OmegaMom

Or, alternatively, “Help me, Obiwan Kenobi!  You’re my only hope!”

What OmegaMom has been doing for the past two days, while sorting and washing laundry, is quickly becoming addicted to puzzle games on the computer.  Specifically, “hidden object” games.

Let’s back up a year or two.  At one point, OmegaDotter wanted (gag!) La Casa de Dora, a computer game.  We had a trial version, which lasted an hour.  So I signed up with BigFishGames–the “Jumbo Club” option–thinking that we would be downloading games on a regular basis, and downloaded La Casa de Dora.

Then I promptly forgot about my Jumbo Club membership.

So…OmegaDotter has gotten more mature, more able to figure things out, more deft with a mouse, and a month or two ago OmegaDad downloaded trial versions of some other games for her, specifically SuperCow, The Scruffs, and Feeding Frenzy.

Once again, the trial versions expired.

The dotter really liked SuperCow.  I really liked The Scruffs, a hidden object game with a sense of humor.  I decided–o brilliant idea!–to buy her these games for Christmas.

But when I went to BigFishGames, I tried signing up with my regular email address, and The Powers That Be told me I was already registered.

Whoops!

But!

But!

I now had 9 game credits!  Woot!

So rather than spending $10 per game (with the super-de-duper holiday game savings coupon), suddenly they were free!

I promptly downloaded the three games, and then spent hours the night before Christmas working my way through The Scruffs.

And then I decided I wanted another “hidden object” game, so I went to the game site and found “Mystery Case Files:  Ravenhearst”.

And then on Christmas day and the day after Christmas, I went through Ravenhearst.

And then I decided I wanted another Ravenhearst game (because I had seen it on the front page of the game site) and I downloaded it.

And I have been playing these damned games for days on end.

This is not good.  I need a magic word (like “Xyzzy!”) to transport me away from this sudden addiction.  Or I need a rescuer, like Obiwan Kenobi, to fight off the Dark Side of the Force.  I have a real life, dammit.  I have a dotter (who is enjoying working the puzzles with me, at least, so we’re doing a Family Fun Time Activity).  I have a husband.  There are errands to run.  There are stairs to shovel, because we’ve had a foot of snow on top of older snow, and 45-mph winds blowing the snow hither and yon.  We have a broody hen segregated in the garage (more on that later).  I still have laundry to do.

…but I still need to free the twin girls’ ghosts and find all the objects and figure out all the puzzles, and it’s calling me.  (Cue ominous music.)

But suffering from a sinus infection which has decided to grace me with an ongoing headache that makes me nauseated and have sparkles in front of my eyes.  Sort of the pseudo-migraine of the sinus world.  Ugh.  So I finally had OmegaDad swing me by the doc-in-the-box and am now outfitted with antibiotics and decongestents and hopefully I will be feeling more like a real live human being tomorrow.

I have some ideas for posts, but nothing is gelling.  Right now, it’s just amorphous ideas drifting through my head; a paragraph or two plus an idea of where it will go, but nothing that is coalescing into anything worthwhile putting down on paper (or putting down on the screen).

Ugh.

Anyone want a Christmas card & letter from me?  Email me. 

The dawg has had unfirm poops for the last few days.  Yesterday, it started being more runny.  This early a.m., he was in and out multiple times, and in the gloaming it sounded even more runny.  Then this morning in the bright sunshine, it was obvious it was almost liquid.  There was straining and twitching.  Then he started barfing.  We were getting worried.  OmegaDad located a vet, called, and got an appointment for 4 p.m.

Today was the dotter’s Kindergarden Circus.  We left, watched adorable five- and six-year-olds playing at being horses, lions, dancing bears, acrobats, and clowns, and singing songs.  (I’ll give you one guess as to what the dotter played in this do.  One.)

We returned home an hour and a half later, to discover the dawg had not been able to hold it and had splattered all over the living room floor.

Well, ewww, yes.  But what was most disturbing to us was that…(grossitude alert!  I mean, even more gross!)…there was obviously a half-and-half mixture of liquified trying-to-be-poop and blood.

Blood?!

OmegaDad has a history of bleeding duodenal ulcers.  These are things that don’t hurt, because they are in the part of the intestine without any pain nerves.  So they just stew along, getting worse and worse, until they start bleeding.  In human beings, you end up with black, tarry poop.  That’s when OmegaDad starts looking like a strung-out junkie, purple bags under his eyes, ashen skin, purple lips, and having dreadful headaches.  And we haul him off to the hospital for transfusions and (if not caught in time) some time in the ICU.  I’ve dealt with this three times since we got together (the ICU incident was, luckily enough, before I met him…that would have just sent me ballistic).  OmegaDad has learned that he cannot stop his Prilosec.  Ever.  Because he doesn’t have the kind of ulcers that you can cure with a month’s worth of intensive antibiotic treatment.

