Just Another Herd Creature

We've had good years and we've had  (understatement ahead) less good years, but  no matter which it has been, there has never been a year, a day or a minute when I wasn't thankful you have been in my life - that we are on this ride together.  I love you a magnitude of googleplexes and googleplexes.

I meant to send valentine  to several folks through the LJ thingy, but the last few days have been . . . well . . . instead of using some tired old word like "busy" or "overwhelming" or "chaotic" - all perfectly good words and true, never-the-less do not convene the flavor of the last 48 hours.  It's Time Line Time.

Thursday
9 am - meet with electrician who is doing work on dbubley's house.  stonebender wakes up with all the signs of getting my crappy cold.

10:30 am - go to KPPACC to see dbubley and I find her still sick - not able to keep food in her body for long.  She has now lost 70 lbs in 6 weeks.

12:00 pm - pick up stonebender and go to Stacy's memorial (I'll have to write more about that later)

4:00 pm - leave church and head to Sal's for dinner - stonebender had a craving for their grilled salami/cheese sandwich.

6:00 pm - on drive home I get a call from dbubley.  KPPACC has transported her to the Kaiser Oakland ER, they couldn't figure out why she was still so sick almost 4 weeks post-surgery.  Thought she might have a bowel obstruction.

7:00 pm - drop stonebender off at home, feed Pippin and head to the hospital. 

While I'm at the hospital, stonebender starts to feel worse and calls serenejournal, who gets a ride from sogwife and comes over ASAP.

Friday
12 am: after many hours trying to make dbubley as comfortable as possible on the small gurney - not really possible - and after seeing several doctors and having x-rays taken, they still don't know what's wrong, but they don't think it's a bowel obstruction.  She will be admitted as soon as they have a bed ready.  Finally they do and I stay until she is safely transferred onto the hospital bed. 

1 am: go home, pick up serenejournal and take her home.

3 am: stonebender does not feel like he can lay down because he is so congested.  I finally go to bed around 3:30 am.

6 am: wake up, shower, and get ready to take Pippin to the vet - she's having her surgery.  Puppy making and lethal tail will be removed.  stonebender went with me, he was still feeling pretty bad.

8 am: after we drop of Pippin, stonebender decides he needs to go to the ER.

11 am: after several hours in the ER at Alta Bates, a breathing treatment and some other meds, we leave.  Original plan was to go see dbubley after I dropped off Pippin, so I could maybe catch a doctor around 9 am.  I tried to call her, but  there was no answer in her room.  I'm starving and we need to pick up a prescription for stonebender.  I pick up something next to Walgreen's and then we head to Kaiser.

12 pm: finally get to the hospital and dbubley is okay, but they're still looking for a cause.  She is on "nothing by mouth" until further news.  We hang out for a few hours.

2 pm: stonebender and I go to KPPACC to pick up dbubley's stuff.  I have to pick up Pippin about 5 pm, but stonebender is worried I'm too tired to drive up to Albany.  I call clever_doberman to ask if she'll drive me.  She has a car with a dog crate for her dobie, Misha - we have everything we need.  She meets us at the house.

4 pm: stonebender is feeling better, so we leave him and go to pick up Pippin.  It's raining and traffic is the wonderful rush hour basic, so it takes a while.  Poor Pippin is a little out of it, but mobile.  We finally get her into the crate and head home, with her whining most of the time.

7 pm: I pull out an assortment of stuff from the fridge and we all have a small dinner.  clever_doberman offers to hang out with stonebender and watch Pippin, who is very needy and wants to be in contact with someone at all times, while I take a nap.  My nap extends to almost midnight. 

Saturday
12 am: After clever_doberman goes home, I give stonebender a breathing treatment and we eventually got to bed around 3 am.  At this point, stonebender has been up for about 50 hours.  He goes out almost immediately.  I follow shortly after.

I woke up about 8 am and stonebender woke up around 10 am.  After a short visit from Dana with her "weekend" dog (a very sweet Golden Lab named Fortune), stonebender had his first real meal since Sal's on Thursday.  Since then I've done a load of laundry and noodled on-line.  That brings us to this current moment.  It has been a jam packed 48 hours. 

Soon I'll take a shower and go see dbubley in the hospital.  She can now have clear liquids - whoo hoo!

Hope you all are having a nice Hallmark Day!

Today we say the public good-bye to Stacy.  I'm so glad she was cremated.  There is not an undertaker in the world that could have made her look even a little bit like herself after cancer tore up her body.    Here's a picture of her with Gilly in Dec. 2003. 

I am so tired of this cold.  It's been almost a week and I'm still coughing enough so that I kept waking myself up last night every 1/2 hour with it.  Once I called in sick this morning, I immediately started thinking about all the things I could get done today.  Costco run, post office run, various cleaning and fixing projects - then during an IM exchange with serenejournal she gave me a reality check.  I'm sick, I stayed home so I could rest, so maybe I should do that.  Pippin does have her puppy class tonight, so I do need to reserve enough energy for that energetic pup.  And I should stay off the computer too.  I need to put my feet up because of the edema whenever I have a chance. 

Here I sit with a sore nose, stuffed ears and aching ribs - all from fours days of blowing my nose and coughing violently.  I felt it coming on Tuesday afternoon.  Wednesday morning at 3 am I called my boss to say I was staying home.  I really hoped one day of rest would do it and it felt like it almost did.  Thursday wasn't too bad, but yesterday was really, really terrible.  I had to go to work because I had two file reviews coming in and the other person who could have done them was leaving at noon.  I struggled through the day with my pockets full of kleenex and a cup of water with me at all time.  I had to have a sip of water after I'd had the "eyes popping out of my eye" kind of coughing fit or I couldn't talk.  I'm sure more than one person wondered if they should call 911. 

