 Nostalgia, DVDs, old movies, television, OTR, fandom, good news and bad, picks, pans, cute budgie stories, cute terrier stories, and anything else I can think of. Contact me at theyoungfamily (at) earthlink (dot) net . . . . . . . . . .
|
||
|
» Thursday, October 20, 2022
Scared and Scared Some More
James has been grunting when he breathes. When I ask him about it he says he isn't or that he "can't hear anything." If this is a comment about how bad his hearing has gotten, so be it. But I can hear the grunt sitting three feet away from him. Otherwise he was doing okay—he had his PICC line removed (although he had a low-grade fever the day after)—and we went shopping and picked up some oral antibiotic for him. Then came Thursday. Started out great: we went to the Cobb County license office and renewed the handicapped tag for the truck. In fact, they let him have a handicapped license plate; when he first got the handicapped tag way back in 2014, we were told he could either have the license plate or the tag; since we sometimes use both cars the tag was the better option. Now he has the permanent plate for the truck and the tag is in "Butch" for when we use the car together. He also straightened out a problem with his bank account. We had supper. We watched Young Sheldon and something we had on the DVR. Then I put on Law & Order from the DVR. About three-quarters through it, James had to use the bathroom. All of a sudden he was calling my name. And also telling me to call 911. He'd sat down on the toilet and all of a sudden felt like he couldn't draw a breath. He grabbed the pulse oximeter on the divider, clipped it on, and his pulse ox was 65! (It later went up to 73.) You bet I was on the phone to 911. I kept telling him to breathe as deeply as he could, and he got up, crossed the bedroom, into the hall, the bit of the living room, and one by one down the stairs, still having trouble breathing. I talked to the lady from 911 all the time. His color was fine, no blue lips or anything, he was just having trouble breathing. EMS finally showed up, he went the rest of the way down the stairs and they put him on the stretcher. The moment he lay flat he started gasping and saying he couldn't breathe. They propped him up finally and that was better. In the meantime we discussed hospitals. They could take him to St. Joseph's, but they were worried about his breathing. I would have preferred Wellstar Cobb, which is the closest, but they took him to Kennestone, which has the best trauma center. I walked Tucker and then covered Snowy and turned out the lights and beat it to the hospital, stayed with him until six a.m., went home to shower and sleep for a few hours, walk the dog, turn the TV for Snowy, then back to the hospital at eleven. He was all day in ER, and they didn't get him a room until 10:30 p.m., a tiny room with a recirculator fan in it, as it had been used for COVID patients, and he was back on oxygen, and furosimide. And here he stayed until the 18th (they took him off the cardiac floor on the 17th and into a nice big room). I was in pieces off and on, my only respite a Sunday seminar I had signed up for where Vincent D'Onofrio talked about his approach to acting; "method" acting has always been kind of made fun of, but I enjoyed listening to him talk about where his "inspiration" (for lack of a better word) came from when he did various roles—it could also be applied to writing, using your own feelings from your memories to bring life to your character. (He did this from his apartment and it was neat watching the sun lower and then sunset fall in NYC from the window behind him.) Once he got to breathing better, James was bored and restless, and even after they transferred him off cardiac and they let him go the next day, he was looking so wan and defeated that I went out into the hallway, telling him I wanted to walk a little, but instead I was out there crying my eyes out to the nurse. Wellstar Kennestone's food has gone way downhill; every time I ate in the cafeteria at night I got sick, gravies or ketchup on everything, although the brown gravy on the hamburger the first night wasn't too bad. Their wifi wasn't anywhere near as frustrating as St. Joe's, but the doctors gave us hives: every single time the cardiologist came in, he was hectoring James about eating too much sodium, that we must be mistaken about how much sodium he was eating, that his cardiologist was "not telling the truth" about James' real condition, on and on and on, and yet none of the doctors had any answers about why this happened. He had no weight gain, no leg swelling, we had no clue that something was going to go wrong, we had gone out that day and he had no problems with breathing. It just hit and hit hard. I wanted to scream at someone; we kept pressing for info and got absolutely none at all. Discharge was absolutely disorganized. Instead of the doctors coming in to tell you you were going home and what you had to do, they basically just said, "You're going home today," and then we cooled our heels through three Law & Order episodes before the nurse came in and asked what was up and we said we didn't know. They also had to arrange for a portable oxygen unit to go home with us until Apria could deliver a bigger model for the bedroom (and then Apria would also deliver oxygen tanks for when we wanted to go out). First they told us the oxygen unit would go to the house, and then they said "No, he must be on oxygen on the way home." So Apria delivered it to the hospital, and then we had to go downstairs to "the discharge center" (the old emergency room). This is where they pull the IVs out of your arm and give you all the instructions. It was horrible. By the way, it was only when James got dressed that we discovered that they had cut his shirt off him when he arrived at the hospital. He was so out of it he didn't remember. So we didn't get home until almost suppertime, I had to drag that "portable" oxygen thing up the f*cking stairs, and James just had to get himself up. We had Trader Joe's orange chicken for dinner and remained glassy-eyed for the rest of the night. The other bad thing about going to Wellstar instead of a Kaiser hospital is that we had to make all the followup appointments on our own. We managed to see Dr. Mobley on Thursday, but James basically spent Tuesday making doctors' appointments.
