Saturday, February 25, 2006

Poor Baby



Daughter and Son-in-law McT. went away (Thursday to Sunday) for a much needed and deserved long weekend. I did the Mrs. Doubtfire duty, with help from the regular weekday sitter. Mr. McT and I had a fun-filled weekend planned for the tot but when he rose Saturday AM he seemed decidedly subdued and I thought he was beginning to miss his mommy and daddy. He had the hiccups. (odd for first thing in the morning) Normally a good eater, he refused to open his lips for either pancakes or scrambled eggs though he did drink a few ounces of watered-down juice.
Just as I was about to get him dressed fro the walk over to the pool for swimming class, he whimpered and threw-up the juice and what looked like the last meal I had fed him the night before. Uh-oh, diarrhea too. There won't be any swimming this weekend.
I cleaned the boy up from top to bottom and gave him a few small sips of water. A few minutes later that came up and the diaper needed changing again. Enough evidence for me to diagnose a case of whatever's been going around.
We bundled him up and brought him to our house for the day. After crushing a quantity of ice, Mr. McT was dispatched to the market to buy Coke, Gatorade, Pedialyte – fluids that have not seen the inside of our refrigerator in years.
Unfortunately, the day went downhill. He slept a lot and when he was awake he was inconsolable. He just didn't know what was happening to him. He couldn't keep down even small amounts of fluid. He was refusing to open his mouth for anything. He just cried and cried. I began to worry about dehydration.
We bundled him back up and drove back to his house. The ride in the car calmed him down and he fell asleep. (Whew) A call to the doctor was definitely in order and he couldn't have been nicer. He assured us that a kid of his size and general health could go a whole day with nothing and that we should just offer whatever we thought he might possibly like and eventually he'd feel better and take something. (I should know that, right?) He said that usually when he calls back the next day to check on a child with a stomach flu the child has bounced back but the adults are all sick.
Great. This was starting to resemble the flu episode in The Secret Lives of Dentists.
Saturday night was bad. Baby and I spent it on the couch watching Barney and Thomas the Train DVD's in between bouts of stomach cramps. He had a fever that was just high enough to cause misery. Would it suddenly spike? Was an emergency room trip a possibility?
Morning finally came. He took a few ounces of milk mixed with camomile tea. It seemed to make him feel bad again resulting in his refusal to open his mouth for anything for the rest of the day. He looked and acted really sick. All day he couldn't really even lift his little head off the couch. When we spoke to the doctor again that afternoon, he was surprised that things had not improved. We were to monitor the temp and be ready for the tepid bath plunge if he got too hot. In four hours we'd call him and if there was no change we'd be meeting at the hospital.
I was tired myself and realized that I hadn't eaten in the past two days either so we ordered in some Chinese food. When the door buzzer rang, the baby opened his eyes and said something (What he said, I have no idea)
When I spooned some wonton soup into a bowl, he said, "Soup? Soup?"
I answered him, "Yes. Chinese soup."
"Chinese? Chinese?" he countered with genuine interest.
This was the most life we'd seen in two days. He wanted the soup. He took it a teaspoon at a time with a bit of noodle and rice asking for more as soon as he swallowed and while this relatively enormous quantity of food precipitated some drastic intestinal reactions he seemed suddenly unbothered by it all and eager to eat more soup. The pains must be gone. He's getting better!
Daughter and Son-in-law McT. arrived home at 10:00 PM Sunday night. Baby MacTech was peacefully asleep.

Monday, February 20, 2006

A Little Entertaining


A very long weekend. I love it. It was another hellish week at Burpie Cow Wow. I'm actually quite inured to it all which I think is good. My mate is in worse shape than I. He even made an appointment last week with a hypnotherapist. He missed the appointment which is par for his recent out-of-control course. We met a friend for a quiet Friday night dinner at one of our favorite 5th Avenue restaurants and avoided all talk of the real world.
Saturday AM I was up early to make my shopping lists. My cousin and his new wife and his two grown children were coming to dinner Sunday night. The cousin is in from the west coast. His kids live here in Brooklyn. I haven't seen either in at least 20 years.
My cousin now works for Apple at their headquarters in Cupertino. He lives in that unreal area of the coast just north of Carmel.
I would throw an official dinner party. I invited a few more New York relatives to round out the group to an even ten.
I did a quick clean up of the house. That consists of throwing all the crap that piles up on horizontal surfaces into shopping bags and stuffing them in closets.
Mac-husband and I both made several trips to various food purveyors across the neighborhood on the coldest day of the winter thus far but the sun was warm and the prospect of using the fireplace was enticing.

