Sick..or Not

Walt, Sheila and I are kind of weird.

Sheila, our dying dog, the one the doctor predicted had "maybe weeks" to live is acting reborn.  She is perkier, friskier than she has been in a long time.  Whenever I leave the house, I always give the dogs a treat.  When I announce "treat time" all three used to come running, but then Sheila figured out that she would get a treat even if she didn't come running with the others.  She would stay lying on the patio outside or the couch inside.  If I tossed the treat out onto the patio, she'd lumber to her feet, eat it, and then lie back down again. If she were on the couch, sometimes she would raise her head to take the treat, sometimes just opened her mouth and took it without hardly lifting her head.  Her eyes always had that dull "oh, if I must wake up, I guess I will" look about them. I began calling her "your majesty" because she seemed to be insisting on being waited on hand and foot.

Since she has started on the Prednisone, she now comes running with the others.  She sits to wait, with that big Sheila grin on her face.

She also joins the others in greeting us at the door the big grin on her face

.

If this is a dying dog, what a wonderful way to die!

As for Walt, his voice is slowly coming back.  He has been about 4 days with little to no voice.  There was no real reason for it.  He had no other signs of being sick.  He had no sore throat, no symptoms of allergies, just one day his voice started sounding funny and by the next day he could barely croak out a sentence.  But he started to sound more normal yesterday and by last night he still had that deep chest voice, but more volume.  He said he remembered feeling like this when he had his tonsils out and thought he should have gotten ice cream.

And then there is me.  I was not really sick, but suffered from extreme lethargy and mild intestinal problems.  I went to have lunch with my mother, then to Sutter Emergency Room to have my TB test read, then out to Kaiser to get the first in a series of 3 Hepatitis-B shots (not a requirement for the volunteer job, but a recommendation).

When I got home, there was lots to do but I just couldn't stay upright and just wanted a nap.  I think I slept 2 hours or more.  I then napped through half of Chris Hayes and most of Rachel Maddow, getting up only to go to the bathroom. We watched Jeopardy and I fixed Walt leftovers for dinner, but had no appetite at all.  I really didn't get out of my recliner for anything -- checked email on my iPad, put off writing a journal entry -- until 11 p.m., when I staggered into the living room to go to sleep.

I may have slept some, but I had so much sleep during the day that I seemed to be wide awake.  I tossed and turned, tossed and turned, and finally, wide awake, came out to the recliner with my iPod at 2 a.m. and started listening to my current audio book, "Room."  It was probably a bad thing to do because the story at that point was so gripping I listened for the next two hours.  Still not really sleepy, I came in here to write this and then will try going to sleep, maybe for a couple of hours.

My stomach feels better...kinda, sorta...though I did have a little bit to eat and my stomach is telling me it knows that. 

So we are all either dying or very sick, or just faking it.  I don't know at this point!

Inactivity

I hadn't anticipated spending the afternoon comatose, it's just what happened.

I hadn't been to Atria in about 4 days, so it was time to go pick up laundry.  I got to the apartment at 11:15 and my heart sank.  Was today the day?

My first clue, whenever I go to see her, that she has survived another night is seeing that her newspaper has been picked up out of the delivery box.  But it was still in the box.  Nervous, I knocked on the door and there was no answer.  I got out my key and let myself in.  I could see the bed unmade.  I peeked into the bedroom and she was lying there, eyes opened.  I couldn't tell if she was breathing or not.  "Are you awake?" I asked, and she said that yes, she had just awakened.

Whew.  She was alive.

But she was quite disoriented.  Said the last time she remembered seeing on her clock was 3 a.m. (and had been up and down all night before that) and so slept until after 11, which is actually 8 hours, so a good night of sleep, if slightly off what she expected.

We visited until she began to wake up.  She told me somethig she had never told me before, that she was always embarrassed that there were so many children in her family because their family (of 10) was so much bigger than anyone else's in town.  Of course by the time she was born, the oldest 3 or four were already grown and gone (and my mother had a nephew 6 months older than she was!), so there were really only 6 or 7 at home.

After she was finally fully awake, she got her hair brushed and we went off to lunch.

I picked a great day to go to lunch.  Since it was Memorial Day, they had a buffet, but not the buffet they have on Sundays.  This was actually better -- fewer choices, but better quality.  I had 3 slices of a tri tip roast which was rare, just the way I like it, a bit of potato salad, and half an ear of corn on the cob.

