OmegaMom

If you can see me, you will see me waving a little white flag of surrender.

We none of us had the flu–officially.  Luckily, the dotter’s pediatrician eyeballed the accuracy rate of the rapid flu tests as determined by the CDC (40% to 70% accurate–almost as good as tossing a coin) and her history of pneumonia, and prescribed Tamiflu. 

Alas, the same did not happen for OmegaDad and me.  OmegaDotter started feeling sick on Sunday (with a bang!), OmegaDad and I started feeling sick on Monday.  We are now eyeing Day 8 of fever and/or general illness.  The dotter, who started one day earlier, and got Tamiflu, has been fever-free for three days, and had energy enough to do cartwheels, handstands, and walkovers today.

I, on the other hand, managed to do dishes and check the chickens in a fit of woohoo-I’m-over-it! energy, which promptly depleted any vestige of fuel my body still contained and I collapsed for the rest of the day in bed feeling like death warmed over.

This is seriously nasty stuff.  At the height, I was running a fever of 103.5F.  The one good thing about the Not-Flu?  I had no hot flashes, ‘cuz I was hot all the time!  Har.  (There was another good thing about the Not-Flu that I thought of, but it has vanished into the mists of vagueness that surround my brain these days.)

You may have noted that I am very dubious about the claim of Not-Flu.  You betcha.  Reading that the flu tests are essentially no better than flipping a coin is enough to tilt my skeptical eyebrow up, sure ’nuff.

In my quest for mindless entertainment, I searched Twitter for H1N1.  (For reference, it’s actually 2009 (a)H1N1.)  Oh, boy.  The woo is strong on this subject.  Let’s see:

• Various claims that a “friend” got the H1N1 vaccine, then promptly came down with it and died.  Let’s just avoid the issue that the vaccine is just now being delivered across the U.S.  There’s a little timeline problem there.
• A person saying she wouldn’t get the H1N1 vaccine because a little kid died of H1N1 around here the other day!!!!  Folks.  That’s what the vaccine is supposed to help prevent.
• People saying they would get the seasonal flu vaccine, but not the H1N1 because it’s too “new” and hasn’t been tested enough.  Okay, this one requires two sub-points:
• FIRST:  Take a look at CDC data.  Ninety-nine percent of the flu cases that are being diagnosed are H1N1.  One percent is “seasonal” flu.  If you were asking me, I’d go for the H1N1 vaccine, not the seasonal flu vaccine.
• SECOND:  Okay, this takes a little longer.  Flu vaccines in general have been around since World War II.  The way the vaccine is developed each year is that WHO epidemiologists take an educated guess as to which flu strains will be prevalent in the upcoming flu season.  This happens around January.  Then it takes the manufacturers of flu vaccines about six to eight months to create a vaccine and get the production rolling on it in time for seasonal flu shots.  This time around, H1N1 showed up in April–months after the regular seasonal flu vaccine process gets going.  However, they had plenty of good virus samples very quickly, and epidemiologists from across the world were rapidly made aware of how novel this one was (like within weeks).  So, the only difference between the H1N1 vaccine and the “normal” seasonal flu vaccine is that (a) they knew exactly what flu they wanted to vaccinate against, rather than a crap shoot of three guesses, and (b) it was a few months later than normal.  But there were a lot of scared governments that pulled strings to get some of the production switched over to H1N1 rather than the seasonal flu.
• Why were they scared?  Because this is a “novel” flu, meaning there are very, very few people who have any immunity to it.  Apparently there was a similar flu in the mid-1950s, so people who are older than that may have native immunity.  But everyone younger than that?  None.  Nada.  Zilch.  The seasonal flu that we normally contend with is usually similar to a flu from the previous year or before, so that most people have had some exposure to it.  This time, a similar flu hasn’t been around for more than sixty years.  To get an idea of how it’s affecting people now, take a look at this chart of “influenza-like illnesses” reported to the CDC within the past few weeks.  I look at the down-tick at the very end of the red line and am hoping it continues, but the kind of upswing shown in the past few weeks is what normally happens in December/January, not September.  So far it seems about as virulent as normal seasonal flu (this is good!), but given the possible numbers of people who could get it at once, the end result could be bad.  Imagine all the hospital ICUs filled with folks on ventilators from the H1N1, and then, oh, a school bus crashes into a tour bus and those people need ventilation and the ICU…where do they go?
• OMG, it contains SQUALENE!!!  It causes CANCER!!!  It kills people!!!!  It has mercury!!!!  And on and on.  Sigh.  Oh, yes, and it’s all a PLOT by the NEW WORLD ORDER…I can’t address them all.  A good resource is EffectMeasure, on ScienceBlogs.