Labels: errands, frustration, health, sickness  » Tuesday, February 04, 2014
Straws
 Willow's appetite, or lack of one, is the hardest on both of us. Things she would eat last week she will no longer eat. She was doing so well until the middle of January and then it began to deteriorate again. We dangle home-cooked food in front of her and she just turns up her nose, but begs when we eat (things she cannot eat, with salt and spices). If she didn't want to eat period, we would understand, but it's this turning up her nose at good meat, rice, and veg and then pleading with us to feed her that is wrenching. Then there are her other habits: she is good for a few days, then does what she did this morning, defecates on the carpet, which I can handle, but then steps in it, which makes a huge mess to clean up with the biological product neutralizer and disinfectant. If we had real floors instead of carpet it would be different, but we couldn't afford them then and we certainly can't afford them now. Most of all it's just watching her go downhill. A year ago you wouldn't have known she was going to turn fifteen, except for the loose gait from the bad tendons in her hindlegs and the white muzzle. She danced when she saw foods and a treat, she went outside with head up and curious nose a-wiggle. Now she still sniffs, she still patrols, she still eats, but it's all rote. I feel guilty leaving her locked in the bathroom because I have to get work done, but realize I'm taking away from her one of the few pleasures she has left, sleeping on the recliner. And if we make a decision, are we doing it for her, or are we doing it for us? In the meanwhile, James made a good-faith effort to repair the desk I use for telework (one of the casters fell off because the particle-board it was mounted in gave way), but the boards he used as a prop were too long. I was hoping to be able to tip it and roll it on the other three wheels, but the edge of the board drags in the carpet (glad now it isn't hardwood, or there would be a gouge in it now). In effect I now have to drag the desk into position with the printer and my office supplies on it, which has pulled the muscles in my back, leaving it pretty painful to sit at the moment. We can swap it for the desk downstairs, which is the same desk and which does not need to move, but it involves getting them up and down the stairs. James has already fallen twice in the last two weeks and I don't want to go for a trio. (This also explains why we have a nearly 80-pound upended dead convection microwave acting as an "endtable" in the living room; we need to get the damnfool thing downstairs without hurting either of us.) And Ikea apparently no longer makes this desk. In fact, as far as I can see, they make no rolling desks at all any longer. All I know is I'm fed up with the clutter; things that need to be gone that aren't, and I bump into them, trip over them, and can't vacuum with them there (and why I haven't had the stupid vacuum surgically attached to me by now I don't know, because the wretched thing seems to be more out of the closet than in). Not only is no progress being made, but I'm sliding backward. Labels: dogs, emotions, frustration » Saturday, June 22, 2013
Think  Tiny whimpers at the door turned into larger ones. It was 7:45 a.m. and Willow needed to go out, so James stumbled into shorts and a shirt and took her out. I was determined to wait it out until the alarm rang, but nature screamed suddenly, and that was the end of that. Sorry, seven hours of sleep, can't make it today.It was a bit after nine when we arrived at the Farmer's Market (copped the last parking space) and it was already too warm for me! We bought a cucumber, grape tomatoes, some fingerling potatoes, a beef stroganoff pot pie, some chocolate cherry cashew cookies for a dessert, chicken salad, goat cheese, peaches, that luscious Pine Street Market bacon, and James got a little sweet potato tart. Capra Gia had two young goats with them, and they were already lying sleepy in the shade. Leashed dogs trotted, panting, around us, including a darling Italian greyhound hiding under a greyhound of the same black-and-white pattern. The Artists Market was this morning as well, so we walked along Mill Street to and from the farm stalls surrounded by pretty earrings, necklaces, paintings, and other geegaws, and some huge firepits guaranteed to last a lifetime. One lady at the Farmer's Market proper had flowers, including marigolds and begonias, both which my Uncle Guido used to plant in our front yard flowerbed every year. She also had geraniums, which we used to buy when we went to the cemetery, because they were the flowers we could afford. Made me think of Mom. When we got home we had to start work. Earlier in the week, James had gotten out of work about noon. He'd had his lunch, and in walking back to the kitchen, noticed the Ikea shelf we'd bought two years ago to put up in the kitchen over the baker's rack to get the items we use seldom, like the stock pot and the sugar, out of the way of what we use all the time, like the Bisquik and the rice. He thought "Hey, that shouldn't take me long to put up," collected the drill, the measuring tape, a pencil, wall anchors, and other supplies, unloaded all the containers from the baker's rack, moved it back, and set to work. When I got in he said, "There's a small hole in the wall." And no