More and Less and Where I've Been Recently

Ming Mrach 3.

Well this has been a hell of a year to this point, if I can be allowed to start the year right around Xmas for which my wife and I got the flu for.

Then after that noticing that my chow was limping and taking her in to the Vet to get ACL surgery which requires that she be kept literally on a short leash for at least eight weeks.  That happened January 31 as I've mentioned before.

After that we agreed that we couldn't take the vacation we wanted to because one of us had to stay with the chow.  So I flew off to Florida to spend a week with my mother and to take her to the doctor.  Did that and we are for the most part in agreement that dementia is starting.  She, of course, refuses to get help or to come up home.  Trying to organize something more then watching the train wreck that I know is coming is not a lot of fun.  My niece (who was raised by by mother) is the only other person who seems to see what is going on.  One of my sister-in-laws was there last week and was so Pollianish that, well I threw up a little.  "Isn't she doing so well?"  Well no she isn't.  What she is accomplishing is because we have people coming in every day for two hours and because people are visiting.  Crap. 

Oh yeah, so my Mother in Law went to Florida for spring training which she has done for decades and as soon as she got down there she decided that her blood pressure meds weren't working and quit them then became very sick, so she is at home right now and my wife and her sister are trying to crowbar her to the doctor.  Oh yeah. now it turns out that my mother-in-law is pissed at me because I am trying to put my mom in an assisted living facility. I think that she thinks my wife and I are practicing on my mother so that when the time comes we will find it easier to do it to her. (Smart lady.)

So anyway, I got home and my wife told me that the chow had been throwing up daily.  We took her to our local vet who then had us take her to OSU, (well he was going to have us take her to Med-Vet, but I told him I wouldn't take another animal there).  Got her to OSU and the situation was much more serious then we thought it might be.  The chow had a reaction of some sort to the anesthesia from her first surgery and it had caused her esophagus to shrink nearly closed.  I'm sure that they were surprised that we agreed for them to take drastic measures to fix the problem..  So starting about February 23 we started to bring her up OSU weekly to have a balloon inserted into her esophagus and inflated to slowly bring the thing mostly back to where it was.  Because of the chows weirdness with the vet up there we would bring her home every day that she had the procedure, because she was feisty.  The first part of everything that happened was that the chow got a feeding tube inserted directly into her stomach, where it is to this day and where it will be for another couple of months in all probability. 

To start we had to feed her every four hours.  It turned out that the vet didn't mean every four hours through the night, just during the day, but for the first week we didn't know that.  We are now starting to feed her by mouth, pea sized meat balls made out of canned dog food.  We will never, the vet says, be able to give her kibble or to feed her by bowl, it will have to be by mouth in pea sized amounts. 

In the middle of all this my secretary got completely fed up with the guy I share office space with and quit.  Not you know like giving notice.  She came into my office and in a 45 minute monologue told me just what was wrong with him.  About 40 minutes into it I asked her if she was going to work out the day.  She told me no and gave me her key and shook my hand.  Given the quality of her work, I can't say that I am completely devastated, although I would have liked a little more notice.

I'm like one of these people who things happen to and who are always looking over their shoulder to wonder what is next.  Although to be honest, so far at least things aren't happening to me directly just to the entities who are near and dear to me.

Hey,  in news outside my back yard (which reminds me the weather has been so warm and the rain so intense, I have to mow my yard before the end of March) the head of the IMF says that the problems in the European Union are all over, even if the actual people living there are living on a lot less money.  Oh wait I'm sorry not all the people just the vast majority.