Seismic Twitch

The decision of the family is unanimous. No heroic measures are going to be used to resuscitate Dad. We are also not going to have them do much in the way of other measures, including dialysis. There’s not much point to it really. The blood tests aren’t all back yet. They’re trying to find out if he has an infection that is caused his kidneys to shut down.

Dad does have basic responses, but none of them bode well. When the nurses attend to him, take his pulse/blood pressure or wash him, he fights it.This doesn’t mean that he is aware of what he’s doing. He can’t swallow and therefore hasn’t taken any meds since he was found unconscious on Friday afternoon/evening. He doesn’t respond to commands of any sort and doesn’t respond to my brother’s voice.

We’re going to let nature take its course. The nurses will keep him comfortable, that’s all.

So now we wait for the inevitable.

To help me Bran has taken me on two car rides to help settle me down. He did that when my dog died in 1985. He would’ve done it if we had a car when my Mom died in 1993. He did that tonight. We went and got snacks for all of us. Did you know that Chapman’s Ice Cream company makes a no-sugar added, lactose free ice cream? They do. Only 14 grams of carbs per 1/2 C serving. That’s better than regular ice cream.

We went through the real estate listings for town as well. It was something to occupy my mind with and do a little bit of dreaming. It was a nice distraction. While we did that Golden Eye played on the DVD player. Laundry tomorrow so that we have clean clothes to to down to see Dad on Monday with. I’ll be sorting through the stuff collected over the years of Mom and Dad’s lives together (including “treasures” given to them by us kids). I don’t know what to do with things like their letters to each other from before they were married, Mom’s nursing uniform (100% cotton that had to be ironed and starched), Mom’s wedding dress and Dad’s wedding suit, and a plethora of other bits and pieces of so much living.

Thank you all, those who commented and those who are just thinking of me and my family. Your support means more than I could possibly say.

Today I woke up at 9 am so that I could phone the doctor’s office and find out when my appointment was. Yesterday, about 10 minutes after I made the appointment and no writing it down, I couldn’t remember when it was for. I thought 10:45, Bran thought 10:15. He was right. I reset the alarm to 9:30 and went back to snoozing.

At the doctor’s office I got a script for Celexa (older version of Cypralex). We changed to Celexa because it’s covered under the drug plan and the newer version isn’t and I wouldn’t be able to get exceptional drug coverage for it. I will be on the same dose of Celexa as the Cypralex but might have to increase.

Also, because of the constant heartburn and that it’s been waking me up. If it’s that bad then it should be taken care of. So now I’ll be taking Ranitidine twice a day.

After that I got the note to request that professors cut me breaks on deadlines for assignments “because of her medical condition”. So hopefully this will relieve the pressure I’m feeling and allow me to get things done at the pace I’m able to push myself and catch up.

My knee doesn’t show any arthritic accumulation on the x-ray, just some fluid build-up. So I’ll be going for physio-therapy and have a requisition for that.

After we finished at the doctor’s office we went to Charlie’s fish market and I got some sushi for being a good girl. Well, ok, it wasn’t for that. It was because a) I wanted sushi, b) we were at the same mall already, c) they make sushi, and d) I’d never been there and wanted to see what they had. The sushi selection was lovely. Only two had raw fish, the rest were either veggie or cooked fish. I got oyster (meh), lobster (sadly, meh), shrimp, a seaweed one I’d never had before (it was good), sea urchen (delicious!), and avocado (delicious!). I was content. They use undyed pickled ginger, so it wasn’t as colourful as it could have been, but it was still yummy. But I’m ahead of myself. We didn’t eat until we got home. I also picked up some instant Miso soup packets. I can take them to work and get a nice quick, low calorie, astronomically high sodium snack.

After the excursion to the fish store (not much in the way of fresh fish, sadly, but tons of frozen fish and more salmon of various types and such than you can shake a kodiak bear at. Anyway, we drove by Divine, which didn’t have a piercing sale advertised in their window and didn’t open for another 5 minutes. Instead we went down to Schmatta downtown. We found a parking spot and went in. I now sport two new piercings in my ear helix. I thought that getting two at the same time would be ok, but next time I’m going to only get one at a time. The first piercing hurt a lot and because everything was all swollen and irritated the second piercing hurt even more. Interestingly my ear doesn’t hurt much at all unless I try to lay on it (as I discovered when I rolled over in bed). They look totally fabulous. Here are a couple of shots I took. They’re a bit fuzzy, but it’s hard to get a good shot when you can’t look through the viewfinder. click to make them bigger:

and

After that we headed to the drug store for the scripts. They didn’t have them ready so I picked up a few other things and Bran got one, a personal groomer to trim his nose and ear hair. I also picked up some Kleenex wet wipe things to have at school, contact lens saline and some cotton balls to use for cleaning the piercings. I know have enough Shoppers points built up to buy $25 worth of stuff.

