It’s 2:15am, why am I still awake, you ask?
My mother had a fall tonight and she’s in the ER. I’m here with her. She seems to be okay. In fact she’s been sound asleep for a little over an hour.
They want to take some images to make sure she’s okay, but things are moving very slowly around here.
If you have some happy thoughts to spare this morning, feel free to send some my mom’s way. I would be very appreciative.
File Under: Oh, yeah.
Just got home from taking my mother to a doctors appointment. All went well. Everything her blood test was looking for is stable and happy. Nice! We’ll get it checked again in three months. She was pretty confused about the whole experience. She kept saying that the appointment wasn’t for her, it was for someone else. Generally speaking she was able to follow what was going on. She answered as many questions as she could, and I filled in what she missed. I’ve taken her to this office three times now. She kept saying she had no memory of being there before. As good as the good news is, stuff like that is heartbreaking.
The office staff was in a state of discombobulation. They went live with a new medical record software today and nothing was working. Now I know that many of my company’s customers have similarly stressful live days but given that the system they were implementing is not the system I work on, I was able to be a snooty snob and laugh inside my heart. I whole heartedly apologize for being a douche, but it was kinda fun.
One final healthcare point. I had my second Covid booster yesterday. I can’t tell if I am feeling run down and achy because of the shot, or because I didn’t fall asleep until 1:00am today and I am just too exhausted to function. It’s a question for the ages. I don’t know if we’ll ever know the true answer.
On February 3rd, two months and one day ago, I was told to lose 5% of my weight in preparation for the weight loss surgery. I weighed myself this morning. I have 0.4 pounds to go. I would do the math to figure out what percentage I am at with 0.4 pounds to go but then you could use that to figure out exactly how much I weighed on that first day and I don’t want to let you do that.
I just drank my morning protein shake and had my morning vitamins and supplemented it all with a fist full of Tylenol because holy shit my back is killing me. I don’t know that my back has ever hurt as much as it does at this moment. Oh my shit, my back hurts.
Today’s plan involves going to my parents and picking up my mother and taking her to a doctors appointment. We’re going to get the results of her last blood test and see how her cancer numbers look. They’ve been pretty much perfect for the last year-plus and I am very optimistic that those results will continue.
After that I will come home and find some demo happening in the cellar. First on the list is the grid that until recently held the drop ceiling. After that it’s the rest of the ugly paneling on the walls. Most of the paneling came down during the flood clean up last year. You might recall me bitching about the paneling in the dining room recently. Suffice to say that the paneling in the cellar is 100 times uglier. Tomorrow the electrician is coming to replace the existing fluorescent lights that don’t really work anymore. There used to be six banks of lights with two tubes each. Only two of them still work, (it’s not the bulbs, I replaced the bulbs and the lights stayed dead) and one of those two only works some times. It’s been good the last week because it knows its end is coming and it wants to stay alive, but more often than not it doesn’t work when I flip the switch. Replace ’em all!
On top of that there is something going on at work that I am not going to be around for and I am feeling pretty shitty about that. I feel like I am dropping the ball. I don’t think anyone else feels that I’m dropping the ball, but I do so that’s that. Hopefully it will be quiet today. Fingers crossed.
Did I mention my back was hurting?
0.4 pounds to go. Oh yeah, and the surgery happens one month from today. Yikes!
Finished with about 30 minutes to spare.
Rob’s writing about pain on a Sunday night. Why? Is he watching Fear the Walking Dead or something? No. That’s not for a couple of weeks. We are still safe.
No, I’m talking about exercise. I still have 24 minutes to do today and I only have 2.5 hours left. My legs are killing me. My back is killing me. Everything is killing me.
Fear isn’t on, but the main show is on. Shits getting weird at the Commonwealth, right? There is 25 minutes left in tonight’s show so I can probably finish my 24 minutes of exercise during the commercial breaks. Har Har Har.
Work was rough on Friday. It spilled over into Saturday. I didn’t hear anything today. Hopefully nothing happened. I’m out tomorrow because I’m taking my mother to a doctor’s appointment. That means I’m worried about work and worried about her at the same time. It could be a fun morning, right?
I don’t feel any negative effects of Covid-19 vax shot #4. Here’s hoping it stays that way.
Okay, the Zombies are back on. No spoilers, but who woulda thought that Daryl was Rick’s father. What a twist!
I think this is the third time in two weeks that I have had to ask for this, but if you’re finding you have some cosmic positivity lying around that you can spare, could you send some my mother’s way today? She’s in the hospital right now. This one isn’t directly related to the last two trips, but maybe it is. I don’t know.
I’m a little late to the happy thoughts request this time. She got to the hospital while I was on the road to work and it sounds like they are already prepping her for discharge. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong this time, which is great, but it’s still really scary. Every little bit helps, right?
Thanks, internet people. It’s appreciated.
I just opened another bottle of distilled water. How long did the now empty bottle last?
21 days. The best since I started keeping track.
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It seems contrary to everything else, but during this period of preparing myself for weight loss surgery I have avoided weighing myself too often. At my first consultation appointment they gave me a goal weight. They wanted me to drop 5% of my tonnage in order to make the surgery a little easier to perform. I have my second appointment with the dietician tomorrow so I figured today would be a good day to step on the scale.
If the rudimentary math skills I acquired during my days earning my Bachelors Degree are correct, I have lost about 4.2% of my initial bulk. I don’t feel any different, but my jeans do feel a smidge looser. I haven’t been doing a very good job with all of the things the dietician asked me to do during our first meeting. I have been trying to implement new things one at a time so that I don’t drive myself nuts and lash out against it by eating the whole town. Unfortunately, one of the things I started working on was really difficult and took me a while to get used to. Then we spent two weeks without a kitchen. I’m trying to track my meals but I’ve failed the last few days.
I don’t expect that tomorrow’s meeting with the dietician will clear me for surgical take off, but I am hoping it won’t be too long before I get the okay. I am thinking another month, but not being a dietician and never having been through this before, how the hell would I know? It doesn’t really matter though. The point is I am getting closer. I feel pretty good about that.
I stayed up really late last night. I didn’t want to, but I was so busy all day that I never had a chance to do some of the things I wanted to do (laundry) and I ended up doing it all after Jen fell asleep. I finally fell asleep around 1:00am and given that I can say without any hesitation that I am ridiculously tired right now.
While I was up last night Harry sent me a text saying that he listened to a Rush album and really liked it. It was Moving Pictures, of course. It was one of the happiest moments of my life. Harry could be a Rush fan, oh glorious day!
He sent me a text a few minutes ago asking me which Rush records to listen to next.
My response was a 100,000,000 word essay.
As I said earlier, oh glorious day!
Here’s a summary of what I told him:
Inside the Red Head's Head 