Exploding Sparrows

Well, my mother is still on the ventilator.  They're talking about the possibility of long-term care, now, if she improves.

I am still short of breath and coughing a bit, but I'm still doing housework and playing the piano.  I'm doing pretty well, considering the wild weather swing we are in the midst of here.  The high temperature today was in the upper fifties, and tomorrow it will be in the lower twenties.  The barometric pressure is incredibly low.  I almost expect to see my sparrows start to swell up one by one and explode from the lack of air pressure out there.  It may well be that the reasons I'm feeling so good are my awareness of the weather forecast's affect on my asthma and my willingness to hit it hard with the meds first thing this morning at the littlest sign of discomfort.  As a result, I'm doing far better than I usually would with weather like this.  OK, it helps to actually have some meds--last year all I had was prednisone.  The meds hardly cure me, but they're helping to make the asthma more manageable more often.

Thursday night I walked with my family from the car (only four or five cars from the front) into the grocery store, and I had a nice little asthma attack.  I could barely walk.  But in general I'm doing pretty well.  Once in a while I'm still a little more tired than I'm accustomed to.

It's occurred to me that if it had been my father who got sick, we'd have been in real trouble.

Mom doesn't drive.  It may be because I take after her.  And she's not very outgoing (major understatement--she'd be happy living on a mountaintop with a couple of dogs for companionship and protection--seriously, she's always said she wanted to be a hermit before she met my father).  And I was *really* sick the first week she was in the hospital.  If that had been Dad, somebody else would have had to drive her to the hospital.  And then wheel her around in her wheelchair.  Heck, she needs help with her clothing in the bathroom (hope that wasn't too personal).

And then after I got the least little bit well (at which point I would have theoretically pushed myself to the point of getting even sicker), I wouldn't have known how to get to the new hospital.  And, then there's the fact that my mother no longer does much housework, being confined to a wheelchair, with hands that don't work very well any more.

And then there was the tonsillectomy.  My daughter is doing very well.  I amuse myself these days by telling her to speak up.  But she is now past the two-week point, so she's allowed to do housework and go out in public and roughhouse if she wants.

We've all had colds here--except for me!  Maybe I had that cold once--there are a couple of hundred cold viruses, and you can develop immunity to specific ones.  And it's a good thing I never caught it (knocking on wood here--can't hurt), because if I catch a cold right now while I've still got another two to four weeks before I completely recuperate from the asthma, I will be screwed.  This is how it works--one illness, and a month of asthma afterwards.  A second illness, and I'm in big trouble.  A third, or fourth, and I'm debilitated until at least Memorial Day.  All I can do is hope I get well before something else hits.

Although, for Social Security purposes, it would be great if I got sick again....

Monday I had my lawyer's appointment.  She had a few questions, and some pointers for appearing in front of the judge on March 5.  And a few days ago I found out that my husband's guard duty had been moved to the same week as the hearing.  ('S***.  S***!  Who will drive me to the hearing?!  Ack!!!')  So at the lawyer's office I discovered that the hearing could be moved.  And that my husband could be a witness, which would be good--he always comes across as credible, while I tend not to (hard as I try to ape more neurologically typical behavior), so this can only work in my favor.  So we started a continuance--a delay of probably a month or two, so that he could be there.

A delay would also work in my favor, the lawyer explained to me, because maybe....and then she started stuttering, so I finished it for her:  (joyful voice here) "Maybe I would get sick again!"

And then the Guard moved his guard duty week again.

So now we have to write a letter for the judge who'd already requested evidence that my husband's guard duty was conflicting with the hearing--a letter stating that my husband had originally had guard duty the week of the hearing, but they'd moved it, stating who he talked to, what they told him, and when.  So now we're stuck with the original date.

If it's not one branch of the government, it's another.

Next week we go to the Cleveland Clinic.  Stay tuned....