This is it!

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I have about 10 minutes to post, so here I go!

March Break was splendid. It was wonderful. Days and days of not sending anyone out of the room, or having chalk dust all over me, or only peeing when a bell rang. DAYS OF IT! Nine days, to be exact. Oh, glory. But it’s over now.

Still, we mustn’t dwell. Not on Rex Manning Day! Instead I will tell you of my Adventures During March Break.

On the first Saturday, Rob and I met up with some friends and went to see the movie ’300′. FOR SPARTA! It was a pretty good movie. FOR SPARTA! I’d probably watch it again, if only for the buff waxed and oiled Spartans (“Dudes! Let’s go to war! Against guys with arrows and elephants and a hunchback!” “Okay just a second I’ll get my chest plate!” “What are you talking about?! No chest plates! We just need our swords and our chainmail underpants!” “Duh! What was I thinking?!”) and the golden face-piercing guy (plus all the naked boobs). I mean, it wasn’t horrible. There was fighting! And heads flying everywhere! You’ve gotta like a good flying head, dontcha?

Hmmm… Okay. On Monday my mother and I went to the fabric store. Because remember how my boss said she didn’t like my clothes? (if you don’t, well, my boss said she didn’t like my clothes) I am in no way going to buy a whole new wardrobe, because hello Benjamins (John A. MacDonalds), but it is cheaper to just make your own. So. I got all the stuff I needed for less than $60, and made a skirt, a couple of tops, and a jacket/dress thing. This took me the entire rest of March Break– I’d go over to my parents’ (my mom has a real sewing machine, plus sometimes I need her help) at about 9 or 10, and leave at 2 (Mom starts watching her Stories at 2 and there is nothing that can come between her and the Young. Or the Restless. They’re all in it together). I would link, but this computer has a thing where it freezes up when you have more than one window open. You’re lucky you’re getting this much!

Rob had last Thursday and Friday off. On Friday he took me to Charlottetown for another date! We went to a paint-your-own pottery studio, which was beyond amusing. They didn’t have any gnomes for me to paint, so I had to do a plate. Rob did a goblet. We’ll get them back next week sometime, after they’re glazed and fired. I’m excited to see how they came out, but worried that my fancy painting that I did is going to turn into ugly colours once it’s fired. Oh well though. It was fun making our oeuvres d’art, and that’s what counts. After the painting, we also went to Cedar’s (this one I know the link to by heart– http://www.cedarseatery.ca or .com I’m not sure but I’m pretty sure it’s dot ca) which is my favourite restaurant in the entire universe. We ate until we thought we would die. Yes, that’s how you can tell that you’re having a good time– you eat until you die. You didn’t know that? Well jeez~!

Saturday and Sunday were spent doing regular stuff and my sister’s cat had kittens on Saturday. Wow, what a sentence.
And then, back to work. Chalk dust. Sending people out of the room. Peeing at the bell. Oh, it’s all coming back to me now.

March Break is over! I am leaving for work in 3.2 minutes! It wasn’t long enough, I say. I didn’t manage to get in half the sleeping I was planning on. BUT we did get some fun stuff done, which I will tell you about… later. Tonight, probably. Possibly. See, that’s what you like about me. I’m a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

It’s.
Almost.
March.
BREAK
!!!

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It’s 6 am and already I am predicting a day I’m not going to enjoy.
The time change has messed me up. WHY THE TIME CHANGE WHY? (whine)
I’m tired. I’ve been up for half an hour and I’m still naked, staring at the wall (oh to be one of those people who can spring out of bed and start their day with a smile!), trying to figure out what’s going on.
I have to clean my car within the next half hour, because I’m driving today.
I’m being evaluated at work. Last period of the day, with my most … lively… class. Fun.
Rob is still not feeling his best, and I wish that he could stay home today but he can’t really if we want to eat this month (he’s lost 7 days of pay already, and I lost 3, from when he was sick). Hopefully they’ll put him on mail or something.
Anyway. Gotta get up. Must find underpants.

Yeah, this isn’t a post about sex toys, either.

I thought perhaps I should actually tell you what had happened with Rob, yes? So now I will.