The end result:  the Internet is a marvelous tool.  But if you’ve got no ability to sort B.S. from real information, you’re a sitting duck for the more scary memes out there.

I personally think we all had the flu.  Given the percentages, if we had the flu, we all had Teh Swiney FLOO.  But when that vaccine comes around, I am dragging the dotter in to get it first, and then myself and DH when we’re in the ranks of those who can get it.  (It seems that they’re going to be giving it to kids and pregnant women first, as those are the folks who are most susceptible.)

Anyway, this is just a lot of rambling.  It’s taken me about six hours to write this post, because I have to keep stopping to rest.  Hah!

Hopefully, OmegaDad and I will also soon be feeling better, and no longer like a pair of old damp washrags that have been wrung out and hung out to dry. 

It has been a bad few days.

A few days ago, I noticed the dawg wasn’t eating much, or drinking much.  Then yesterday a.m., early, the dawg started barfing.  And barfing.  And barfing.  And soon, there was nothing to barf up…but he was thirsty.  And he couldn’t keep that down, either.  At which point, dawg-worrying became intense enough to have us call the vet.

The dawg doesn’t like vets, so we needed both OmegaDad and myself to be there to calm the pup down for an exam.  Then x-rays.  Then blood work.  Then shots (an anti-emetic and an acid suppressor).  Then instructions to wait until evening, then try him on water, then white rice & boiled chicken this a.m.

We walked out having spent $380.  Ack!

The dawg stopped barfing for a bit.  Then we tried him on water later that night, which he slurped right down.

And then promptly threw right up again.

All through the night, the same thing:  drink water, throw it up.

So we called the vet again this a.m., and the vet said it was time for the barium x-rays:  fill the dawg with a barium-spiked fluid and trace the movement to see where the blockage was.  So I schlepped the pup off to the vet again, and dropped him off, with an estimate of another $300.  Ack!

Two hours later, the vet calls, saying that the barium didn’t move more than an inch beyond the end of his tummy, and the only thing to do was exploratory surgery, and here’s the estimate:  $1000 to $2000.  ACK!  ACK, ACK, double ACK!

At which point, the qualms start.  Ooookay, we’re talking serious bucks here.  Ooookay; if it were the dotter, we wouldn’t be balking at the cost, but scrambling to find ways to cover it.  Ooookay; there are people in the U.S. who need that money to get health care.  Ooookay; a dawg is worth it/a dawg is not worth it.  Oookay; there are people who would think we were nuts to even think of paying for it.  Ooookay, there are people who would think we were cruel and horrible for even thinking of not paying for it.  Ooookay; we don’t have the extra bucks right now, but we will have them when our PFD check comes through in two weeks–and yeah, we wanted to buy some toys with the money, but isn’t Kai worth it?

Et cetera.

It was a very odd feeling.

The end result:  A “Care Credit” card, a credit card offered for paying for vet bills.  You can apply over the phone.  Oh, goody.  Just what we need…

So we signed and the dawg went in for surgery, OmegaDad and I went out to lunch, and then I went home.

To be confronted with a message on our phone from a friend of my mother’s saying “She’s ALL RIGHT, but your mother is in the hospital, just released from the ICU, and here’s the phone number…”

Oh, shit.

Two days of ongoing worry were suddenly replaced with frantic panic.

Talking to my mom, and then talking to her doctor, reassured me (currently).  Seems she went in for day-surgery for a blockage in her leg; all went well.  She stayed with her friend for the night, and in the night, her leg and foot started hurting.  She couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t go out for her regular weekly breakfast with her buds, so she finally called the doc and asked is this was normal.  He immediately told her to hie herself off to the emergency room.  When she got there, the ER folk all panicked about her heart flutter and kept talking about how she needed a pacemaker right now.  Her doc finally got them straightened out on that (she has had the flutter for quite a while, and has a “strong heart” according to two cardiologists aside from the flutter), but she was admitted to ICU for observation and testing.  While she was there, some bloodwork came back indicating she might have internal bleeding, but everything else was okay; they moved her out of ICU into PCU (?!) and decided to keep her for another day or two.