Anyway, any time there is blood in poop, I get Very Anxious.

So OmegaDad got the appointment moved up.  I got out the Clorox and started cleaning like a maniac.  The thought of this thing being contagious just raises the hair on my head.

Then I hauled OmegaDotter off to her Friday gymnastics class.

When we returned, the hubby and dawg had also returned.

OmegaDad was not impressed by the vet.  The vet had not even touched the dawg.  (Well, he does have a bad rep, and we do have to tread very carefully around any vet, because the dawg needs to be either tranquilized or muzzled.  But even so…)  We were able to provide an excellent sample of the stuff from the splatter on the living room floor, which the vet had analyzed, and he proclaimed it a bacterial infection, prescribed antibiotics, no food, water only for a day, then the bland diet thing, plus chewable Tums.

This didn’t really impress me, either, because…well…very bloody poop just sets all my alarm bells ringing.  Like I said, I get Very Anxious.

Then dawg indicates to me that he needs to go out.  I take him out.  He squirts.  It sounds like water pouring out.  When he’s done, I take a peek, and it looks like cherry red water with some brown mixed in.

Dawg is not happy.  I am not happy.  OmegaDad is not happy.  We may try another vet tomorrow morning.

Anyone have any experience with very sick and unhappy dawgs?

Update:  The dawg vomited again, including his medicine, and there was a hard ball-like thing in the vomit.  So OmegaDad called another vet, and is on his way there now.  We know the dawg is sickly when a moose can be rummaging around in our back yard and he doesn’t even twitch an ear…damn moose, eating our nice fresh green grass!

WHOA!  I was downloading the pics of him from afar when he sauntered up to the house and started chowing down on the grass right outside my office window!!!  I was wildly watching the "files transferred" number, and then clicking on the "delete files uploaded from camera" and going "don’t go away…don’t go away!"  So he didn’t.  And then I wished he would, because he wuz big.

You can see some of OmegaDad’s new veggie beds behind him, in front of "The Villa", which desperately needs painting to match the house.  You can also see some of my Christmas cactus collection.

Note the bent forelegs.  Why reach down using your neck when you can crouch down like that?

Damn moose.  Eating all our nice green grass.  What the heck are we going to do to protect our veggies??

I had, somewhere in the midst of my old collection of LPs, the Angela Lansbury/George Hearn Sweeney Todd production.  It is a queasy-making musical, weird and fantastic and creepy and hair-raising…and full of quite hummable songs that talk about murder, violence, twisted lust, cannibalism, yadda, yadda, yadda.

One of these days I’m going to have to rent the Johnny Depp version.

So why discuss "the demon barber of Fleet Street"?

OmegaDad had a thing growing under his chin.  It grew quite fast.  We decided to send him off to the doc-in-a-box to get it checked out.

Dr. SledDog, the doc-in-a-box, shot him full of local anesthetic, whipped out his scalpel, and cut his throat.

Eeek!

Well, okay, not his throat, but the large goiterous mass under his chin.

And ever since OmegaDad came home with this humongous bandage under his chin, covering his beard, I have been humming "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" in my brain.

Grossitude ensued (really, this is a warning that you may not want to read the next bit):  Dr. SledDog, when he shot him with the anesthetic, had to shoot him four or five times, because each time he plunged the plunger on the opposite side of the growth, the anesthetic went squirting back out the other side.  When the growth was opened, some pus emerged, but Dr. SledDog had to reach inside with his scalpel and dig stuff out…which, apparently, was somewhat crystalline in make-up.  Then Dr. SledDog packed the entire thing up with gauze, slapped the bandage on top, shot OmegaDad with a butt-load of antibiotics, and sent him home with instructions to come back this morning for a follow-up.

Amazingly enough, OmegaDotter listened to me when I requested she not bounce OmegaDad, and was quite gentle with him for the entire evening.

This morning, OmegaDad went in for his follow-up.  He has returned, after having to have a CAT scan (?!).  He needs to go back again to learn the results.  It seems that there is more swelling and what-not that is not reachable, and Dr. SledDog needs to know what’s going on before plunging his straight razor scalpel back in and noodling around with it.

Many years ago, I had outpatient surgery to remove a cyst from my lower back.  (This cyst is apparently a genetic thing; Great-Grandma had one there, and so does OmegaGranny.  I didn’t know it at the time.)  The docs who did it told me it would be a quick-and-easy thing, in, a few numbing shots, slice, remove, sewed back up, and out the door.  Well, firstly, it was much bigger than they expected; a lot of it was subcutaneous.  Secondly, since it was bigger than they expected, they kept running out of numb skin.  That was fun.  Not.  So they ended up chasing the scalpel with more shots and digging further.  Finally, when they got it out, the whole thing was about the size of my thumb.  Ewww. 