I had the stomach flu on Thursday/Friday of last week. Barfing, pooping, the whole deal. It was gross, but I lived through it, although I think this was the first time I’d had the actual FLU-flu in a long time. People call alot of things the flu, but this was really it.
Rob started feeling icky on Thursday afternoon, and started really throwing up on Friday night/Saturday morning. At first it was just every couple of hours, like you do. But by Saturday evening, he was throwing up everytime he swallowed anything, basically. Plus the ‘rhia, which I know you don’t want to hear about, but it was part of everything. I was trying to make sure he drank plenty of juice, water, ginger ale, anything clear that he could swallow… but by Sunday morning he was either throwing up or otherwise evacuating every 5-10 minutes. We had both slept in the livingroom (because it was too tough for him to walk up and down the stairs from our bedroom to the bathroom every 20 minutes), him on the couch, me on a little nest I had made on the floor, and at around 4:30 or 5 am I took him to the Emergency Room, where they basically looked at us like “EVERYONE has the flu. Stop overcrowding our waiting room!”, gave him a shot of Gravol, and sent us home with Immodium (which, he’d already taken half a package of Immodium, and it hadn’t helped at all). The gravol made him woozy, which was good because basically he hadn’t slept since Friday night. However nothing stopped his throwing up or pooping, and because of that he couldn’t exactly sleep. At 2 pm he looked dead. His skin was parchment-white. His eyes were sunken in– he looked as though he had two black eyes. He was freezing cold to the touch, and in pain all over. He could barely speak, and was just lying all pathetically on the sofa, holding his barf bucket. I told him we were going back to the hospital. He grunted something along the lines of them just sending us home again, what’s the use of going, so I got all butch and called his mom. Yeah, I know how to bring in the big guns. After he listened to her for a few minutes he agreed that we could go in to the hospital.

That was when we both got really scared. He couldn’t stand up. He couldn’t dress himself. He could barely lift his arms so that I could help him change his shirt. Those of you who’ve met him know this, but Rob is a big guy. And strong. He couldn’t bend over to put his shoes on. I had to prop him up all the way to the car. When we got to the ER, he couldn’t walk in; I got a wheelchair for him and he barely got from the car to the chair.

The nurses were having lots of trouble with just taking his vitals. His blood pressure was so low that they couldn’t measure it. It took them about a jillion pokes and prods just to be able to find a vein for taking blood. When the (different from that morning) doctor came in, he knew just by looking at Rob that he was dehydrated, but when the results of the bloodwork came back he told us that Rob was the most dehydrated that he’d ever seen a person still conscious. That was when Rob started having really bad pains in his back– bad enough that he was writhing around in pain. They didn’t really say anything in the room, just gave him some Tylenol and continued putting in his IVs (he had two IV’s in– one to return fluids to his body, another with a blood product that would help to expand those fluids, because they couldn’t give him too much saline at once because saline is salt water and Rob’s salt levels were high because of the dehydration etc etc), but I heard the doctor in the hallway mentioning that they should test for “PARF”.

Rob was finally admitted to the ICU after a few hours. It was a very long couple of days– they measured his output of fluids, and in a 6-hour period he lost 12L. They had the IV’s wide open, but it was hard to keep up with his fluid loss. His heart was fluttery, his blood pressure was still really low. I slept in his room with him, on the chair, until the nurse came in at about 5 am and told me to go sleep on the sofa in the room down the hall.

He eventually got much better, and was let out of ICU on Tuesday, and moved to a room in the “regular” wing. He was still on his IV’s, and having his blood tested four times a day. They were also still giving him Gravol and Imodium every hour. But his blood pressure had come back up, his heart rate was strong, and he was actually eating (popsicles and jello, but still, it’s eating!)

When he was released, on Wednesday, the doctor told us everything that had been going on. The “PARF” thing stands for “Prerenal Acute Renal Failure”. Basically, since his blood pressure was so low, his blood wasn’t circulating everywhere. His kidneys started shutting down, which is what caused the pain. Luckily it’s very treatable and once he was fully rehydrated he was better from that, but it did take three days to get him fully rehydrated. He stayed home the rest of the week; I went back in to work on Friday but was phoning him at every break to make sure things were okay. He’s still exhausted– we went to buy groceries on Friday evening and he was tired out after five minutes of walking around the store– and probably will be for awhile. In fact, for the first time in… well, forever, since I’ve known him, he actually went to bed before me tonight.

I’m writing this and it’s not even seeming real to me yet. I write with no emotion, because if I allowed myself to, I would be crying like a baby right now. I almost lost my husband. He was close to dying. I see those words on the screen, but I’m not processing them. The important thing is that he’s okay now. I’m sure that I would be a living organism if he weren’t around, but I’d like to avoid that possibility for a very long time, thank you.

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No, this isn’t a post about sex toys.

My cute and sweet husband is in the ICU right now. If you’re at all inclined, feel free to send some good vibes his way. I’m home long enough to call his mom and pick him up a toothbrush and I’ll be back there but I wanted to post this.

My parents had a dog, Smokey, for about 10 years. Actually she was my brother’s dog, but when he moved out, she stayed behind, because his new wife was afraid of big dogs (she was a german shepherd/collie cross– though she looked like a german shepherd and not at all like a collie). Anyway. My parents had her. She was their dog. Only a few weeks ago, they noticed that she seemed to be in a great deal of pain with her walking and she was throwing up all the time. They took her to the vet who told them that basically, she was pretty old, and was going to die, might as well get it done sooner rather than later.

My mother has pretended to hate that dog for ten years but this was a huge blow to her. My dad sometimes works nights so Smokey was her company. Plus, she was already sad after our other dog died (okay so it was 4 years ago, but still. We’d had her for sixteen years! And she was our baby!) and now basically was all “No more pets! Ever! They just break your heart!”

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