Life in progress

Tag Archives: Health concerns


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#SoCS – Oops!

I almost forgot to post my SoCS. It’s been a month since the last time I did one. And it’s been a hell of a month. Busy? Can you say busy? It’s been busy.

And worrisome. We never did figure out what’s wrong with Alex, though he does seem better. He went for a walk with me today, so that’s a huge improvement. But he still says his stomach hurts. So who knows? Stress?

Stranger things have happened.

Me?

I’ve been paralyzed every time I’ve thought about writing something. It’s not fear, exactly, but it kind of is. Anxiety, maybe? I dunno. Maybe I’m just totally out of practice.

Or I feel like I’ve got nothing to say.

I can write fiction.

Maybe I should write a fictionalized version of myself.

I could be rich.

I could be thirty again.

And skinny.

And totally healthy. Hell, I could write away my tinnitus! That would be awesome.

My fictional self could have silence.

I could even write the pandemic out of the world. Would you like that?

I would.

No “oops” there.

Life would be perfect.

For everyone.

2019-2020 SoCS Badge by Shelley! https://www.quaintrevival.com/

This fantastical post was brought to you by Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Find the prompt here and join in! https://lindaghill.com/2021/04/23/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-april-24-2021/


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I post this hesitantly …

I’ve been putting off posting this because I don’t want to jinx it like I did last time, but Alex is home from the hospital and he doesn’t seem to be suffering too much.

The doctors did every test they could–xray, CT scans, colonoscopy, checked every fluid in his body, but we never did get any answers why his stomach hurts. As one doctor said, they’ve ruled out the scary stuff, so there’s that.

Hoping now it just goes away.

Thanks so much for all your comments and prayers. Though I haven’t replied, I’ve read them all and taken them all to heart.

Fingers crossed this is the last update I’ll need to make.


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Alex is better

He’s better than he was, anyway. I didn’t push him too much, and so he’s spent most of the day on the couch. But he’s not complaining of pain anymore (touch wood), so there’s that.

I never did find out what was wrong with him. They put him on antibiotics as a precaution, and we’re waiting for a call for an appointment with a gastroenterologist.

Which is all great, but the province of Ontario is going into a 28-day lockdown starting tomorrow. I don’t know if his appointment will be considered essential enough to bypass that.

So we continue to wait and just hope it’s cleared itself up.

In other words, “better” is relative.

Thanks again for all your good thoughts, prayers, and well-wishes. I appreciate you all more than you know.


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Yikes!

Yikes! It’s late.

I slept in this morning.

Forgot to fix my alarm to include Monday after the holiday last week.

Because Alex is back home from the hospital (as of yesterday) and he went back to school today.

But the doctor told me it’s probably a good idea to feed him more slowly, because it’s possible the issue with his respiratory system could be bronchitis. And that could be due to coughing up little bits of formula when he’s sleeping through his morning tube feed.

So I have to get up early now. Five am instead of 5:30.

Yee-haw!

It’s fun to be me.

Oh, and yellow. Because I had to say it.

Finally! I need “Z” words for tomorrow’s illegal A-Z post. One word per person, please, and keep it clean. Note that the oldest comments are at the bottom.

Thank you to the three lovely ladies who gave me today’s words. You’ll find under the words “yikes,” “yee-haw,” and “yellow.”


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What happened to Linda?

Let’s play “What happened to Linda? This morning’s edition,” shall we?

I started writing this post–read: that first sentence–before I had a nap. When it took me a full minute to decide whether the word should be “edition” or “addition,” I knew finishing the post wasn’t worth risking my career as an editor.

Even after a three-hour nap, it’s an iffy prospect. I sincerely hope I’m making sense.

Where was I? Oh, yeah.

I put my darling son Alex to bed at just after 10 last night. He fell asleep after begging me to take him to the hospital. Now, you have to realize that the hospital is one of his favourite places in the world, so I take most of his pleas with a grain of salt. Last night, though, his breathing started sounding more horrible than it has all week.

At midnight, I finally said yes. By 1am, the decision had been made by the doctor to admit him for a couple of days. He has pneumonia again.

But, of course, it couldn’t possibly be that easy. Alex’s ultimate goal was to get out of emergency and up onto the floor, where he could hang out with the nurses. For the next thirteen hours he sat in anticipation of being admitted, asking me every fifteen seconds, When are we going upstairs?

I got home at 3pm.