Anyway, gross description aside, the thing I remember most was just how much that "small" surgery took out of me.  I was wasted for days; my feeling is that bodies are not made to be cut open on a whim, and doing it can send a finely-tuned collection of skin cells, nerve cells, hormones, chemical signaling pathways, and what-not into a great tizzy.

OmegaDad is feeling the same way.  I’m just waiting for Dr. SledDog to sew him up, fer cryin’ out loud.  And I’m really hoping that the CAT scan doesn’t show anything extraordinary, just more pus and where it is…and hoping that the antibiotics kick in and things calm down and OmegaDad can go to sleep at night, and then I can go to sleep at night.

When you’re sick, and your brain is fuzzy and bleary, you generally sleep and seek out mindless entertainment.  I am trying to keep various space navy stratagems firmly in mind while reading my latest Honor Harrington book, but The Illness keeps me falling asleep instead.

So, off to the intertubes for mindless entertainment.

And I find…

…in all its glory…

…I present…

The Disintegrator!

Our world is a very, very interesting place when there are people who will spend four months lovingly hand-building something like this.

At least this keeps me from having to come up with something intelligent to say to Our Fearless Leader’s plan to "stimulate" the economy (sliding into the crapper as we speak!) by handing out tax rebates.  Ya think that people who are worried that their house is about to be foreclosed on will find a $300 check…stimulating?

OmegaDotter was sick, then OmegaDad got sick.  Now it’s my turn.

My head feels fuzzy and I can’t think.  I hate it when I can’t think.  Gah!

OmegaUnk pointed out in the comments to my previous post that Hasbro is getting huffy about Scrabulous.  As the article I link to says, why on earth don’t they just buy Scrabulous, and keep it running?  Though I suppose they’d get all snarky about paid subscriptions and stuff like that.  Maybe they could do ads, and make it pay that way?

After all, it’s the rare family that’s going to use Scrabulous to play Scrabble™; it would require a computer for each person, or an insane amount of people switching seats and swearing up and down and left and right that they’re not cheating by looking at the other person’s tiles while the other person is playing.  In other words:  people will still buy Scrabble™ for playing at home or with friends, so they’re still going to be getting their money for the game anyway.

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

More later, dudes.

…the dotter is getting better.

The pediatrician (nice lady!) thinks it’s an adenovirus, and it just has to take its course.

I’m hoping to the Kozmik All that she will be all pink-eye-free by Monday, so she can go to school when it starts up again.  As she is still pink-eyed, even after five days of one eye prescription and a half-day of a different eye prescription, she still can’t go back to her out-of-school care place. 

Am I a bad mommy if I just say:  AGGGHHHHH!!

The dotter has been out of commission for just over a week now.  Today’s visit to the pede was graced with OmegaDad’s presence because I pretty much informed him that I was burned out, I was tired to the bone, and it was his turn to help.  Anyway, luckily the illness never reached Dotter Stage 3, but has chugged along at Stage 2 forever. 

Can I say that I am really really looking forward to next Monday, and a healthy child??  I had all this time off, and didn’t get to use any of it as planned.  Wah!

In other news:  The planned mural in the dotter’s bedroom has been languishing in my fertile imagination for months now.  See, I was looking for horsie coloring pages or silhouettes or pictures that I could dump into my photo/art program and manipulate into all being about the same size.  But the pics I kept finding were…well, some were small, some were large, some were fuzzy, some required lots of fiddling…The end result, alas, is that the horsie mural stayed in my head, rather than showing up on the dotter’s bedroom wall.

However!  Since one of OmegaDad’s shameless bribes incentives for the dotter to take her medicine (which she has had copious amounts of) is a dip into the "goody bag" filled with cheap (aka less than $2) toys-n-things, he has had to replenish the stock a few times this week.  Today…today the dotter pulled out…

…a horsie coloring book!

A veritable bonanza of all things horsie!  And all in more or less similar sizes and styles!  And we have a scanner!  So after I post this post, I will be diligently scanning coloring pages so I can create templates so I can paint that damned much-anticipated mural!  Woohoo!

Onto more topical things:  Johnny wrote a post about New Year’s resolutions, in which he states, "I just believe that the best resolutions are those you keep to yourself."  This is something that resonates with me for a different reason:  I fear stating my resolution and then falling flat on my face.  Julie, over at Using My Words, had a post about resolutions, too, that ended up essentially saying her resolutions this year were more "general goals" than specifics with action plans–which fits right in with another blogger’s approach, to unify your resolutions under one word to direct your life for the coming year.  (I thought Julie had pointed me to the Christine Kane post, but it wasn’t her, and now I don’t remember whose post I read about her post on…)

Anyway, I think I have a goal this year.  But, like Johnny, I’m not going to talk about it.  Neener, neener.  It is, for me and for us as a family, a breathtaking and exciting goal.  Goodness knows if I will succeed.