shelf, sadly. He'd assembled the shelf, measured, gotten it level, drilled the holes, and put the wall anchors in, top and bottom. Then he screwed the shelf into the two top wall anchor holes. The shelf looked a little off to him, so, before he set it in permanently by screwing in the two bottom screws in the two bottom wall anchors, he gave the shelf a small tug to make sure it was fastened securely. Well, one wall anchor never deployed at all, and popped straight out of the wall leaving a 3/4 diameter hole. The screw had fed into the other wall anchor at an angle making it unable to deploy, and that pulled out of the wall inflicting collateral damage, leaving the drywall looking like someone had punched it with a fist. Sigh. So we had to go to Lowes today to buy a patch kit; we found a nice one, with screening, drywall compound, and a putty knife all included (we bought some extra compound just in case). As we came out of Lowes they were giving away free hot dogs and water, so sometimes there is such a thing as a free lunch. :-) Then we unloaded the baker's rack again, enough so that we could move it, and James had the two holes patched in a trice. We just had to wait thirty minutes, which, of course, I used to work on the laptop. Installed HTML Pro for web pages, Paint Shop Pro 5 (I don't do anything complicated on the laptop; if I want to, I can install Gimp for that) for images, VLC to play video, and Audacity to try to record off the BBC (but I can't because for some reason it picks up background sounds in the room, too; it's like a microphone is open), and WinRAR. The only thing I had trouble with was, of all things, Windows Media Player, and that was only because, when I had gone into the install panel to delete Windows items I didn't want, like Outlook Express and Front Page, I'd accidentally deleted Windows Media Player, too. Once I re-initialized it, it was fine. The wireless signal still drops out occasionally, but I believe this is the router's fault because it happens on my desktop and on the netbook as well. To keep it from kicking me offline, I usually have BBC's iPlayer running Radio 3 (classical music) in the background. Anyway, this stuff didn't dry in thirty minutes. Or sixty, for that matter. And when it was almost dry, we discovered the screening for the hole was showing, so I put another thin coat of the compound on it. The thing about this stuff is that it goes on a bright, bright pink, like a bougainvillea flower, and fades to white when dry. The second coat on the hole is fading, but it's still pink. Dang it. So this project probably won't be done until tomorrow. We hope to cut our losses and use the two wall anchors still in the wall for the top part of the shelf, and use some heavy plastic wall anchors for the bottom. This means the shelf will be a foot lower than I wanted it (just high enough that the stock pot just cleared the ceiling), but I figure we can use the top rack of the baker's rack for the smaller containers (pioneer porridge, kosher salt, steel cut oats, etc.), and with the stock pot off the baker's rack shelf, if the rice container doesn't fit on the taller shelf, it can be on the rack, and the shelf can still hold the flour and Bisquik, which only James uses and can reach, and the sugar and the Splenda, which I use so seldom it won't be a hardship to pull up the stool to get them. Sigh. This is, of course, if the other two metal wall anchors do their job. Either that or we'll have another patching job next weekend. [Later: Boy, did this turn into a comedy of errors! The drywall patching compound finally dried and we went to paint it, only to realize there wasn't a proper wall-painting paintbrush in the house! I finally pulled out my inch-wide craft brush that I use for painting big projects like shelves, and painted all the places that were patched, as well as a bunch of marks on the wall. We had gotten rid of a lot of speckly food spatters by washing down the wall with a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, which works superbly, but some of the scuff marks would not come off. Plus there were places around the doorway where the paint had worn off the metal corners of the doorjam, so those are now covered. The paint went on light, got darker, then hour by hour lightened until by the time we went to bed you couldn't tell what had been patched. Small comfort for a disappointing afternoon.] Labels: computers, food, frustration, home improvement, shopping » Monday, July 16, 2007
Juuuuuust Ducky...
Been quite a morning so far.
Go to pack my lunch and there's tiny livestock wandering the kitchen floor. Aieeeee! Get to work and my computer will not boot up. I tried it twice, then called the helpdesk. They sent over a technician. Apparently no security scripts will run. The tech cannot even make it work in administrator mode because they've made Windows so secure there's no way to access it. [eyes roll] So to get my computer going again they will have to reformat my hard drive. (Yes, you heard that right. Even the tech thinks it's absurd.) So presently I'm working at a co-worker's desk while she is in class. I called the exterminator and their computers were down, so they can't schedule me for anything until they're working again. Gah. Oh, and I was assigned ten more orders over the weekend. Geez, and it's only ten o'clock... Labels: frustration, insects, work |
||