The end result:  I have been on the phone now to fifty kazillion people for hours.  (I tried calling my Unka Bill in Australia, but when I got through, he couldn’t hear me, so I had to email him [Unka Bill, check your email!].)  Our finances are in a holding pattern.  I’m tired.  I want my mommy.  My mommy wants her camera and a laptop because she’s bored out of her gourd…

Oh, yeah, and mom’s friend says that she’s due to go back for roto-rootering of her other leg in 10 days…

Oh, yeah, and I finally talked to the vet’s nurse, who said that the surgery took longer than expected (that means more $$), they had to take out a piece of the dawg’s intestine, and there was a blockage which looked to be the knotted end of a rope chew toy.  At which point, I was amazed:  we haven’t given the dawg a rope chew toy for more than a year, when this incident happened.  The nurse scoffed.  She said it wasn’t possible.  Well, I can tell you that we removed the dawg’s chew toys that very afternoon, May 17, 2008, and haven’t given him one since, and he’s not allowed out unless we’re with him…sooo…where’d the chew toy come from if it hasn’t been sitting in his stomach since then???

Wah.

I have been in a truly bitchy mood all day, and one of the reasons is that it’s snowing yet again.  Another nine inches.  Sigh.

The other day, we passed a bank sign that excitedly proclaimed, “The pussywillows are here!”  I don’t believe them.  Oh, I guess it’s true; moose have been congregating by the roadsides, nibbling on the branchlets with the rising sap, and I swear I saw some leaf buds on the trees lining our streets.

But now they’re covered with snow.

OmegaDad claims that in a month, it will all be gone.  Please mark your calendars:  April 5.  No snow.

Right?

Springtime is coming.

Right?

After all, this weekend is Daylight Savings Time weekend.

And in a few weeks, we hit the Spring Equinox.

So even here in the frozen north, spring must be coming.

Right?

Please tell me it is so…

Today I:

• Kibbitzed over the dotter’s shoulder while she played Farm Mania.
• Spent about an hour “helping” her do gymnastics.
• Snuggled with her while she read GrannyJ’s latest letter (a few weeks after we received it).
• Helped her type an answering letter.
• Played Farm Mania myself.
• Spent too much time reading Twitters.
• Got ridiculously defensive when boss asked if he and coworker could help with the website revamp.  Why?!  Partly because I’m trying to get rid of years’ worth of accreted code schmutz and I don’t want to have to explain each and every step, partly because I’m trying to develop a “style” using the stylesheet and I need to write it down before passing it on, partly because…?
• Reveled in daylight when I was driving the dotter to school–we’re gaining five-and-a-half minutes each day, woot!
• Tried very hard to keep away from depressing here-comes-the-Depression websites.
• Read the memo from school about What To Do If The Volcano Blows.  (Yes!  We got an official memo about it!)
• Spent all day in my pajamas–driving the dotter to school, working six hours, helping with homework, playing, hanging out, eating dinner–and didn’t feel guilty about it, though did make sure not to turn on the video when we had a Skype meeting at work.
• Dipped in and out of Godel, Escher, Bach, which I am enjoying immensely, even though it’s–at the same time–immensely slow going.
• Suppressed any sneaky moments of gloom-n-doom.
• Determined that Wall Street is sorely in need of a good overall PR person, or else a bunch of sadly lacking common sense.
• Tried to figure out if I agree with the various incarnations of the stimulus plan or not.
• Felt amazed, astounded, and somewhat affirmed and proud that the dotter’s recital of friend S.’s tendency to peek at her math work at school and copy it ended up with, “That’s bad.  She’s not learning it.”
• Felt equally amazed, and very happy, that the dotter said about her latest assigned book from school, “I want to keep reading–it’s like TV in your head!”

I am finding that simply getting out of the house each day, and doing a little bit of exercise, plus a heapin’ helpin’ of commiseratin’ commentary from my readers, has helped keep the blues to a minimum for the past few days.  Fingers crossed that this continues!

Won’t you take me to Funk Town was my alternative title.  Notice that’s not “funkY” town.

For the past few weeks, I have been sinking deeper and deeper into a funk.  Enough so that my lovely OmegaDad is upstairs doing kitcheny magic kinda things for OmegaDotter’s birthday party tomorrow, rather than me.  When I wandered into the kitchen and said that he was taking things over, he said, “Well, I thought I ought to, because you seem to be in a funk, so I thought I’d help.”

“I see a red door and I want it painted black.”  Everything I try to think of to cheer myself up is not working. 

My internal dialogues are going somewhat like this:

Happy Me:  Oh, look at all the beautiful fresh new snow!

UberFunk Me:  Yeah.  Snow.  Still more snow.  I am so sick of snow.

Happy Me:  And the sunshine sparkling all over the snow–isn’t it wonderful?!

UberFunk Me:  You mean the sunshine that is just now coming back?  The sunshine that isn’t warming anything up?  The sunshine that’s going to go into hyperdrive and not let anyone sleep in just a few months?  That sunshine?

