Living Systems and Bodily Fluids

We've gone over a week without a new Covid-related catastrophe, although I did lose much of last week to a days-long migraine (the temperature's up! it's down! It's balmy on Friday! It's brisk on Saturday! My head is a football being gleefully punted around between pressure systems). Angus's college is probably online until the end of this term - they almost got to go back, but then the cases spiked in the surrounding county. Eve is in the last couple weeks of the first quadmester - less formally, at the 'trigonometry is ASS' mile marker in math and learning how much water different living things add to their pee in Biology. Last week she explained to me how the PCR Covid test worked in terms that even I could understand, so I sent her teacher a Starbucks gift card. 

Both Eve and I have hit a bad run of insomnia. I used to have prescribed sleeping pills but since I got the sleep apnea diagnosis (thirty years late, not that I'm still bitter) they don't love giving me stuff because apparently it's not great to be sedated when you have a tendency to stop breathing. But, I mean, I use the CPAP, so I don't really understand the reasoning - in fact, if I could take something to help me sleep longer I would use the CPAP for longer, which means I WOULDN'T be stopping breathing. Anyway, for a while I could take a Benadryl and it would help, but now it just has the tendency to exacerbate the restless legs problem. Then I remembered that the very first thing that helped with Eve's relentless insomnia as an early adolescent was a high dose of melatonin - which she hasn't been taking recently because her sleep was so much better. So I told her to take a shit ton of it Sunday night and I did the same and it did the trick for both of us. I'm still exhausted from the sleep debt and I suspect I've had a mild melatonin hangover for the past couple of days, but it's worth it.

(How we wind down for the night, can't think why anyone has trouble sleeping)

So, want to hear about my bloodwork adventure? Just to feel better about yourselves, if for nothing else?

So. I saw my doctor at the end of July and she gave me a requisition for bloodwork. Then we went camping. Then we were getting Eve ready to go back to school. Then my dad fell. Then my dad barfed up huge quantities of blood. Then my dad was in the hospital for two weeks. Then Eve had to get tested for Covid and we were in isolation. Then I had to get tested for Covid and I was in isolation. Then I thought "hmm, I was supposed to get bloodwork a couple weeks back, oh no, look, it was three months". 

I knew there was some kind of sign-in system that meant you maybe wouldn't have to wait in line for as many hours. So I woke up Friday, already later than I meant to (refer back to not sleeping, not before 5 a.m. anyway) and tried to sign in at the lab close by. It was already not taking any more sign-ins. for the day. So I found another one not too far away and signed in there. It said the wait was 82 minutes.

Cool, I though. I'll shower, have breakfast, and head over.

I showered and went downstairs and checked the wait again: 135 minutes. 

Cool, I thought, I'll grab a book.

I dished out my Greek yogurt and checked again: 32 minutes.

Wtf, I thought, scarfed my yogurt, slid my shoes on, and headed for the car. It's only an 11 minute drive, so no worries.

I get halfway there. There's no traffic, the weather is nice, I'm feeling good, I'm getting shit DONE, I.... have forgotten the requisition on the dining room table. 

I am torn between rage and resignation - I am a goddamned half-century old and I STILL can't get my shit together. But honestly, I'm just too tired to panic, so I turn the car around, head back to pick it up and see what can be salvaged of the process.

I get home and check the wait in the driveway: 24 minutes. Hm. Still doable.

I go in, grab the paper, yell I FORGOT THE REQUISITION I'M A FUCKING IDIOT, so that had to be fun for Matt's work call and Eve's Zoom class, get back in the car and check the wait again: 11 minutes.

Clearly, the universe is just fucking with me now. 

I am somewhat less observant of moving violations and land-speed records this time around. I squeal into the parking lot, and then get hung up in the entrance trying to buy these fucking token things that you need to pay, but none of my payment methods are working and and I am losing what's left of my composure and then a woman opens the door and says, oh, don't pay for parking, the gates are up! And also, are these your car keys on the ground? And thank goodness we are wearing masks or I might have kissed her, like, with tongue.

Then I walked down a four-mile-long hallway to find the lab, and they checked me in and I sat down and I was called in under thirty seconds. 

So obviously I win at bloodwork. 

I have to get a mammogram soon, so stay tuned for for that fun-filled frolic.

Peripheral Covid Stuff and My Weird-Ass Kids

 So Angus texted us this the other night:

So I had a minor heart attack. Then he texted this:

So naturally I disowned the little shit. 

Taking Eve to get tested was easier than I expected, considering we had been hearing about five-hour lineups at testing centers in Ottawa. We called a place a little further out at nine a.m. and got a window of between eleven and twelve. She was supposed to be in school, but for math she is able to follow in online if she can't be there, so she was listening to the lesson on her phone as we drove. 