Oh, the piercing place has the hair dye we talked about, DarkDaughta. All kinds of colour! That totally rocked my boat.

After we were done at the drug store we headed to Wendy’s for Bran’s and Boy’s lunch (and some chicken nuggets for me to augment the sushi lunch) we came home and ate. Then I laid down for a nap. I work graveyards this weekend and have to be at work in an hour. I also have to find something to eat before going but it doesn’t look like I’m going to think of anything. Boy is has Hot Shots Part Deux in the DVD player and they’re busy making fun of every single possible movie made that could be snuck into a movie script (and a few advertisements)…now is the chicken shot ala Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.

I have a package waiting at the Co-Op mail depot. That will be the Camelbak Better Bottles and straws that I ordered. They stalled the order because the straws were on back order. I think that’s what is there. It’s way too early for any of the t-shirts I ordered to be in yet.

That’s been my day. I’ll take my reading to work and hope to get more done including beginning the beginnings of my literature review and changing my methods pre-proposal. I also want to get a head start on my monthly report so that I all I have to do later in the week is record the final stats.

Ta-Ra

That’s right folks, this is the entry that very nearly didn’t exist. However, because it’s only 1 am, I feel I can spend some time I would have spent reading for tomorrow’s class on this entry.

I’ve been plagued by sinus headaches of late. I don’t know what the deal is with that. I take ibuprofen and antihistamines when I got to bed at night. Afterall, that tends to be the time I get all congested and stuff. Not only that, but nothing else except the change of season has happened. I can’t even count the time change since the headaches came before it and we don’t change our time (we’re always on MDT). Anyway, Saturday was the worst one, but they’ve been hanging around the edges for a few days now. SUCKS!

Sunday morning I had very good intentions of getting to the school by 10 to study and make sure I was caught up on my notes and such. It didn’t work out quite that way, but I was at school (with my new thermal jug filled with Bran’s marvelous soup) by 11 accompanied by a large double/double coffee from Tim’s and having already eaten a breakfast sausage sandwich.

I spent my time productively…eventually, but first rearranged my desk to accommodate the new lamp (which had no bulb) and rearranging my desk to my liking. Then I glued water spots and splats with teeny splat splashes all over the top of my laptop. I got those at London Drugs in the scrap book section they have around photography. I love my water spots. I’m hoping they freak a few people out. This does mean that I want more in different colours. I got the plain clear to be more realistic.

After that I finished reading comics and by 12 I was ready to settle in to work and that’s exactly what I did. I got the chapter reading and notes for Theory done (though I’m going to skip the class this morning in favour of reading for the Aboriginal Women and Law class – it’s not like I’m going to miss anything though the class might miss my blabber mouth and actually have to participate in the discussion). Then I began reading Gender Trouble, the book that I’m in a “group” for. Group is a bit of a strong appellation since it’s just me and another woman. We nearly had a third member, but he wimped out.

Bran and Boy came and got me about 6. We went off hunting down supper and brought it home. Unhappily after supper I was very, very, very tired and went to bed. That now explains why I’m wide awake now after a 5 hour nap. So I’m going to get my leftover pop-corn chicken and nosh on them while I read “Real” Indians and Others: Mixed Blood Urban Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood and download a Supreme Court of Canada ruling on something or other.

Ta-Ra

I went to bed last night with a very slight sinus headache. I had taken my nighttime pills so didn’t worry about it much. In them are ibuprofen and antihistamine so I figured that it would be taken care of. Alas when I was woken by my bladder at 11 am, the headache had bloomed into a full, sharp and extremely painful, sinus headache. After the bathroom business was taken care of I went to the living room and got my morning pills (which are pretty much the same as the evening pills but with the addition of the thyroid med and the possible lack of the bupropion – still weaning down to get off of it) and took them.