Happy Me:  You could go out and play in the snow, you know!

UberFunk Me:  Ugh.  It’s cold out there.  And the snow will get in my boots and melt, and then my feet will freeze and I’ll get frostbite.  No thanks.

Happy Me:  Oh, c’mon!  In a few more months, it’ll be spring, and you’ll be able to hang out in the yard all the time, and the grass and trees will be a lovely green and the flowers will be blooming.  Keep thinking of that!

UberFunk Me:  Excuse me.  To think of that, I have to think of “a few more months” of winter.

Happy Me:  Well, at least the volcano isn’t erupting, this is good news!

UberFunk Me:  Volcano.  It’s not enough that we have cold and snow and winter for another three months; I have to worry about a goddamned volcano, too?!  Just wait until it erupts and the ash fall hits.  That’ll be fun.

Happy Me:  But it hasn’t happened yet, so it’s not likely to.

UberFunk Me:  Whoop-de-doo.  It’s gonna erupt, and we’re going to be buried in inches of ash, and we’ll have to wear dust masks and goggles and buy a dozen new car air filters and change them over and over again…

Happy Me:  … Well, if it does erupt, it won’t last too long.  Hey, look on the bright side:  When you start your new shorter hours in a few weeks, you’ll have all that extra time, and you can go exercise, or check out the yoga place!

UberFunk Me:  Yup.  That’s just ducky.  I have to have shorter work hours plus no-pay furlough days because our economy is in the crapper.  We’ll also have to keep a tighter rein on our spending, and change our eating habits, and what are we going to do about summer camp?!

Happy Me:  Um.  Well, hey, at least you’ll still have a job!  Lots of people don’t have that any more, so we’ve got it good, right?

UberFunk Me:  …

Happy Me:  Changing the subject!  Isn’t it cute how excited the dotter is about her birthday party?!

UberFunk Me:  Yeah.  Right.  I should be the one upstairs figuring out how to do a unicorn cake, not OmegaDad.  I’m letting everyone down.  I’m no fun.  I’m no good.

Happy Me:  …

UberFunk Me:  I just want to go into the bedroom, draw the drapes, lie down, and stew in my funk.

Happy Me:  … 

This is with my happy pills and with my magic light.  I’d hate to think of what it would be like without them!  So tell me what you all do when you’re stuck in a funk and can’t seem to get out!  Surely I’m not the only one who gets into the doldrums like this (though it has been a hella long time since I’ve been in a funk like this).

We are living in The House of Pain.

I got sick last Friday.  OmegaDad got sick a day later.  I keep waiting for it to Go Away.

Nope.  Now the dotter has it.

WAH!  She was just back to school yesterday!  The end of all the “togetherness”, enforced by the bitter cold, was such a relief!  But this morning, after OmegaDad’s dread Man Cold response woke me early, I slouched out to the living room where the dotter was, she snuggled with me, and said:  “I don’t feel good.  My throat hurts.”  So I hauled out the trusty thermometer, and OmegaDad has a fever and the dotter has a fever and I feel like throwing a tantrum.

In the meantime, I am not alone in being sucked into the Ravenhearst mystery black hole.

Our plumber, who we had to call in again because, while we had heat, it was very anemic, was afraid that our pipes had frozen somewhere.  Eeek!  But, no–whew!–it was the pump on the heating system.  Still quite pricy, but a hella lot less pricy than the alternative.  The plumber reported that they had been working endless days thawing out people’s heating systems because it’s been so cold, for so long, that normally well-insulated systems have given up the ghost.

The water in the chicken coop was frozen yesterday night.

Our kitchen door is freezing shut; we have to aim a heater at the door for a few minutes to loosen things up to the point where a few good whacks against the wood will jar things loose.

All our windows have chunks of ice at the bottom.  (We are trying to find a dehumidifier, but every store is sold out, hah!)

The poor dawg is having serious problems when he goes outside to do his thang.  It’s funny, but sad, to watch him try to poop while holding first one paw, then the next, up in the air.  By the time he’s done and we’re at the bottom of the stairs to go back to the kitchen (having thumped the ice free to open the door to let him out to…), he’s a miserable puppy limping along.  Time to go buy doggie boots and hope like hell he’ll wear them.

We’re in the fifth day of the cold snap; it’s been below zero here in Suburban Alaska all five of those days, while Big City still reached above zero on the first day.  The cold weather is forecast to continue until Friday, with “highs” of 5 below zero.