We found the place and parked. 

It was a community center and the parking lot was surrounded by little apartment buildings, so we sat for a a bit while Eve's class was on a break looking at how people decorated their little entrances or balcony railings - window boxes, a line of inukshuks, patio lights. Then a truck pulled up with a really cute dog hanging out the window, so we squealed at him for a while. Then we talked about nonsense. At one point Eve said "do you know that if you pet a bird under its wings it messes it up and it will chronically masturbate?" I lifted my jaw off my chest and whispered "how... does a bird masturbate?" Eve threw her arms out and yelled "I DON'T KNOW! It must have a penis, right? Does the bird have sex? Where the bird penis at? WHERE IT AT?" Then I looked at her phone and said "you're on mute, right?" and she lunged for it in desperation.

They called us and checked her health card number and told her to come to the back door. She went in and I drove around to the front door and she came out almost immediately. She'd been pretty nervous about the test but said it wasn't bad at all (she had the two nostrils and throat swab - I have since been tested in just the one nostril and I did not KNOW my nostril went up that high, so I am glad she had a better experience).

So that was all good. Then we got home and I went on Twitter and experienced the weirdest instance of Bader-Meinhof phenomenon of my entire life:

And Then Angus Got Covid

 I spent the afternoon driving around doing errands, looking at pretty fall trees and listening to Blue Rodeo. I spent nearly a year listening almost exclusively to the Hamilton and Waitress soundtracks in the car and generally I regret nothing, but recently I've started feeling like I was cheating on all the other music, so I started letting my phone play a random mix of songs. This is highly entertaining, since we still have a family iTunes account, which means all of my music, all of the music we used to play for the kids, and all of Angus's music are combined. A random selection is apt to feature Ingrid Michaelson, Sara Bareilles, The Wiggles, David Bowie, Juice WRLD and YoungBoy Never Broke Again, leading to text conversations like this:

Anyway, Blue Rodeo was good medicine today, particularly "I see a world so tired and scared of living on the edge too long" (also gratifying to see the 'u' in "Rose-Coloured Glasses", fuck you Google Chrome).

So after the nightmare of the Urgent Care ward, my dad was moved into a still-pretty-nightmarish different Covid-safe ward and I couldn't visit for a day and a half until his Covid test came back negative. Then he was moved into a palatial room in Acute Care - spacious, only two beds, two windows with a killer view of the green space. We settled into a nice visit routine - I would come, bring him anything he needed, take away dirty laundry and whatever else, sit for a bit, make his bed if he was in the chair. I found an old ipad and took everything off it except Netflix, and loaded a couple of books onto his Kobo. 

I loved the simplicity of his plan for the first couple of days:

We also had fun trying to emulate the pain scale faces:

I was mistaken for his wife for the first of several times, which everyone assured me was because he looks so young and not the obverse. I found it pretty funny either way.

Then he was moved to a less-nice room in less-acute care, which was okay - good, in fact, because it meant he was improving -  but we were getting a little frustrated with the lack of information. I always kind of knew this, but it was made even more clear how you can show up to the actual hospital every day and still leave knowing very little about very much. The nurses are great, but they are overworked and not given all the information. The doctors are overworked and not around much, so unless you happen to time it right, it's pretty hard to get an answer about how things are moving. 

The O.T. staff were working pretty hard to convince him that he should go to a rehab centre for a few weeks. I didn't think this was necessarily a bad idea, I just knew he wasn't going to go, no matter what they said. Also, they said it could take a month off his recovery, which didn't seem like a great return for how much I thought it would impact his mental state. We were all getting the impression that they thought we were rushing to get him home for our own convenience, which, I mean, they didn't know us, so we weren't offended, just frustrated. 

We finally realized that trying to be kind and unbothersome was getting us nowhere, so we (and by 'we' I mean 'Matt' who did all the hospital telephone liaising - did I betray my gender, or just leverage patriarchal structures, or a mix of both? Whatever, it worked) adopted a slightly sterner tone. We also got some help from a friend who's an OT and got mobility aids in place in the bathroom and spare bedroom. 

So, after almost two full weeks in the hospital, we busted him out on his 80th birthday:

Getting him up the driveway was still a bit of an ordeal, but nothing like doing it at three a.m., with no walker, while he was bleeding internally. 

We parked him on the couch on the main floor for the day and came back to help him upstairs after dinner. He's been home for two weeks now and he's doing amazingly well - he's done the stairs by himself both yesterday and today. I actually panic a bit thinking about how lucky it probably was that the stomach bleed manifested itself so violently when it did, because if it hadn't he would likely still be feeling dreadful and we would assume it was just because of the fall. This kind of bleed is often very slow too, so who knows how long it's been affecting him. He's eating more than he has in months.