The menu:
plenty of wine, of course
Cheeses and olives and vegetables with dip
Green salad with pear and grilled tuna
Fillet of beef with scalloped potatoes and roast asparagus
Tarte Tatin with vanilla ice cream

All went well. I especially enjoyed my cousin's children.
His daughter is a physics teacher at a prestigious New York City independent school "...after college I just hung out in St. Luis Obispo working in a coffee shop and smoking a lot of pot."
His son is a drop-out from an English Lit PhD program at Columbia who now works for a hedge fund. "...I really hate it and all the people I work with. I'm not going to blow up the building or anything though."
My younger brother also came out from Manhattan. He's always funny and edgy.

We sent the guests home at a reasonable hour neither too early nor too late – Legends car service ( better cars and distinctly middle-eastern with American flags stuck in their rear-view mirrors to throw you off any terrorist inklings) for the cousin and wife who were headed to a Manhattan hotel, Arecibo car service for the kids who would be perfectly comfortable heading back to Williamsburg in those jalopy cars, with the cardboard air fresherners and salsa background music, my brother by subway as he eschews cabs of any kind.

Monday I was up early to do the clean up which I actually enjoy. I worked for half a day as I had network consultants going over our servers at school. My colleague who is the official "Network Manager" had his nose out of joint about that so I had to spin it a bit to get him to swallow this (to him) intrusive pill. He doesn't realize yet that it will be a lot worse before it gets better. Oh, don't get me started down that road.

Tuesday I'm up and off to the dentist to repair some broken teeth. He'll tell me for the fourteenth time, "I think you grind your teeth at night." I probably should just get all my teeth sheathed in steel like Jaws, that villian in The Spy Who Loved Me.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Last Year...



Last February ('05) and the first half of March I'd get up every week day morning at 5:00 AM. I needed to be on the subway before 6:00 AM in order to get to the Upper East Side for the first radiation appointment of the day.
There were a few snowy and stormy days and a major East Side subway shut down during that six week period of time.
This is all to say that I took it as a challenge. I would get through radiation therapy every day for six weeks and still be at school before my first class of the day. No one would be any the wiser.

Radiation is nothing. It's painless. It does not make you feel sick or tired. (Everyone I know is sick AND tired but radiation has nothing to do with it.)

The down side of radiation:
•It's a pain in the neck to make the commitment of going every day with the other things you have to do in your normal day.
•At the end of the six weeks you do have a very itchy rash. They give you medication for it and the rash eventually goes away.

I bet most of the people I work with didn't even realize something was different with me last year. That was my plan.
I forgot all about it myself, until today.
I got a questionairre from Sloan Kettering:
"When was the date of your first breast cancer?"Oct 15, 2004
"Which side?" right
" What was your treatment?" surgery and radiation
"Have you had a second breast cancer?" no
"Have you had a third cancer of any kind?" whoa...give me a break, it's only a year!
My annual radiation follow-up falls on March 7 this year, a Tuesday. If Mondale really pays attention he might notice that I'm not there at the beginning of his computer class that day. He may not notice at all, which would please me. I like to accomplish these things under the radar.
Life goes on.
I really did enjoy the snow this weekend. almost as much as the snow last February.

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Snow is a Nice Diversion



If you're going to feel plowed under anyway, you may as well have a snowstorm. I'm still not able to dig out of the heavy weather that's hit me at work. The weekend's snowstorm is sweet icing on my bitter cake.

It's Sunday night and I'm sitting next to a pile of paperwork that I've shuffled about for the last 48 hours. I spent Thursday and Friday with our school database developer. We were trying to find and repair glitches and bugs and generally get the thing to function better. When he left I was left with one of those eye-squinting headaches. And while we did move forward, I slept the disturbed sleep of FileMaker Pro layouts and scripts.

I'm into my second week of Federal jury duty. Luckily...not picked but I have to call in every day 'til Friday. I admit, I just forgot to call last Thursday night. I'm sure to forget at least one night this week too.

These things worry me:
•I have to make a decision on a three year Internet access contract for school on Monday. I have not done my proper homework.
•I have to arrange for many thousands of dollars of network security projects in the next several weeks.
•The historical academic data has to be converted from the old database to the new so that transcripts can be accurately produced.
•The three-year tech plan I must produce in order for our school to qualify for discounted network services requires a survey of staff tech skills (where they are now) and a plan of where their skills will be in three years and how I propose to get them there.
•I have a meeting with red pants on Tuesday.

And there lies the theraputic nature of blogginng for just writing this down makes it seem not so bad. In fact almost laughable.

I will be working on the holidays next week and I won't be able to take the March break either. I am beyond self-pity on this as now I'm just worried that these pieces of time won't be enough to catch up on all this crap, and besides, my friends at school are going through really life-altering issues and what have I done for them?

I hope they can be strong. I hope they can be happy.