Suburban Alaska has postponed its Alaska Statehood Celebration, which was scheduled for today.  The commentary on the story was full of Rough Tough Alaskans sneering at the weeny wusses who “can’t handle a little cold!”  OmegaMom raises her hand:  that’s me!

Right now, it’s 26 below zero here.  It was 30 below zero in the middle of the night.

The end result is that my brain is frozen.  I have ideas for posts floating around in my head, but nothing coalesces.  Bear with me:  the brain will defrost sometime soon.

It’s 25 below zero here.

Our furnace isn’t working.

The temperature in the house is ever-so-slowly dropping.  Downstairs, it is 60F, upstairs it is a bit warmer.  I figure we’re dropping a degree or two an hour.

Bahahaha!  “Happy New Year!” indeed.

Luckily, at least one plumber is at work on New Year’s Day.  (The others, even though they advertise 24-hour emergency service in the phone book, are apparently sleeping off hangovers.)  He’s getting his truck warmed up and will be on his way soon.

My other potential title for this post was “As cold as ice”.

I’ve mentioned the horrendous winds we get here on a regular basis.  This morning I was woken by one, bright and early (okay, dark and early), a half-hour earlier than I normally get up.

The wind continued throughout the day; currently we have sustained 17 mph winds with gusts up to 37 mph, but it topped out some time this afternoon with sustained winds at about 30 mph and gusts up to 44.  The forecast says gusts up to 70 mph tonight.  Usually with a wind like this, the Big City forecast will have a wind warning.  Today, none.  Why is that?  Why, because the winds were nowhere near Big City this time, just on our side of the inlet.  So there we are, with 60 mph winds where OmegaDad works, and no wind warning.  Elitist snobs.  The weather folk, that is.

The wind was strong enough that while I was home the lights were flickering and dipping in and out at various times during the day.

The wind was strong enough that while I was out, it was blowing my big honkin’ piece of iron also known as a Ford Freestyle.  This is quite rare.  The Big Honkin’ Piece of Iron is, at its heart, stable.  Sedate.  A soccer-mom’s type of car.  It takes a goodly bit of moving air to rock this car on its axles.

One of the problem was that when the wind blew while the car was on the icy side streets, the car would fishtail.

Such fun.

See, we had boatloads of snow earlier.  We’ve had snow piling up since early October.  The last big snow, after Thanksgiving, was icing on the cake.  Or coals to Newcastle.  Or ice to an igloo.  Or something like that.  So the side streets were solidly packed snow, which is generally good driving.

Until you get about five days in a row where the temperature hovers around 33 or 34F, complete with misty rain, during the day, and goes down to 28F at night.  The top layer of packed snow melts then freezes.  The misty rain puts a slight layer of water on top of the ice that results.  Then you have what I consider “a lovely mess”.

Getting out of the cul-de-sac today–or getting back into it–was a nightmare.  It was solid ice from our garage door, down the driveway, up the cul-de-sac, down the intersecting street in both directions, and on the intersecting streets with that street.  Once you got to the more major roads, you finally hit bare concrete and asphalt, and suddenly got traction.  But until you reached that point…

…and if you had the Winds of Hell blowing…

…even in a great Big Honkin’ Piece of Iron…

Well, let’s just say it was A Grand Adventure.  There.  That’s the optimistic point of view.  We’ll just gloss over the moments of sheer heart-pounding terror as BHPOI was buffeted by the howlin’ winds while on the side streets and slid (slooowly, because I was driving like a 75-year-old) this way, and then slid that way as I corrected, and finally (finally!) settled down again roughly pointed in the right direction…

…only to be buffeted once again.

Ugh.

By the way–the day was completed by having to sit around the tire dealership for a couple of hours (there were a lot of folks who needed tire work today), only to be told that letting Fix-A-Flat sit around in a tire for more than a day was A Very Bad Thing and that Fix-A-Flat rots the insides of tires so that patches won’t stick well and “compromises the integrity of the tire” and, say, lady, did you know you need a new tire?  To the tune of $168.  Harrumph.

I am still questioning whether I was taken or not.

It doesn’t help that yours truly, who has been quite mellow lately, unlike last year, bouyed by lots of nice bright snow and relatively clear days and a truly stupid private daydream, has suddenly had the daydream yanked away (reality bites sometimes), the clear days disappear, and the mellow abruptly morphing into the galloping blues, just like last year’s blues.  Except much shorter, hopefully, as the solstice approaches quickly, as does my one week in (gloriously sunny) Arizona.

Wah wah wah.  I promise to have a more spritely post tomorrow, filled with Christmas-tree and gingerbread-cookie goodness.

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.