Tale of a Shooting Star…

Today is the birthday of my niece, Guendalyn. I’m not sure how old she is, I would have to look it up in my date book at home, but I think she may be 9 years old today.

I’ve never even met her and yet I think of her every year, especially because her birthday is two days before her daddy’s (my brother’s) birthday.

While I could allow myself to be sucked into the vortex of sadness that beckons to me around this time every year, I will not. At least, not today. I already indulged myself in a small cry on the way in to work this morning. And probably will again tonight.

Happy birthday, my dear niece. If my thoughts could take flight and find their way to you today, I would wish you the very best, now and always. I hope that you get everything your little heart desires on your special day.

We had some nice plans for this weekend. We were going to visit my Florida dad in their Pennsylvania house, spending some good quality time with them, seeing how Phoebe socializes with their dogs, working with my dad through past issues once and for all, going to my grandmother’s house for a hike in the mountains, some antique shopping if it rained and we couldn’t hike, etc.

As of right now, though, the hike is most definitely out. I think I might have pinched a nerve yesterday, as I had so much pain in my left hip and knee that I could barely walk. Terry’s back is still sore from his unfortunate meeting with the steps at the beginning of the week, too. Add that to the fact that I’m still having the wierd tingling stuff and it’s just not a good idea to go for a hike in the summer heat. I’m focusing today on drinking a lot of fluids and trying to work on my electrolyte balance. I have a feeling that the strange feelings may be due to dehydration. I drink a lot of water normally, but have not stepped up my intake during the heat wave. That combined with IBS problems most likely equals dehydration. And the sheer amount of water I shoved in yesterday did not do the trick, so I’m pretty sure I’m low on electrolytes, as well.

At this point, I am still planning to go visit my dad, provided we can both stand to be seated in the car for the 3-hour drive. It’s just that our activities there may be somewhat limited. I still want to visit my grandmother’s house, though. I have a feeling this is my last (and Terry’s only) chance to see the place before my grandmother moves into an assisted care or aging facility. Winters on the mountain where she lives are brutal and there is no one left up there to really help her anymore. Her brother passed away last year and his wife was just placed in a nursing home a month or so ago. The landscape of the area is changing, despite being known by the name of generations of her family that were born and raised there. The culture has changed and children no longer build or buy homes in the same area where their parents have lived their entire lives. My grandmother’s children have all moved away. It’s sad, really. The end of an era. And one that I want to make sure is captured on (digital) film for posterity.

We’ll see what happens, though. I need to be flexible and make sure that I make decisions that are the best for both of us right now, depending on how we are feeling. We still have a few more weeks before my dad goes back to Florida, so we can always postpone.

We spent an hour and a half in the emergency room tonight.

For the past several days, I’ve been having an eery, uncomfortable, completely unnerving tingling yucky feeling in my face and running down my arms and sometimes my legs, as well. It’s more pronounced when I walk and has been starting to disturb me. Terry figured it had something to do with the extreme heat and humidity, as I don’t fare well with heat.

We made a WalMart run after work and those are never quick, especially since we were going to try to do a little bit of summer clothes shopping, as well. By the time we reached home, I was really starting to feel funky and Terry encouraged me to lay down for a bit.

Believe it or not, though, the emergency room visit wasn’t for me. We started to work on making dinner and Terry wanted to take a Tylenol for his aches and pains stemming from a fall down the stairs a couple of days ago (that’s a whole other post!). It was a gel tab and I should have kept him from taking it. He has trouble taking pills (he was recently diagnosed with a relatively uncommon condition called eosinophilic esophagitis) and has recently made incredible progress, moving from just his small prescription pills to taking full sized Excedrin caplets without difficulty. However, even I have problems with the Tylenol gel tabs sticking in my throat. I should never have let him take it.

The pill stuck in his throat. This is incredibly terrible for him. Because of his condition, things can stick in his throat or even just irritate the esophagus enough that his throat closes off and he can’t swallow. He can still breathe, but even that can be a problem if he doesn’t continually expectorate his saliva and it backs up in his throat until it reaches the top. I first and last witnessed this during his last episode about 9 years ago when we were dating. It was very frightening for me because I didn’t understand what was going on. I just knew that he was attached to the bathroom floor, hanging over the toilet, for hours. Just spitting. Until finally his throat relaxed enough that he could swallow again.

We live literally one mile from a very good hospital. It took me five minutes tonight to decide that we just needed to drive to the emergency room and get this taken care of. It really was as much for me as it was for him, as much as I would like to seem a selfless angel. I really could not stand to watch him suffer through this for hours again. He panics inside, even if he manages to maintain an extremely calm demeanor, so it didn’t take me very long to convince him to let me drive him to the ER. So, we got dressed (we were both in our comfy after-work wear at this point), penned the dog into the kitchen, grabbed a book for each of us, a bowl that he could spit into and hopped in the car, leaving our dinner untouched.

I swear, it took every ounce of self-control I had not to fly down the road at 90 mph. As it was, I was going 10 miles over the speed limit, but since it’s less than 5 minutes away, going faster wouldn’t really have helped!

The emergency room staff were just as good as everything else we’ve experienced relating to this hospital. We got him signed in quickly, the triage nurse interviewed him about 5 minutes later and another 5 or 10 minutes later, he was in a bed, with a nurse putting an IV into his arm. Everyone was incredibly kind and quick-acting. Because no one had heard of his condition, they took our advice as to the course of action to be taken to help him. This meant a shot of Glucagon (a muscle relaxant specifically for smooth muscles and a treatment successfully used for him in the past) into the IV. 10 or 15 minutes later, he was able to swallow again. 45 minutes or so later, we were walking back out the door. He was only unable to swallow for an hour or less. Much shorter than any previous experience he’s had. THANK GOODNESS!

Needless to say, the adrenalin rush that I experienced, kicking into maternal hen mode and getting things taken care of, has finally worn off and I am back to feeling crappy, with a side of exhaustion.

But, who cares about me? I don’t. 🙂 Terry’s better! YAY!

So, with everyone fed (Terry had Jello and mashed potatoes) and life slowly returning to normal, I’m finally rolling the both of us into bed.

[Edited to add: Carol commented that I should have had myself checked out while we were in the emergency room, so I did want to add that I have a doctor’s appointment scheduled for Monday evening. It was intended to be a routine check-up, but if my symptoms persist, I will ask about them. I have checked my blood pressure during an episode and it was normal, though my pulse was higher than normal, so it could be a blood sugar thing or who knows. Rest assured that I will check into it if it does not abate when the heat does. Or by Monday. Whichever comes first. Thank you for your concern. :)]

As of last night, my website and blog should be officially back up and available to those of you who were unable to access it since this weekend.

Terry created a new server and moved my site(s) over to it this weekend. Unfortunately, a minor mistake was made during that process which we couldn’t see, as we could both access my sites just fine from within our own network and outside of it, as well. Thanks to Christine D. for being the first person to alert us to the problem and for sending us the screenshots that finally made the problem stunningly obvious. Terry fixed the problem on Monday night, but the changes need to replicate out to all of the Internet root servers before those of you who saw the problem were able to get in again. That takes approximately 24 hours.

So, we should be back in business for all of you who keep up with my life via my blog. However, I decided to suspend meaningful posts for a day or so, just to allow everyone to catch up.

I hope that you are all having a great week and that those of you caught in the grips of the heatwave like us are staying safe and cool!