ETA:  Sorry, everyone!  I really didn’t even consider that the last post was my "Stoned Cold" one.  I’m fine–I did toss out the Bad Drugs, I haven’t had a single twinge from my foot (though that will have to wait until I spend a day at the computer, working again, to see whether All Is Well), and I did not fall into a ditch or spin out in the snow or plunge down the stairs or any other disaster that may have popped into people’s imagination.  Thanks for asking, though!

I spent the entire week planning to write a post.  But each time I sat down at the computer and actually thought about a post, my mind would go wondrously blank.

Totally, completely tabula rosa.  Pure, pristine white.

So I’d shrug, read my bloggin’ peeps, and then return to the Bosom of My Family.

Unfortunately, part of the Bosom of My Family has decided, as usual, to get sick.  If it’s the New Year, dotter gets sick.  Really!  Go look at my previous end-of-year posts; you’ll see it’s true.

So my original plan was a wonderful, restful week off, with me being able to tackle a bunch of projects while the dotter was at her all-day after-school care place.  This went to hell in a handbasket as of Thursday, when we decided her constant crying over the sore throat (but no fever) warranted a visit to the doc, who posited a sinus infection and non-feverish tonsillitis.  When she seemed better on Friday, I sent her off to ADASCP, only to have them call an hour later requesting us to take her back because she had pink eye.

Then Friday night she started running The Fever.

Another visit to the doc’s today, and the dire news is that whatever it is is viral, because the slew of antibiotics that she was put on by the doc on Thursday are actually doing their job vis-a-vis the tonsils, and are broad-spectrum enough to hit anything bacterial.

Bah.

The dotter’s illnesses have a three point scale:

1. Temp between 98.6 and 101 - generally just fine, happy as a clam, but unable to go to school or other places if the temp is 100F or greater.
2. Temp between 101 and 104 - miserable.  Whiny.  Bitchy.  Petulant.  Any touch hurts.  Die-away airs…she can’t sit up to get her milk, she must have anything liquid handed to her, medicine is a major PITA to administer.
3. Temp over 104 - More than miserable.  Wants to spend her entire waking time on top of mommy.  No whining, no bitchiness, no petulance, just plain quiet misery.

She’s been at stage 2 for three days now, and it looks like she’ll be there for another day or two at least.

Christmas was a blast.  Dotter and daddy made sugar cookies on Christmas Eve to leave for Santa Claus; mommy and daddy duly ate bites out of the cookies and drank all the milk, which just blew the dotter away.  She’s at a stage where she suspects that it’s me and OmegaDad, but she keeps reassuring herself that it isn’t, but she keeps asking very practical questions that indicate she thinks it’s all a bit unbelievable.

We went cross-country skiing on Christmas Day, had a great time, and took the dotter out too far and too long.  The end result:  OmegaDad had to carry a sobbing dotter back after her plucky attitude gave out entirely.  Turns out she had sprung a leak or two or a thousand in her ski boots, and her socks and feet were entirely soaked and cold as ice.  Bad Mommy and Daddy Score:  -1000.

Some pics–First, OmegaDad and dotter showing off the wreath we made:

Next, the dotter as the chef, taking down orders (okay, so the waitress takes orders; she has the chef hat courtesy of Christmas).  Note, also, the array of horsies on the floor behind her; of course she got some horsies for Christmas.

Me, looking more like a fixture for St. Patrick’s Day.  The hat was because I had not showered, so my hair was stuck up in a mohawk.  The bow had topped off one of the dotter’s presents; we wanted to see what I would look like with it.

Skiing across the bridge in the foggy snow:

It was really a great skiing expedition, but generally too much for an almost-six-year-old.  We’ll be more cautious in the future; I was actually scared that we weren’t going to be able to get her out unless we dragged her behind us.

We got the prescriptions Friday night.  I took the first batch on Saturday morning.

Three hours later, I was getting quite…woozy. 

Sunday, I took another batch.

I had found information on a "Holiday On Ice" show at the ice skating rink attached to the Big Mall in Big City.  So we were driving in to Big City to see the show.  I was woozy again.  I closed my eyes.

Y’know how, when you close your eyes tight, you get flashes of light and patterns and sparkles?  But normally you have to close the eyes quite tightly for a while to get that…

There, relaxing in the car, with my eyes lightly closed, I was getting quite interesting versions of the flashes. 