So just as this was winding down, Angus's girlfriend's suitemate at school tested positive for Covid. Angus and Mary both got tested and found out they were positive the same day I took Eve to get tested here because she had a slight fever. They were both pretty shaken, but asymptomatic except for loss of smell and taste - fully for Mary, partially for Angus. They went to her family's trailer which is at a lake halfway between their college and Mary's parents. Her mother was delivering food and they had internet so they could be online doing coursework. Once he got there he said he realized the world wasn't ending and it wasn't the worst spot to hunker down and work (he's in third year biochemistry, which was always going to be tough, and obviously this bullshit on top of everything is not helpful). 

There were a few days where I would wake up and get confused about which thing I was supposed to be worried about. I couldn't remember which kid was positive and which kid was waiting for a result, and which one meant I should be monitoring myself for Covid symptoms and which one meant I just had to monitor myself for maternal guilt and fear. 

Anyway, between Mary's parents taking care of those kids, and our friends checking on us and bringing us groceries and apple crisp and flowers while we were isolating, it would have been sheer self-indulgent drama-seeking to freak out too much. Eve tested negative. Angus and Mary were released by the New York board of health on Tuesday - he went golfing, she went for a smoothie bowl. Things are still uncertain, of course (when are they not?), and the next crisis is probably not far off. For today I'll keep my rose-coloured glasses on.

And THEN

 So my dad had a good night on the couch, and we got him a walker and got him upstairs the next day. Then our friend Chris came - he was the best man at our wedding and we hadn't seen him for a couple of years. We had a great night, had several drinks, went to bed with our cellphones off, and in the morning realized my mom had called at 3 a.m. because my dad was vomiting blood. We have a landline, and she knows that, but for whatever reason she didn't think to call it, and honestly it was probably for the best because she called the ambulance and there wasn't much we could have done at that point anyway. 

So we waited again - we all walked over to my mom's and picked plums, actually, because they have a plum tree that was overloaded and it was a simple thing that we could get done while waiting -  and eventually they called and said I could go in, but because he had gastro symptoms the Covid protocol had been tripped, so I would have to wear full PPE to be with him. Which was fine, and it was good that they told me that, because when I got there and was directed where to go, he was in a room with the curtain open and there was no one around, so if I hadn't known I would have walked right in obliviously. 

I put on a gown, and gloves, and a face shield over my mask. I was worried that he wouldn't recognize me, but when I walked in he woke up from a doze and smiled at me and I gave him his glasses and the other stuff I'd brought. He was thirsty but was due for an endoscopy so he couldn't drink, but a nurse gave me some ice chips for him. The PPE was hideous - hot, itchy, cumbersome - and I had an overwhelming wave of gratitude for the health care workers that have to wear it for long hours, and an overwhelming wave of rage towards the morons whining about wearing a piece of cloth over their face to go grocery shopping.

The biggest challenge was helping him stand up so he could pee - he really felt like he needed to, and couldn't do it lying down. I was less worried about the embarrassment - we're both adults, shit needs doing, we do it - but it was painful getting him up and back down and he was gray with pain and it was all horrible, but it was done and that was good. Then he said "have you been here long?" and I said "what? No, I walked right in ", and he said "no, I mean employed here long" and I was like "DUDE, I'M YOUR DAUGHTER". He burst out laughing and said he thought Matt had just dropped stuff off. I said "Did you not wonder why I was hanging around so long? And why I suck so bad at all the nursing stuff?" He said "I was about to say 'my daughter is built just like you' and I said "DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES SAY THAT EVER". A little while later I was trying to get his oxygen sat thing back on his finger and it kept beeping and he said "it must be almost midnight" and I was like "Dad, it's almost seven, are you losing it?" and then realized he meant because the beeping sounded like a clock chiming and it was up to twelve. 

Thankfully, the endoscopy nurses showed up with the machine, and then the (insanely hot) doctor, and they did the endoscopy and then he came out to talk to me (took his mask off, which I guess was not totally kosher but maybe he sensed that I just needed a little pick-me-up) and said it was a bleeding ulcer in his stomach that was now cauterized, and he did great. 

They had given him some super-good drugs - after they took the tube out and asked him how he felt I heard him yell "I feel AMAZING!", so I waited until he was asleep and then went home. Matt had barbecued, and we sat with Chris outside until it got dark and all our twinkly solar lights came on and the weather was perfect, and we listened to the ball game. 

It felt like the day had been four days long, but on the whole it all trended to the positive. Both things that happened to him could have turned out to be much worse, so there was that to be grateful for.