my moral standing is lying down

I downloaded a Mad Libs app for my iPhone (the free version has only 4 "stories") and played with my mom on Saturday while I was in the hospital with her and my father. She was filling in the words, and you can sort of glean her mood from some of the words that were used to fill in the blanks...

For #4, Liz arrived at the hospital after just having taken a final for her class about Politics in South Africa.

Also note - I'm the one who was obsessed with the drip bags...

( Hilarity ensues... )

Mom has had a herniated disc for the last 2 months. She's been on vicodin but pain was worse when she woke up this morning, so I helped drive her to the hospital. I'm at work now, but my father's with her. They're just waiting in the emergency room now, so I'll have to wait and see what they say.

Next step is probably surgery, though there's no guarantee that it will actually relieve the pain. She's finding out about alternative treatments, but I'm getting the impression that since nothing is a sure thing, she may just go for the surgery in the hopes that this will get it over with, and not delay any longer -- because delaying will only make things worse.

Sigh.


[edit:] Just found out that they've scheduled her for surgery tomorrow morning, so hopefully that will do the trick. If there's still pain (or complications) after, I'm not sure what the next step will be. I'm hoping the surgery will take care of the problem alleviate the pain.

http://orthopedics.about.com/cs/herniateddisk/a/ruptureddisk.htm

My mom tripped over an uneven grate about half a block away from work this morning. She fell onto her shoulder and, after an excrutiatingly painful ride to the hosptial in an ambulance, and several hours later, we were informed that she had dislocated her shoulder, fractured the ball of her shoulder, and broken the upper arm (humerus) bone -- all the way through. They tried to manually push the bone back into the correct spot, but it didn't work.

She was in horrible pain all day long as she can barely move without jarring her shoulder -- got 4 doses of morphine over an 8 hour period...

She's in the hospital tonight and scheduled for surgery in the morning to have pins and plates put in to put the bones back into their correct spots, and to hold them together.

...and did I forget to mention that while we were in the ambulance we were cut off so the driver had to slam on the brakes, throwing us all forward? Which caused her to scream in agony as the EMTs aren't allowed to give painkillers in the field? I was seatbelted in, so I was fine. But the other EMT who was sitting next to me, writing up his report actually got thrown off the bench into the cabinet?

I feel soooo bad -- this is one of those things that you just can't predict will happen, which causes you to go into those "if ONLY I'd gone to work earlier", "if only I'd gone down the other block" sort of spirals.

And I'm just relieved that she's feeling a bit better (some of the pressure is off her arm since they splinted it, I believe). I hope after-surgery and the next couple weeks are not going to be too painful for her -- I know we're all going to be stressed and stretched to our limits here at home.

Good (kinda) news:

It's been a while since I updated my journal. The reason being, well, bronchitis. On Thursday (last week, not yesterday) afternoon I got home and realized - when I had piled on a full length wool coat, a hooded sweatshirt, a scarf, and 2 blankets - that I must have a fever. Took my temperature and it was 102.7! Haven't had that high a temperature in years! Felt like crap, of course. Stayed home from work on Friday. Temperature kept going up and down all day. Went to the doctor Saturday, got drugs. Yay. Antibiotics and cough medicine. Went home, felt like worse crap, coughed up a few lungs.

Oh, I forgot to mention that on Friday I finished reading a very good fantasy book -- Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind. It was one of those books I thought I'd never read or get into because of how intimidatingly large they are. They're scary. The series takes up like a shelf or two at B&N and those paperbacks are like 1000 pages long! Not that I can't read 1000 pages, they just seemed intimidating. But I ended up borrowing the first book to the series (called Wizard's First Rule) from the library 'cause there's a really great GW fic which takes certain ideas from Goodkind's series. (The Confessor Series by Annabell.) So anyway, it was SUCH a good book, that I wanted to make sure I could get the second one ASAP. On Saturday after coming home from the doctor's, I went online and checked the library catalogue to see if they had it in any of the libraries I have access to. They didn't.

So I went to my back-up plan. The BSJ, aka the "Bookstore Junkies". It's a mailing list where you can put in a request for a book you're looking to buy and the other people on the mailing list will "search" for it for you. If they find it, they'll offer it to you. Generally, all the books are used and you'll be charged half of the cover price (or whatever the finder paid for it, you can always refuse it) plus the cost of shipping. Usually, everyone ships by USPS media mail, which for one or two books is generally under $1.50. Of course, you can always request another form of shipping, if you're willing to pay for it.

So I went and requested the second book in the series, Stone of Tears. And got a reply very quickly! (Which is usually the case, unless the book you're looking for is way out of print…) And I asked the nice lady to send my book by priority mail and I paid her by paypal so I would be sure to get the book ASAP.

In any case, my fever finally broke on Sunday and I stayed home Monday and Tuesday because I still wasn't really well enough to go back to school yet. But on Wednesday, I went back to school (and dropped by a B&N during some of my free time and read 65 pages of Stone of Tears). Then on Thursday morning I went to the post office, and guess what was waiting for me there?! Yep, you got it! Stone of Tears was there, monstrously big… did I mention it's between 950 and 1000 pages long? Well, I read during all of my free time on Thursday (I had a lot) and got up to about page 300 by 3:00. Then I started reading again at home (around 7, I think) and went to bed at 11pm, leaving off at page 497.

Terry Goodkind is an excellent storyteller.

So, since the libraries only have one or two of the 7-book series available, I went ahead and just requested the whole series from the BSJ. I've already received a reply on 2 of the books from the same person I got the 2nd book from. Now, I'm just waiting for a reply on the other 2 books I haven't read. I can't wait.

Bad news:

My father got sick around the same time as me; he was throwing up & coughing a lot and subsequently got a hernia. =( My mom took him to the hospital on Thursday and they kept him overnight and did the surgery to put his intestines back in this morning. He's all doped up, but okay. Surgery went well, no complications. ::sigh:: It feels like we just went through this for the pneumonia. Poor Poppy. Now he's going to be home on pain killers for two weeks and then off the pain killers, but still in pain and back to work for the next two weeks after that. He's been real lucky until now but he really has to start taking more care of himself, especially with his Diabetes. (He hates watching his diet.)

Well, on that depressing note, will go. Off to Angelica's house. Dunno what we'll do 'cause I don't feel like watching anime, but we'll see.

(Oh, BTW, the subject for today's post is the Wizard's First Rule.)

Well. My father's been in the hospital since Thursday with pneumonia. We've been visiting him every day for a little while during visiting hours. He seemed to be getting better. Then... the doctors said he wasn't getting better and he'd been on 2 strong antibiotics, so something must be wrong. They took him to get a CAT scan and found that the infection isn't in the lungs, it's between the lungs and the ribs. So they said they have to do surgery to "drain the fluids" or something.

So, anyway. Today they did the surgery, which was supposed to start at 12 and was delayed until 1. Afterwards, he was put into the Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU) for recovery and we went to visit him, which was around 7 pm.

He was all groggy, but lucid, at least. He was babbling on and I guess it shouldn't have been funny, but it was. He kept asking my mom to make sure we told Chuck that everything was okay. (Chuck is a co-worker of his.)

Oops! Gotta go now 'cause Angelica's waiting to yell at me over the phone for scanning a pic of myself to send to Sharon... but will continue soon!