There were also visions.

Yes, really.  Visions.

The best one was a highly detailed little Santa who appeared in the middle of my vision, then spun backwards, shrinking, until he vanished with a little flash of stars.

Then there were the neon-like straight lines that marched upwards from the bottom of my eyes on up.

Lemme tell you, it was quite interesting.  I never fell asleep, but listened to OmegaDad and dotter chattering, and watched the light show.  But when it came time to "wake up" in the Big City, my eyes felt glued shut.  The eyelids were heavy.  It was a chore to open them.

The "Holiday on Ice" show turned out to be a recital by ice skating students.  But, oh, it was too cute for words.  I could easily turn out to be a recital junkie.

On the other hand, I don’t want to become a medication junkie.  The worst part?  The part that scares me the most?  Was that by the time we got home, I wanted another dose.

Um.

Nuh-uh, thanks very much.

So I tossed the Lyrica into the garbage can and got online to research the stuff.

Apparently, a "drunk feeling"/"inability to concentrate" was a side effect felt by about 12% of the research guinea pigs.  There was, hidden away in the fine print, a little blurb about how a particular group thought it gave a "good high" and that it would probably have a market on the street.  There was also a warning that it might be addictive.

Eeep!

Apparently, Lyrica is one of the very few medications out there that helps with nerve pain; regular painkillers like aspirin or Ibuprofen don’t work.  If my nerve pain were constant, I could see wanting to take the stuff.  But, as it is, the nerve pain is highly intermittent, and I’d much rather try back exercises and stretches and yoga to control it as opposed to getting addicted to this medication.  This is the first time I’ve tried something and actually been scared by my instant reaction, the desire to take more.  It’s a pretty creepy feeling.

So, like I said, into the garbage with that prescription.  I think I’ll have a little talk with the doc and tell him to warn people when he’s prescribing this medication.

I’m borrowing Mrs. Figby’s "Hypochondriac Thursday" theme today.

The past few days, I have been merrily working along, dealing with this and that, and suddenly, out of nowhere…

(cue the theme from Jaws)

I will have a sharp, stabbing, electric-shock like feeling in a very specific spot in the arch of my foot.

We’re talking something that jerks me wide awake out of my deep thought with an audible "Ah, ah, ahhhh, OH!" and grabbing at my foot in desperation.  Lasts about five seconds.  Then, poof, it’s gone again for a random number of hours.

Years ago, I had a pinched nerve in my neck.  Or else something called "thoracic outlet syndrome".  Either way, it manifested itself similarly in a spot on my upper right arm, with a delightfully, painfully zingy electric shock sensation, numbness and tingling in my last two fingers on that hand, and the ability to actually trace the radial nerve down my arm (yes!) because of the pain.  (The radial nerve tracing felt like I was touching a healing bruise.)  The pain started out occurring fairly randomly, like maybe once a day, and then escalated to a point where I was feeling it jab my upper arm once every 30 seconds.  Like someone is stabbing you with an ice-pick.

It took six months of physical therapy to get rid of that feeling.

Add in to this a family history of diabetes.

And the fact that a typical diabetes symptom is something called Neuropathy, and it typically occurs in the feet.

My oldest brother had both his feet amputated due to diabetes, which led (indirectly) to his death.  My dad had problems with his feet for years related to his diabetes.

Probably it’s another pinched nerve.  Fun, fun, fun.

Or, according to Dr. Google, it could be a Morton’s Neuroma.  Fun, fun, fun.

But then again, almost every single "foot pain" link I connected to that talked about zingy electric-shock like things in the foot talked about diabetes.  Since it’s been at least a year since I had a diabetes check, I guess it’s time to go and look again.  Bleah.  I am totally paranoid about diabetes, even tho my fuddy-duddy older brother biologist claims that diabetes is genetically linked through the mother and I should be fairly safe from it…

So, hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to see the doc-in-a-box we go this afternoon.

John Donne Dylan Thomas says, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.“  In general, I agree; don’t give in, don’t give up, keep on keepin’ on.

At this point, though, I’m sure he was talking about people dying young. 

I remember, oh so many years ago, when my grandfather W. finally died, it was such a relief to him and to everyone in the family.  He had been suffering from heart attacks and emphysema and Parkinsons’ Disease for so many years, in and out of hospitals, the EMTs regularly called out to jolt him back into wakefulness when his heart stopped yet again.  Grandma W. had been coping with this for ten years, and even though we had plenty of family in the area who tried to help her with everything, it was wearing on her.