I went back to bed. I tucked my head under the blankets in my attempt to alleviate part of the discomfort, light sensitivity. I tried that for some time. I had to stop eventually because I was getting too warm. The headache was sharp. It was like having shards of glass inside my head behind my ears and in my forehead. I laid there for what seemed like forever. Then I decided to get up and have a shower, a nice hot shower, to try and get the pain to ease up. Poor Bran was on the toilet when I came blearing in to shower. I managed to get my clothes off, get the shower running and get into the shower without killing myself. I’m sure that Bran’s balancing hands helped a lot. Oh, I also used my new bath sheet (the lovely, long, soft, long towel we bought at London Drugs a couple weeks ago).

As I stood and washed myself, shampooed my hair and so on, I felt the moisture seem to pick apart the pain. It was such a relief to have the pain ease in such a palpable way. By the time I’d finished my shower and was working on getting dressed without exacerbating things again, I asked Bran to heat up some of his oh-so-marvellous soup. Aside from being hungry, I knew the soup would encourage my body to keep on shifting the congestion out.

By about 2:30 or so the headache had cleared up enough that I wasn’t wanting to have my head surgically removed. I did plan on going to Warman with Bran to hunt down bras, but the headache sort of derailed those plans. Instead we went hunting some Werher’s candy. When we got on the road we decided to go to Costco and buy a sewing machine. When we got there we discovered that they didn’t have the Singer machine at all. That sucked a whole lot. So we bought some potato salad, some grapefruit and Werther’s. Then we headed to London Drugs and I got a Brother ES-2000t sewing machine. It was on sale. It’s fully electronic (which means I need to find the instructions and read them. I hope the bobbins we have can be used in the new machine. I’ll be able to hem pants (which is a good thing for both Boy and myself) as well as get some flannel and sew up hankies. It even has a button hole function. The old machines require a separate machine to attach on to make buttons. It’s really light. Even in the box it’s lighter than the old all metal Singer I have (that’s broken).

As well, I got a nice thermal container for taking soup and such things to school to eat. I also got a desk lamp and some stick on things used for scrap booking. They look like water droplets. I got them to freak people out about my computer being wet. So cool!

Anyway, it’s time to clear off the coffee table and check out my new sewing machine.

Ta-Ra

Today I spent 2 and one half hours cooking. I fried bacon. Then I cleared the grill. Then I made pancakes. Then I cleared the grill. Then I put hash browns into the oven to bake. Then I opened a can of peaches. Then I discovered that the oven the bacon was in to keep warm was singing the cardboard thingie I was using to keep the bacon drained (the bacon also got very crispy). Then in the last 20 minutes before I was to serve, I scrambled some eggs…1.5 dozen to be exact. I have never in my life encountered eggs with such fragile shells. They must be feeding those hens DDT because I’d tap the shell (and I do mean tap, not bang, not anything extravagantly violent, just a slight tap) and the entire shell would crack and collapse in my hand. Weird.

When brunch was done everyone scattered. Here I’d spent most of the morning cooking for a bunch of adults and not one of them stays behind to help clean up. So I got on the speaker system and announced that I was no one’s mother or maid and that someone had to come down and clean up the mess because I was stopping for a rest after I put the leftovers away. I got a reluctant volunteer. Man, you sure can tell that prison makes people assume that someone else is going to do the work.

Now, thanks to that and 4 building and room checks, my feet, ankles, left knee and hip as well as my back ache. I’ve taken my night time pills. There are two ibuprofen in that so I should be feeling some relief soon. I still can’t believe that they did that. Augh!

Oh well. I’m home. Tomorrow Bran and I will be going to vote (it’s our national election day tomorrow – I bet all you Americans are jealous cuz you have another 2 or 3 weeks left of campaigning to listen to. I know I’ll be relieved to have it done with. Then after that we’re going to a small town outside the city to a bra shop where I’ll have my girls supported in the manner to which they’ve never encountered before. With luck I’ll also find a pair or two of pants that fit (not at the bra shop).