So that’s “What happened to Linda,” and why I was thinking I should be posting the SoCS prompt at 9:30 this morning, too far away from my laptop to do it. And, backing up, why I was thinking I should be posting my illegal-A-Z-Challenge for the letter “V” at midnight last night as I drove to my local hospital.

Where Alex is now, happily wandering the halls, chasing nurses, because his obsession with the hospital far surpasses the actual science that tells the doctors he’s too sick to stay home.

Thank you to the bloggers who volunteered their “V” suggestions for yesterday’s post that’s not going to happen. I need sleep. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.


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My mother, my basement, and my eye – Is 2019 over yet?

So let’s start with my mum. I haven’t written an update on her for a while.

She’s still in the hospital, even though her pneumonia is cleared up. For a while there she was so lethargic and unwilling to move that the doctor told me it was likely her dementia’s progression, and that she’d never get better. So last week, on her 89th birthday in fact, we had a meeting with the hospital’s discharge planner, the head nurse from her retirement home, and myself. My mother refused to get up and walk, so it was decided that I needed to start looking for nursing homes. She wouldn’t even lift her hand to feed herself.

I explained it all to her when the meeting was over, and it was as though a switch flipped. The next day she was up walking.

It took a few days, but I convinced them to go back and reassess. Yay! I thought. She’d be able to go back and live somewhat independently! But no, now her ankle is swollen and she can’t put any weight on it. The x-ray turned up nothing, so gout, maybe? The good news is she’s more alert and less confused than I’ve seen her in a long time, probably due to not smoking for a month.

And even better, she seems to have forgotten that cigarettes exist. She hasn’t asked for one in three weeks.

Fast forward to yesterday morning, I was sitting in the living room with Alex (who was supposed to go to his dad’s this weekend but didn’t–it’ll be at least 2 months again before I have a break), when my eldest son came upstairs and said he thought a pipe had burst. There was water under his desk in his room.

When I got down there, half the basement was flooded. All the cardboard boxes on the floor and everything in them, I figured, was ruined. Turned out it wasn’t the whole basement once we got stuff moved, but the leak had been ongoing for some time. The stuff that was ruined was really bad. The good news is I think we’ve managed to plug up the hole, which is half-way down the wall in the concrete behind an electrical outlet. The bad news is mold.

Fast forward again to this morning. The windy weather made Alex decide he wouldn’t get dressed to go to school. So we did our usual dance when he’s misbehaving, him screaming at me and punching me and me ignoring him the best I can until he complies. Which he always does, eventually, and usually with minimal damage until this morning when he decided to hit me in the side of the head with his sock. It wouldn’t have hurt except he got me in the eye. My only good eye. The other one is legally blind.

So I’m off to the eye doctor today, just to make sure there’s no serious injury. The sock in question was one he’d worn before, and I think he had it on downstairs yesterday. Nothing like an infection to ruin your entire life …

Happy, happy, joy, joy.

The bright side? Alex actually went to school today on the bus, even though there’s snow. Keeping my fingers crossed we’ll finally have a full week of school, the first one this year.

 


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Day 2

Day 2 is much like Day 1, Day 1 being yesterday, the day of ice.

Except Day 2 doesn’t involve ice falling from the sky. Now, ice is on the ground. Still keeping Alex from going to school.

Alex, who is at the moment gleefully jumping up and down in unison with the contestants on “The Price is Right.” Screaming as if he was just called up onto the stage.

We took down the Christmas tree yesterday. It didn’t help. Cross superstition off the list of causes for this year’s luck.

In other news, my mother has been diagnosed with hypo delirium. She may recover. Good news, though: her lungs are better. So the pneumonia is gone.

Yet, I am stuck at home. Unable to visit the hospital. Unable to escape the screams, joyful as they are.


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The Road to Blogging

… is paved with good intentions.

It seems no matter how good my intentions this year, nothing seems to work out.

Case in point: today I spent a good two hours solid looking for a song they’ve been playing often on the radio to use for Bee’s Love Is In Da Blog prompt. I had the lyrics in my head, but stupidly, I decided to look for the name of the song–on Youtube, no less–rather than just Google the lyrics I had. By the end of the two hours, I couldn’t even remember the lyrics because I’d listened to so many songs that weren’t the one I was searching for.

So I put the radio on.

All day.

They didn’t play it.

Unless of course they did when I was visiting my mother in the hospital. Yes, she’s still there. I hoped to track down her doctor to find out the results of the CT scan she had done on her lungs on Sunday, to perhaps see why she’s getting worse instead of better.