I was in my mid-twenties when the phone call came from my cousin, in the middle of the night.  Grandpa had died.  And while I was sad that he was gone, I remember distinctly feeling very happy that finally, finally Grandma would be able to take a rest, a break, turn her eyes outward from the cocoon of the family home.  She had a lovely year or two afterwards–my aunt and uncle moved her out to California to be in their area, her meds were adjusted, with the majority simply being tossed out, and she was making new friends and socializing like crazy.  Then she, too, died.

Here I am, twenty years later, coping with a different grandparent in a different situation.

Marguerite is 104.  She comes from a line of people who live long, healthy lives.  Her brother was in his 90s when he died; her two sisters both made it past 100 themselves.  Her husband died more than 30 years ago…

She has been a constant in my life.  Not as much for me as for my cousins, whose yearly all-summer visit was one of the few pieces of calm and normalcy in their lives.  But, nonetheless, she’s always been there.  A wonderful grandmother for small children; not-so-wonderful once the kids hit adolescence and start having minds of their own.  Once we all made it through adolescence and our early 20s, we were able to come to grips with how Grandma operated, and we all made our peace, in one way or another, with her.

Which is to say:  We love her.  We may not really like her quite as much as we’d all like to like her, but we all love her.  Fiercely.  Because she’s an amazing woman.

She was still driving until her late 90s.  She was still bowling at age 99.  She was still playing bridge at the assisted living center–and beating the other players–just two years ago.  She just kept keepin’ on, getting slightly frailer, but mostly being astonishingly hale and healthy and doing her puzzles every morning.

I spent a year living with her during the weeks shortly after OmegaDad and I moved to Arizona.  I got a job down in the Valley of Death, but our house was near OmegaGranny, ninety miles away from the job.  So I’d wake up early on Monday mornings, pop into the car, and drive down to my job, then Monday evening would drive to Sun City and spend the nights through Thursday…then, Friday night, would drive back up into the (small) mountains and meet up with OmegaDad for the weekends.  He, in the meantime, was driving 100 miles the other way, on pretty much the same schedule.

Yesterday was my last day in Arizona for a while.  OmegaGranny, the dotter and I visited Great-Grandma in her nursing home.  She is so frail.  She was lost in her mind, trying to figure out why her husband was stepping out with another lady…and I reassured her that B. loved her totally, and that she must be mistaken.  When I asked her if she wanted me to lotion her hands and arms, she agreed, then fretfully told me that I’d have to wash them first, because they were all covered with squashed bugs (the little black spots again).  So I went into the bathroom, wetted down some heavy paper tissue, and came out to carefully wash the non-existent bug juice off her hands before applying the lotion.

This is the woman who kept three little girls squealing with delighted terror at ghost stories featuring herself and her sisters.  This is the woman who won prize after prize for her flowers at her flower club.  This is the woman who took some gold wire and a disposable furnace filter and somehow managed to make a darling angel out of the separate pieces.  This is the woman who trekked to Australia in her 80s, who flew to British Columbia every summer to see her sisters until her late 90s, the woman who sewed her own wedding dress and made smocked clothing for her granddaughters, the woman who put on elaborate plays with her brother and sisters, the woman who was taught for a year at home during the 1918 influenza epidemic, the woman who moved across country with her husband because his job demanded it…

And on and on.

This one is really shaking me up.

Part of it is the realization that I can’t help my mom.  I’m 4,000 miles away.  It’s so stressful for her, and I wish I could wave a magic wand and make it better.  But I can’t, and she can’t.  No-one can.

Right now, all I can do is hope that my grandmother’s amazing body will just decide to…stop.  Right now, I wish her:  Do go gentle into that good night.  Because the time for raging, raging against the dying of the light is past.  Because I wish her rest, and peace, not this drifting in and out with phantoms of a non-existent past bothering her like this.

The seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on a carousel of time.
We can’t return
We can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

Painted pony number one:  Five years ago Saturday, we met our dotter for the first time.  It doesn’t seem possible that it’s been so long already.  We’ve gone from a tiny little baby coming home for the first time:

To an almost six-year-old full of creativity and vitality:

Her first tooth to come out is just about out–it’s at that stage where it can lie almost flat.  We almost thought it was out tonight, but it looks like at least one more day, after all.

Our trip to Arizona has blindsided us with some Issues.  The dotter decided–unbeknownst to us–that it meant we were moving again.  Um.  Oops.  Then, since OmegaDad’s job is still fairly new, we had decided early on that he would stay only a few days, while the dotter and I would stay longer.  So I spent this evening in the bathroom with her in full-blown brokenhearted weeping mode–Daddy was gone, she missed him, I would be gone on Wednesday (a trip to the office) and would leave her all alone, and she first refused to believe we were actually going home on Sunday, and then declared in tears that she wanted to go home now, and then told me that Sunday would never come.

Some kid point-of-view things just blindside you, y’know?

