole-grain breakfast cereal, he is in bad shape. Yesterday he had cake with lunch and spent the afternoon unconscious on the couch, and the rest of the weekend was not a whole heck of a lot better for him. When all this mess surrounding my medical issues is all cleared up, he's going to see a new doctor; meanwhile, since his symptoms match reactive hypoglycemia exactly, we're going to assume this is what he has and act accordingly, and see if all symptoms clear up.
Which, frankly, is not going to be a whole lot of fun.
Well, there is that aspect that's kind of fun, wherein I get to be all methodical and make lists of possible foods to eat and create SIX MEALS A DAY from them. But let's face it, a man who can ordinarily eat nearly an entire single batch of waffles in one sitting is not going to like having one-inch cubes of cheese become a regular part of his diet. My favorite teenaged-boys-eating-horror-story is: when T was in high school and then in the Navy, he would frequently buy a pound of sharp cheddar cheese and a quart of chocolate milk, and that was a meal. Or he and a friend would go buy a dozen donuts. Each. For breakfast. He doesn't do that anymore, of course, but still, it's a big step from where he is to where he'll be from now on: looking at a dinner plate with, for example, two six-inch whole-wheat tortillas holding a total of two ounces of meat and some vegetables. But hey, lettuce is a free food! As is celery! So he should be really happy about those, at least. I mean, come on. Lettuce and celery! Who needs cheesecake when you have those?
I'll sign off with two pictures. This evening at almost exactly five o'clock the whole family started in at the same time with the "I'm HUNGRY" thing, looking at me as if they expected me to pull a roast turkey and all the trimmings out of thin air or some such thing. I told them I'd make dinner but first I asked them if, just to humor me, they could do an actual baby-birds-in-the-nest imitation, to send me into a kitchen with a smile. And they did.
And then here's a picture of me, coloring with C. Did you know that Crayola manufactures a crayon called "purple mountain's majesty"? Anyone who can tell me why that made me send a tersely-worded email to Crayola gets a free signed first edition of my first book: The Essential Guide to Grammar Snobbery.
That's just the working title, of course.
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