My mother wanted fruit salad and vegetable soup, but there was no vegetable soup, so she decided to have chicken.  I went and got it for her, since her back was bothering her, and there was no fruit salad either, but I did get her a couple of slices of watermelon. 

The corn on the cob was really good.  I am always leery about that particular food item from a food warmer, but this was fresh, warm, crisp and sweet.  My mother had decided not to have any but when I raved about how good it was, she decided she wanted some.  I remembered this was the woman who, in her teens, once ate 12 ears of corn for dinner!  When she took her first bite, she closed her eyes in bliss.

After lunch, I picked up her laundry and was pleased to see there were clothes in it this time, and no sheets, and then headed on home.

When I got here, I was feeling kind of light headed and just weird and shaky.  I decided to take my blood sugar, which was 50, the lowest it's ever been, so I had a couple of apricots and it started climbing back up again. I took a short nap, and felt more normal when I woke up. But soon, I had to go to the bathroom, which is where, alternating with sitting in the recliner, I spent most of the rest of the afternoon.  It got to where I brought fresh clothes to the bathroom so they would be there if I needed a change -- and I did.  Twice. 

I finally remembered we had Imodium in the house and took one of those magical pills.  Things stopped almost immediately (of course by then I was completely empty anyway!).  I wrote a haiku about it for Facebook.

Bad afternoon, then
Along came Imodium
All is well again
(I think)

I told Walt he would have to fix his own dinner and I just continued to lounge about in the recliner, alternately watching one of the Outlander episodes from the week end marathon that I had recorded or a cooking program when I needed a break.

I finally started feeling human around 8, and by 9 had a little bit to eat, but not much.

Sleep in Heavenly Peace

New Year's Day is the day when traditionally people veg out in front of the television and gorge on either football or NCIS marathons. I had the NCIS marathon going in my office while Walt had football in the family room. I decided to read a book, climbed into my recliner with a blanket and a chihuahua and started to veg out. I made it through not one, but two football games without seeing much of either. I woke up from my first nap long enough to realize that it had really tired me out and what I needed was another nap. I woke up from my second nap shortly before the end of the Rose Bowl and it took an hour to come to life enough for me to cook dinner.

I had no nachos or other traditional football day fare, but I definitely was a couch potato.

I'm not sure why I was so tired. It's not like I'd partied hearty last night. We went to a friend's house, as we do each year. There are maybe a dozen or a few more there. We have fabulous homemade soup and sit around talking. I learn lots about theatre, movies and televison each year, and it's always so much fun to play "the name game," where we all put names of famous people (real or fictitious), divide into teams, and then sit around trying to give clues to our team members so they can guess them. Like charades, but you can talk...in fact must talk.

We played the game for about an hour and a half, using up all the leftover names from last year, and then it was 5 minutes to midnight. We gathered around the TV and watched Ryan Seacrest prop up Dick Clark for another year, toasted each other and 2011 (I didn't even have champagne, but toasted with a large glass of ice water) and we were home by 12:15.

I slept fairly well, all things considered, and was up around 7:30. And then spent the whole day sleeping. Obviously I'm doing some sort of catch up. I started writing this around 9:30 p.m. but then took a break for another short nap before finishing it. Of course as I sit here writing, I'm not feeling all that well, so it's either some bad Omaha Steak hamburger or maybe all this sleeping means I'm getting sick. I hope it's the former.

During my brief moments of awake time this afternoon, I was aware that Walt was talking with his sister on the telephone, and later with his mother. The three Sykes kids have always been close, but I've watched them draw closer to each other during these past few years, dealing with the problems of their aging mother.

I got the pang that I get, not often, but occasionally. It's one thing to be an only child; it's another to have a sibling and then lose her.

Peach is fond of reminding me how lucky I am because I still have a mother, while she and Kathy do not. I never mention that both of my cousins have sisters (and Kathy also has a brother) and I haven't had a sibling for forty years.

Karen and I were never close, and she was murdered when she was 24 years old, but who knew what might have happened if we could have grown older together. We did share many interests, which sometimes was the cause of our differences, but maybe as we got older we would have shared experiences rather than tried to hide them.

It's difficult to imagine her as 63 years old. That's Peggy's age. It's difficult to imagine Karen being Peggy's age. But sometimes it would be nice to have someone to share the closeness that Walt and his siblings have together, especially as we approach whatever is going to come as my mother's memory problems worsen.

I'm going to have to end this entry. I am either going to have to go back to sleep, or lose my dinner. Or perhaps both.

Sorry for being so graphic!