Painted pony number two:  A person who I have posted with for years on various debate boards died of colon cancer this week.  She was in her early 40s.

Painted pony number three:  Marguerite, coming up on her 104th birthday, had a bad infection that required her to be on antibiotics.  The infection and antibiotic combo, along with heparin, had her hallucinating and sleepless for three days and nights, unsteadily wandering the halls of her assisted living center and falling often.  No broken bones, but they finally hospitalized her, got the infection under control, figured out the right antibiotic, and got her to sleep.

But the assisted living center said they couldn’t handle her anymore, and she needed a nursing home.

Sigh.

So Great Grandma (my own grandmother) is now in a nursing home, and sad and confused.  Nothing tastes good.  She can’t hear well.  Her eyesight is going, with black spots in her vision that make her think there are black bugs wandering all over her food and her clothes.  And she, like OmegaDotter, wants to go home.  Imagine going to sleep in one place and waking up in another–with the intervening days and nights just vanished from your memory–and being told, "This is your new home."

I’m so glad that we had planned a party for Great Grandma, so that there were lots of folks in town to help my mom out during this extremely stressful time.  But it’s so sad for us all–we have been spoiled…Marguerite was still bowling up until 1999, she was still out playing bridge at the assisted living center two years ago, she has always been sharp as a tack and filled with tart commentary and memories.  Having her in this state is…heartbreaking.

This evening, at bedtime, the dotter quizzed me:  "Why is Great Grandma like that?"  And I had to explain to her that Great Grandma is 104 years old, that most people don’t live that long, that she’s wanting to go home and is having a hard time realizing that she has a new home, and that she’s just tired tired tired.  So in the midst of all the upheaval, all the worries about moving again, the dotter is learning some other things that are very difficult to process.

Parenting is hard sometimes.

Life is hard sometimes.

But I’m so glad we have the dotter with us.  I’m so glad my family can pull together like this.  I’m so glad we all have each other.  Because it makes the hard stuff more bearable.

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Right now, the “No, I wouldn’t”s are in the lead.  The tally is OmegaDad, EzFez, Margaret and Theresa, all of whom essentially say “Why?  It’s just another thing I would worry about!”

I do like Theresa’s idea of “just feed me ice cream and gummi bears!”

The “Yes, I would want to know”s either have a family history of Alzheimer’s or a deep-seated need for control.  ;)  Del says while he might use it to prepare, he might just blow his retirement savings on fast women and booze.  Sister Carrie doesn’t quite put it like that, but says she wants to enjoy while she can, as does Kat.

I’m squarely in the middle on this one.  On the one hand, Medical Science Is Doing Amazing Things These Days.  (Hear that plummy announcer’s voice?  I swear I have Marlin Perkins’ voice forever engraved on my mind–pseudo Alzheimer’s aside.  “As the sun sets on the Serengeti, my intrepid assistant Jim is dangling from a rope in front of a hungry lion…”)

Anyway, Amazing Things.  The point being that, perhaps, sometime soon, they’ll come up with drugs or therapies or a brain-artery Roto-rooter that scrubs the plaque away, and Alzheimer’s will no longer be the soul-sucking personality destroyer that it is now.

In which case, hell, yeah, I’d like to know ahead of time, so that I can trot myself down to the local medico and say, “Gimme drugs!”  (Or “Gimme that Roto-rooter; I’ll do it myself!”)

On the other hand, I have the experience of OmegaBro’s maternal family to scare me silly.  Aunt J. (OmegaBro’s mom, dad’s first wife) had an ongoing edgy relationship with her own mother, with a hefty thread of resentment coloring everything.  And then her mother started the downward spiral that is Alzheimer’s.  She got tossed out of the assisted living home–either because she had become so nasty and bitchy that no-one wanted anything to do with her or because she kept forgetting that she had put a pot of water on to boil for tea.  Then she lived with Aunt J., who had to cope with a slew of emotions based on obligation, resentment, tainted love…

Of course, to me, L. was a lovely lady, but I still remember the first year she lived with Aunt J., when, at Christmastime, over the course of five hours she asked the same set of questions five or six times.  It was my first experience with Alzheimer’s, and made me incredibly sad, because L. was a vivid, vivacious, witty, proud and self-sufficient lady, or had been.  And that was at the early stages; by the time she died she had been bedridden for a year, no longer recognized her daughter, her grandsons, or her great-grandsons, couldn’t clothe herself or take care of herself in any manner.

So, on the third hand, knowing ahead of time, coupled with my memories of L., would give me incredible incentive to investigate any and all possible treatments and rage, rage against the dying of the light.

But, on the fourth hand, I am prone to stewing, and, like all the “Hell, no!” folks above, it would be just yet another thing to stew about.