I'm trying to take it easy today, but, I have so much stuff to do.  I still need to cleandbubley 's house and I have laundry and the kitchen and dining room table really need a good cleaning.  Pippin would love some attention and I really need to work with her before the next class on Tuesday night.  Or I could just go back to bed withstonebender until he is ready to get up.   Which will probably be real soon because I'll probably have a marathon coughing session just after I lay down. 

Stacy, stonebender's long time attendant and our friend, is in the hospital.  Her niece called and said if we want to see her to go soon.  They don't know how long she will live.  The pancreatic cancer, misdiagnosed for so long, has spread all over. 

I sit here as a non-believer wishing I could pray.  Stacy is very devoutly Christian.  She's very involved with her church, sometimes spending all day Sunday in prayer and worship.  Every Christmas and Thanksgiving she worked serving meals.  She collected clothes for "my homeless" as she called them.  There was always some in the trunk of her car and if she saw someone on the street that looked like they needed something she had, she'd stop and ask them.  She gave as much as she could to support her church and their homeless project.  In Dec. 2007 she collected money from her family and friends because she wanted to directly help someone.  She didn't know who, but she knew she'd find someone.  One day at the laundromat, she met a young woman with two children.  The woman was a single mom living nearby.  She had very little money or family support, but she managed to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads.  Stacy offered to give the woman and her children a ride home.  Stacy told me the next day that she'd found her family to help.  A few days later she knocked on this woman's door and offered her a shopping spree.  Shoes, pants, tops, underwear and socks for everyone, groceries for a week and a couple of toys for the children. 

Stacy never had a lot of money and she worked very hard for what she did have, but she knew she was graced with a large supportive family and her belief in god.  These two things got her through a lot of hard times and when we met her in 2000, she'd become one of the pillars of support for her family.  She and her mother raised her nephew from the day he left the hospital, neither her brother or the baby's mother could take care of him.  Pooh (not his real name, of course, but the only name I heard him called for at least a year) is now 16 years old and plans to go to college.    When she first found out how sick she was she didn't want to tell Pooh because she said "he's never been very good with death, when his gold fish died he was upset for a week." 

Stacy saw her mom through more than a year of hospitalization and nursing home stays.  She is diabetic and eventually loss one of her legs.  Stacy has been her mom's primary caregiver.  When it came time for her mother to get a prosthetic leg and insurance wouldn't cover it, Stacy collected money from her family and they brought her one. 

Now I'm just rambling and procrastinating getting stonebender up.  I have had to wake him up with awful news way to many times, but it's not like I can just wait until he reads this entry while he drinks his coffee.  

One last thing about Stacy - she LOVED our Gilly girl.  She was scared of her when she first started, but eventually she became one of Gilly's people.  One day I realized I was almost out of cans of tuna fish.  I thought I had a little stock pile.  As Gilly aged and went through her own illness, Stacy would sometimes give her a can of tuna to make sure she ate in the morning.  And more than one piece of bacon was slipped into her bowl too.  She missed Gilly as much as we did.  

Now I will be missing both of them. 

I consider myself a realist, but today I'm giving that up.  President Obama's administration will result in world peace, cures for all diseases including fucking cancer, enough food, housing and health care for everyone - EVERYWHERE and I'll never have a bad hair day or a pimple again.  And Pippin will become the world's best trained puppy before our class tonight.

Tomorrow I'll return to my normal "half empty" state. 

I saved two lives today.  When I took some garbage out this morning, I saw two little small dogs playing on the sidewalk on the other side of our very busy street.  I walked towards them hoping to see an owner, but no one was in sight and they didn't have a collar on either.  As I got closer I realized they were very young puppies of a small breed.  I would guess a chihuahua mix and about 8 - 10 weeks old.  As I walked towards them slowly, they backed up and barked.  I kept going forward because it was driving them away from the street and into a yard.  I talked to them the entire time.  They were curious, but wary of me.  I remembered I had some training treats for Pippin in my pocket.  I tossed a few to them.  After about 20 minutes of talking, advancing and giving treats, they let me pick them up.  Now that I had them safe, I thought "What the hell am I going to do with 2 puppies if I can't find the owner?"  As I was walking back, a young man (probably 14 or 15 years old) came out of the house and said "What are you doing with my puppies?"  I explained they were on the sidewalk a couple of houses down.  They'd left those little puppies in the back yard with a chain fence that had plenty of room for them to wiggle under.  The only reason he came out of the house was because he heard me saying "Pooppies, Pooppies, Pooppies" in a high voice.  He said it sounded like a French person was in their yard. 

While I am very, very happy the puppies didn't get hit by a car today, I have a feeling this might not be the last time these guys are in danger.  I suspect this family doesn't have a lot of dog or at least puppy experience.  I hope this was just an abnormality, but I think I'll keep some dog treats handy and my eyes open for further escapes.

A trip to the vet and an x-ray revealed the possible answer for her limping.  On a small bone in one of her toes there is a very slight rough edge and a little swelling.  There is no fracture or break.  She probably caused some trama to this area with all her jumping and esp. falling, often off the bed.  She's still quite young (5 months) and the growth plates are still soft.  She is taking an anti-inflammatoryand we are suppose to keep her more calm (ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha - that's a good one.)  Hopefully this will solve the problem, but the vet wants us back in a couple of weeks for another x-ray.  There is a small chance it could also be a small cyst.