How it started:
Am currently at the Emergency room at the city hospital waiting for my wife to be seen for an issue that might be serious, but might not. She can’t sit in a chair, so we’ve been lying down on the grass outside their front door for an hour, waiting for her name to be called. They say some people have been waiting for as long as three hours. The Sun is starting to go down, and the temperature is beginning to drop…
How it's going:
Had to take a week off work since then to look after the wife. The diagnosis is that she has no injury/clot, just
a nerve constantly shooting pain down her leg for no good reason other than to torture her for her past sins or something. So we have been moving her between couch and reclining chair about once every 2-3hrs with applied heat and propped pillows for that entire week. Yes, even during the night. Also there is the medicine regimen of relaxants and painkillers to make things more bearable. For her, any kind of sitting is agony. That includes when going to the bathroom. Luckily I have a ton of sick time, but I haven't slept more than an hour or two at a time for a whole week. Her sister (who does MedAssist for a living) came over yesterday to help out so I could put in a day of actual work and prove I'm not playing hooky, but let me tell you...putting in a 10hr workday on a week of haphazard involuntary
polyphasic sleep was SO much fun.
Having her out of commission also means I've had to do all the cooking and cleaning and stuff, because I'm really the only useful worker in the house right now. Oh, and did I mention that our washer crapped out two weeks ago? There's
a new one on the way to replace it (which was on sale for "only" a THOUSAND dollars--
AAAAGGHHH) which should be here on Wed, but that still means I had to truck four loads to and from the laundromat on top of everything else. I
still haven't finished folding it all.
And that brings us to today. Got a phone call waking me up at 7:30am (after going to bed at 6:30am) telling me that surprise! The new washer is ready to deliver early and should be here in half an hour and isn't that wonderful? Yeah, sure is, because in order to get anything into the basement, I have to first pull one of the flights of the back stairs out of the way (it weighs about 200lb/90kg) and I wasn't expecting to have to do that until Tuesday night. So I throw on some clothes and some water for tea to wash down some prophylactic Aspirin and run down there to get started pulling out the stairs and find that the other two adults in the house have gone off to have Breakfast with The Boys(TM) leaving me by myself with an invalid wife and a sleepy teen. JUST GREAT. I had gotten as far as pulling all the screws by the time the delivery folks showed up, and fortunately one of the dudes volunteered to help me remove (and reinstall!) the stairs along with the delivery. I would've tipped them for it, too, but they left before I could do so.
After I finished reinstalling the stairs (and the storm door, which
also had to be removed), I headed back upstairs to get ready for work when I got a notification that the guy was here to look at our boiler. Oh, did I mention that our house is heated by a boiler which has to be something like 150yrs old? Well, it went out at the end of last Winter, so yeah, the last couple of weeks where our outdoor temperature has only been in the 40's (that's in the single digits for you Celsi-fied folks), we haven't had any heat ON TOP of all that stuff I've already mentioned. Looks like we just need a new thermocouple/thermopile which should only be $75 or so, but I don't know how much the guy is going to tack on for installing the thing (because I'm fine working with electronics, but I don't enjoy working with gas piping if I don't have to). He's apparently a friend of the (extended) family, but...still, I'm sure that'll only count for so much.
Once that's done, we can prepare for my son to have a video meeting at 1pm with his principal. He's been slacking off on his studies, so much so that we're now at that
CTJ point where if he doesn't turn himself around RIGHT NOW, he may be dropped from the program and either be compelled to attend in-person schooling (which he absolutely hates...and I don't blame him, cuz I hated it, too) or else get shipped off to wherever it is they send kids who maybe aren't delinquent enough to go to full-on
reform school, but ARE
recalcitrant enough that they can't handle "normal" school.
Oh, and my wife's follow-up appointment from her ER visit is at 3pm today. Yes, one week IS the soonest we were able to get an appointment
for an emergency room follow-up because the Health Care system here in the USA is
obviously run by people who don't have to worry about their
own health, and it reeeeally shows.
SOOooooo....yeah, looks like I'll be calling off work again today...
And my week is only just
starting...
--Patrick