Okay, so far I’ve got four hands going here.  I am not an octopus.  But obviously I am not decisive on this issue.  Finding out early if I had cancer?  Hokie doke.  No problemo.  Let’s find out, let’s kick that cancer’s ass, and if it doesn’t work, well, we’ve fought the good fight.

Ditto with diabetes, heart disease…

But these are all physical.  It’s the mental and emotional capacities that get clobbered by Alzheimer’s.  It’s so easy to be strong (at least in theory) with physical problems, but not so easy with a shrinking fear of the Essential Me just…fading away.

Anyway, it’s an interesting mental exercise.  Part of my issue is that I have all these incredibly long-lived women in my mother’s side of the family…so I keep thinking it’s not possible that can last more than three generations, that the strong pioneer stock must be diluted by now, so there must be some catastrophe awaiting me as a legacy from my dad’s side, to put the kibosh on the long-lived Mills women.

In the meantime, given that the first of the Baby Boomers has just begun picking up her social security check, and there are millions more just like her following along, the field of gerontology and elder health is just going to be busy and booming for quite a while.  Since I am towards the end of the Baby Boomer cohort, it’s quite possible that all the research that is going to go on in the next twenty years will pay off with exceptional dividends for me…and those like me.

Onto less morbid topics tomorrow!

The dotter, having had a quick bout with the cold, handed it off to me.  Thus, I spent the weekend id a haze ob bizery.  OmegaDad, having lured the Geography Gals to our house for a Sunday evening birthday dinner, spent the weekend alternately patting me on the head, thrusting various cold nostrums my way, cleaning house in a frenzy, and dealing with the dotter.  By the time the GGs showed up, Banana Split Birthday Cake (a decadent, cholesterol-laden delight from, I am sure, the ’50s or ’60s) in hand, I was at least alert enough to socialize and eat some of the cake.

In the meantime, OmegaGranny had evilly emailed me a link to The ESP Game, which randomly partners you with someone else (never seen, heard, or named), randomly tosses up a bunch of thumbnail pics, and asks you to label them.  So, while I was dealig wid de code ad de stuffiness, I whiled away away a few hours mindlessly typing in descriptors of pictures.  It’s something to do with Carnegie Mellon University and labeling unlabeled pics on the web, supposedly…Anyway, I soon found that even though I could neither see, hear, nor talk to my partners, I got some definite likes and dislikes very quickly.  Some partners were worthless.  Some–wow!  It was like we would zing*pow*zap get the same descriptors over and over again.

What can I say?  I found it addictive.  Bad, bad OmegaGranny!

In the news, we had a Texas legislator whipping up some ill-thought-out plan to pay women $500 to decide to adopt their children out rather than have abortions.  He did, at least, make sure to include verbiage that would keep anyone who did so from being charged for selling babies…No word on fathers, of course.  No procedure for getting the kiddo into foster care, or finding agencies, or anything like that.  Not a word about prenatal care.  Nothing about coercion.  Just *bam*, sign this paperwork (available only at abortion clinics, by the way) within one month after the birth of the kiddo, and voila, 500 smackeroos.  I can’t collect the words to properly describe how idiotic I think this is.  I hope this is the kind of throw-away legislation that never makes it out of committee, like the legislation that some of our own state legis-critters have produced.

No great thoughts here, alas.  I’b sdill drying do ged by doze do clear up.

At ten to noon, I get a phone call at the office from OmegaDad.  OmegaDotter’s teacher had called him, saying OD didn’t feel well and was running a low fever.

The dotter was sick yesterday, in that horrid, cranky, whiny way that kids who are somewhat sick are, as compared to the deep, quiet misery of kids who are really sick.  We stayed home yesterday.  This morning, though, no fever, no cranky whinies, pretty much normal kiddo, so I took her in.

So I pack it in and head off to preschool–no big surprise that her fever is back.

When I arrive there’s the dotter sitting at the table, bouncing and smiling.  My mommy radar goes off.  Miss M., her teacher, says in a dubious voice, “Well, she was sick yesterday, and she hasn’t been feeling good, and she does have a low fever…”

How low is low?  99-something.  Hmmm. 

On the way home, she’s smiling and singing and dancing and giggling and happy.

Let me tell you, this child is not sick.

Half of me is laughing, the other half is going, “Grrrr.”  I have made it quite clear that this is not to happen again (you can tell she knows I know she isn’t sick).  I lectured her about what Mean Mommies do in this situation, about how next time this happens, she will be put to bed pronto, since she’s so sick.  I made her take ibuprofen (ewww!).

OmegaDad, like me, was halfway laughing, halfway not, when I called him to tell him we had all been played.  “That little shit!” were his exact words.

That little shit, indeed.

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