Ta-Ra

From the latest CBC News:

Border guards to turn away church group aiming to picket bus victim’s funeral Last Updated: Friday, August 8, 2008 | 9:09 AM CT CBC News Canadian border guards are under orders to prevent members of a fundamentalist American church from crossing into Canada to protest at the funeral Saturday of a Winnipeg man brutally killed on a Greyhound bus last week. Westboro Baptist Church, a controversial Kansas-based sect, intends to picket the funeral of 22-year-old Tim McLean to tell Canadians his slaying on July 30 was God’s response to Canadian policies enabling abortion, homosexuality and adultery. “God is punishing Canada for passing laws against WBC — by exposing Canadians as cannibals and highway decapitaters,” the church says in a news release on its website, which refers to McLean as “The Headless Canadian.” Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day’s office sent an alert to border patrol to “look out” for people with signs and pamphlets consistent with the messages that the church promotes and to keep them out of the country, Winnipeg MP Pat Martin told CBC News on Friday. “Entering Canada by a U.S. citizen isn’t an absolute right, and if you’re coming here only to disrupt the social order and to promote what we consider to be bordering on hate crimes or hate language, they shouldn’t come into Canada,” Martin said. “We’re not going to allow these people to compound the tragedy of the McLean family loss, and Canadians simply won’t tolerate these lunatics disrupting what should be a respectful service.” Freedom of speech is not absolute, Martin said. “Your freedom to swing your arm in the air ends when it touches the end of my nose,” he said. “What these people were going to do was hurtful, harmful and disruptive to the peace, order and good government that we guarantee to our citizens, so they have no place in this country.” A counter-protest against the church’s picket plans was launched on the social networking site Facebook on Thursday. More than 500 people have since joined the group; postings indicate they plan to form a “human wall” around the family to shield them from the church protest, if it takes place. The Westboro Baptist Church and its founder, Pastor Fred Phelps, gained infamy by protesting gay-pride rallies and the funerals of people who have died from AIDS-related illnesses. In recent years, church members have also picketed the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, claiming the deaths are also God’s punishment for the country’s tolerance for homosexuality.

I may despise Harper and nearly all of what he represents, but his government has managed to show a remarkable amount of sense and sensitivity around this whole issue.

The space on my jaw where the tooth used to be hurts, but it’s not the same kind of chronic then acute pain I had when I’d eat while the tooth was there. The nice thing about this pain is that 1. I know it’ll go away 2. the ibuprofen is pretty effective and 3. so long as I’m careful when I drink (not too hot and not sucking on a straw) it doesn’t hurt to drink cold liquids. Yay! It won’t be long and the gum will heal (despite the tooth breaking up it wasn’t a difficult extraction and the entire tooth is gone) nicely and I’ll get used to no tooth being there. I might even get a denture or something to replace it.

Thanks to everyone for your well wishes.

I should be going to bed soon. But first I’m going to read my daily comics and then eat my chicken rolls from last night’s supper…because, you know, I can.

Yep, today will be the very last update about that tooth. That’s because that tooth is now an ex-tooth. It’s in the bio-hazard trash at my dentist’s office. Not only was the tooth cracked, it came out in pieces. Both the front and back roots were infected which is why the blister on the side of my gums grew.

If you ever have problems with your teeth, take care of them a.s.a.p. and prevent yourself from going through what I just did. From the get-go I knew that saving both teeth was going to be a questionable proposition. I was right. So if you don’t want to be gumming your food, take care of your chompers. If you clench, get thee to a drug store and buy a mouth dental guard. In the long run it’ll be more than worth while.

I won’t go into much detail about the whole thing, but the smell of the infection was somewhat problematic during part of the tooth pulling because I was highly nauseated by the odour. My dentist is a nerd. Like I enjoy popping pop pack bubbles, she enjoys popping infection blisters. How they manage to deal with the smell is beyond me. For that part, I wish I had been knocked out.

So now I’m going to go lay down. The freezing is beginning to come out. I’ve taken some ibuprofen and I’m sleepy so I’m going to take advantage of that while I’m still relatively pain free. I work the graveyard shift so I will need that sleep.

Hopefully there’s going to be some of that delicious leftover chicken tortellini soup left for my supper at work.

Ta-Ra

That’s what I have. I called the dentist office and talked to the lovely receptionist (Hi Darcy – if you read this) and she’s booked me in at 10:30 tomorrow morning for Dr. Moe to have a look see. I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m going to be losing a tooth tomorrow. Sucks, but that’s the way the enamel crumbles.

I shifted shifts tomorrow as well. Instead of working 4 to midnight, I’m taking the 12 to 8 am shift for a woman whose family is coming in from out of town for a wedding. That way she gets the extra day with them, I keep a shift instead of having to call in “pained” and everyone is happy. I should be recovered enough from any work that needs to be done by the time midnight comes along. I will have had the entire day to sleep away any initial discomfort.

