the news about Kenny today is not so good. Last night at around 5 AM he threw up bile while using a CPAPusing a. The bile was then forced into his lungs, and today has developed into pneumonia.  they have already started him on antibiotics, the same ones they used to treat him last time he had pneumonia, so now we just have to wait and see.  His ( Read more... )

Kenny is out of surgery and everything went well. They will be at the hospital for several days yet, at the very least through Monday.  Really really good news is that his stomach is still doing at least a little bit of digestion, just not enough to keep them alive, so the family will be able to continue to give him small amounts of food by mouth ( Read more... )

Some of you have already heard this news through Facebook and twitter, but I wanted to post it here as well ( Read more... )

today I am grateful for sleep -- bountiful quantities of the deep, restful, dream filled sleep ( Read more... )

Okay, I will start by confessing that I have a cold and feel generally miserable and sorry for myself and tired today. Plus, having a cold means that my hands ache even more than usual, to go along with all the other body aches associated with the virus ( Read more... )

regular readers may have noticed that I have been posting very very infrequently lately. Some of that has to do with the frustrations of trying to use the Dragon dictation software, but more of it has to do with depression. My physical life is very hard right now -- at least, by most measures: I do recognize that I am not living in a third world ( Read more... )

 a little over a week ago I went to see a new doctor. I didn't like the one I had seen before, and I was pretty much in despair about how my hands felt. So off I went. I knew almost immediately that I  liked this doctor better. He asked questions about the friend who referred me to him , listened carefully to the history I gave him, and did about ( Read more... )

In some ways, the hardest thing about this illness has not been its physical impact, bad as that has been, but its emotional one.  It hit me just as I was starting to settle into the routine of my Spring semester, throwing everything off-kilter and making the new beginning seem like an uphill battle instead of a fresh start.  It came just in time ( Read more... )

Things I have not done while sick:

• Listened to or read the news
• Even looked at the dissertation chapter I need to revise
• Eaten 3 full meals in a day
• Shoveled any of the snow that has fallen
• Spent more than 3 awake hours out of my bathrobe

As the title to this post says, I'm not dead yet, but I'm also not well either.  I still have a hacking cough, violent enough to make me gag, almost total ennervation, and next to no appetite--I might have eaten 1,000 calories yesterday, but almost certainly no more than that.  The terrible aches and pains went away Monday afternoon after a long ( Read more... )