No luck finding the doctor.

They told me to come back tomorrow morning.

Which isn’t likely going to happen.

Because we’re expecting freezing rain for 17 hours straight. Which means Alex won’t be going to school again. But hey, maybe instead of talking to the doctor and doing the work I was supposed to do, I can take down the Christmas tree.

That’s probably responsible for all the awesome luck I’m having this year.

Because superstition.

And if that doesn’t work and I don’t show up with the One-Liner Wednesday prompt, you’ll know the ice took down my power lines.

…

The road to blogging IS paved with good intentions, after all.


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My Final Random Jot of #JusJoJan 2019

Aaaand, it’s a wrap! The year that was January 2019 is but hours away from its completion here in my corner of the world. Will February be better? I damned well hope so. Having said that, my mother is still in the hospital with pneumonia. I believe it’s going to take her a while to recover from this. I just spoke to her on the phone: she can hardly breathe.

I’m not sure I have a favorite part of this month, other than you all here. All of you who helped me make Just Jot it January a success for the fifth year in a row. I appreciate everyone who linked up to the prompt, even once. And of course a special thanks goes to all of you who helped choose this year’s prompts! I couldn’t have done it without you. 🙂

I had a lot to be grateful for last year. Career-wise, I had my July Bookbub Featured Deal that had me give away 25K copies of The Magician’s Curse. I signed up for it thinking I’d have no chance whatsoever getting it. Bookbub deals are like the lottery. I was flabbergasted when I got the acceptance email!

However, it could have been a disaster: if there’s one piece of advice I’d give anyone submitting for a deal, it’s to make sure it’s not your only book, especially if you’re giving it away. Had The Magician’s Blood not been ready to publish, I’d never have made my money back. Bookbub deals are expensive! But so very worth it.

One other piece of advice for anyone thinking of having thousands of strangers read your book? When it’s free, some will pick it up and read and review it even though it’s not a genre they enjoy. Not everyone is nice, unfortunately, so make sure you’re wearing your thickest of skins when you read what people have to say. Having said that, I do appreciate (almost) all my reviews! Even the negative ones. The exception being from those who didn’t even read the whole thing before giving it one star.

I’m grateful that everyone in my family survived 2018, all of them healthy except that little bit at the end. And even that was temporary.

And that’s pretty much it.

I’ll be back tomorrow with the participation badge and an opportunity to leave links in the comments. More details about that in tomorrow’s post.

Until then, stay warm if you’re in the northern hemisphere and cool if you’re Down Under.

Cheers!

It’s never too late to participate in Just Jot it January! Click the following link to find out how, and see all the other participants’ links in the comment section. It’s fun! https://lindaghill.com/2019/01/31/jusjojan-2019-daily-prompt-jan-31st/


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As the pneu turns, aka what I’ve been doing today

Yes, I know. Pneu means tire in French and this has nothing to do with tires. It does have to do with pneumonia.

Start from the beginning shall we? Actually, I don’t remember that far back, so starting at yesterday will have to do.

Yesterday afternoon I picked my mother up from the hospital, from a three day stay. The first thing she asked for was a cigarette. I asked her if maybe she thought it would be better to wait a day or two to smoke since she still had pneumonia. Her answer: “I’ve already waited two days!” I then said that maybe waiting another two will mean she can get better and not have to go back to the hospital where she can’t smoke at all.

So she had a cigarette before she even made it to her room in the retirement home. I went off to get her meds from the pharmacy, and when I came back, she wanted another one. I tried again to reason with her, but no. So I sat outside with her in the -20C-with-the-wind cold while she hacked and wheezed through another cigarette.

At 5:15 this morning I got a call from the home. She was having trouble breathing and did I think she should go back to the hospital. I asked the nurse to keep an eye on her and she agreed.

At 4:00 this afternoon I got another call. They were putting her back in an ambulance. I arrived in the emergency room a little while later, and as I stood at her bedside, holding her hand, she asked me why she was back in the hospital. I explained to her that she had pneumonia and smoking had put her back in there. “I told you yesterday,” I said, “that if you smoked you’d wind up back in here,” to which she smiled and replied, “You’re a wonderful daughter.” I couldn’t roll my eyes hard enough.

She seems to be worse now than she was when she went in on the 23rd, to me at least. But they’re not sure they’ll keep her, so I might be going back to pick her up in the dead of night.

I have my doubts.

And that pretty much sums up my day. Nay, my weekend: I have my doubts.