Have I mentioned lately that I love my job? I really do! I work with a bunch of very awesome, very odd, but very awesome people. I just thought I’d mention that. Everyone should have a job like mine, a job where you are pleasantly surprised to get paid because you’d be there anyway, where you can talk for days on end about its awesomeness. Everyone should have that. Damn. I love my job.

When I got back to work today I discovered that one of the men who had been caught with alcohol on his breath was back at the house. That was a good thing. He has been trying hard to make things work and the one slip resulted in a curfew cut and not much else. The one who was sent away (week before last) wasn’t sent back because of the breathalizer result. In fact, parole officers can’t send them back because of readings from the CRF. They’d have to read positive at the parole office, have the smell of alcohol on their breath, or have a positive pee test. They sent him back for other reasons. The positive breathalizer reading was merely the last straw. It’s a good thing to know.

I also talked about how to see when things aren’t going well for the residents to try and help them either cope or find strategies to help themselves out of whatever they’re going through. Apparently it’s not easy to see. For more than 50% of the people who come through there, asking for help or admitting that things are out of control isn’t on the list of things to do. It’s really too bad, too. I mean, that’s what we’re all there for, to help them be successful. It’s hard for them to trust that we’re not there to make their lives harder.

I had some really good laughs with my co-worker. He’s nuts and it suits me just fine. The sad thing is, though, that even though he’s a movie maniac (he has thousands of DVDs) he’d never seen Casablanca or The Big Sleep. He’d never heard of James Coco, David Ogden Stiers, Peter Falk, Sid Caesar or Eileen Brennan. That is an abysmal failure on the part of society. I can’t believe that one could go through life not having even heard of those people. Tomorrow I’m going to take in The Cheap Detective. At least then he’d be able to see a spoof of those movies.

I made an unfortunate booboo when I set up the DVD machine to record my murder and mayhem tonight…or rather last night considering when I’m writing this. I forgot to turn the cable box on and set it to A&E. So the DVD recorded 2 hours of no signal. I hate that. The only good thing is that I know they’re going to rebroadcast the programs sometime in the future. I have Thursday off so I can get any reruns that I don’t already have.

My mouth hurts. I can hardly wait until all this dental work is done and out of my hair (so to speak). The tooth itself hurts this time. The dentist told me the tooth would be sensitive and pained because of the work she did. The blister at the side in my gums is still there as well. That means that the infection is still there. I have a very distinct feeling that I’m going to be using that prescription she gave me for another round of antibiotics.

The couch is leaving the house tomorrow and the La-Z-Boy left today in the hands of some people who wanted it. Bran advertised the computer desk on Free-Cycle tonight. I hope that it goes soon. this means that the fish tank will move and some more space will open up. It’s also possible that the couch might fit in front of the genuine-real-fake-and-tacky fireplace.

That’s about it from here.

Ta-Ra

We lost two more guys to booze this weekend. Two blew over .000. One swears that he didn’t drink, but the machine isn’t broken. The other admitted he had some beer but instead of waiting for the cops to come he ran. So any chance of having his PO just give him shit and send him back, he’s now UAL and will definitely go back to prison when he’s caught. That sucks big time.

So in the past two weeks we’ve lost 3 guys to having to call the RDO because of drinking.

We have to prove to the guys now that the machine is working by blowing a reading ourselves. That’s thanks to a drama queen and twit-shit-disturber who works hard to get people all worked up. The place doesn’t need that drama and he’s actually stuffing his nose into what isn’t his business. Shit head.

Otherwise it was an extremely quiet shift. There were only two people around for lunch and one of them was asleep. For supper there was only me and one resident. There was tons of leftover food. mean, it was meant to feed 10 people. Lunch was fried bologna, mac and cheese and broccoli salad. Supper was chili, corn bread and a tossed salad.

Sadly for me I bit down on a very crisp and thick piece of bacon in the salad. It was much like biting on a rock. My newly drilled and temporarily filled tooth is now sore. I’m very conscious that it’s there. I’m trying to figure out what to eat now. Eating cold things hurts the tooth. Eating solids hurts the tooth. I don’t really want clam chowder.

I’m going to be prepping the mushrooms tonight for tomorrow’s stuffed mushrooms. We got crab meat and butter yesterday, Bran picked up some lemons today. With all that the mushrooms will be stuffed with sauteed mushroom stems, crab meat, onion, garlic, some butter and lemon juice. Then they’ll get baked and that sounds a whole lot like supper.

Now I’m tired. I need to get the mushrooms prepped, figure out something to eat and then go to bed because of that tiredness.

Ta-Ra