This Entry is Bipolar, Please Read At Your Own Risk
I worked hard to get all my work done by Thursday; my metaphysics class on Friday was cancelled due to the professor just not wanting to have another one. So club was immensely relaxing on Thursday night, because I didn't feel that I had to rush back and do homework for the first time in months.
All day, it seems, or most of it, it had been snowing lightly - big feathery flakes that floated down out of the air and glittered in the streetlights. I walked back from club with Cold in a happy daze, just taking in the way that the falling snow seems to muffle all sound. I told her that I really kind of just wanted to walk until the snow drifted me over - and so I did.
I stopped at the apartment long enough to drop off my notebook and then I was out again in the snow, walking in the still cool evening. It was only ten but everything was so still, so quiet. I haven't felt so Zen in a long, long time. I had no sensation of the time, or even of the cold. Just the snow, falling on my face, in my hair, my breath rising among the snowflakes shining in the lights like galaxies falling out of the sky.
It was storybook perfect. Magical, almost. There was just me and the snow and the orange streetlights and the sound of my own footsteps. I tried to stay in the light (well, it was after ten at night and even if Camrose is usually pretty safe, I was alone) and unfortunately that meant that, going around the downtown area, that I ran into people whose harsh everyday voices broke the spell of my walk, shattering it on the icy ground. But it was waiting to catch me and enfold me again the moment I left them behind. It was a sort of meditation, I guess. It's been a long time since I've reached a moment like that.
I could have stayed out forever, it felt like, but I had enough sense to know I was getting tired, so I headed back, and slept better that night and more peacefully than I have in a long time.
Mom called me earlier than usual tonight. That itself was enough to throw me off a little, because they always call at nine on the nose or just before, and at seven-thirty, it was not something I'd expected. So I'm all, "Oh hey, how are you, how are things going? =D" and Mom says: "I'm flying out to Ontario first thing tomorrow morning," and I know enough to know that this is Not a Good Sign.
It turns out Grandma (my mom's mom) is in the hospital, and if I'd checked my email after Thursday afternoon like I normally do, then I would have at least had some warning a lot earlier. She's had a cold for a couple weeks, and it's been getting worse, and my aunt Jan has been bugging her to go in and get it checked out. Except she didn't. And she hasn't been letting people in the house either, which is highly unusual in and of itself, simply because Grandma is very social and has been very lonely ever since Grandpa died when I was in grade three.
But it's not for this cold that she's in right now. For this to make sense, I need to explain that she's diabetic, and so infections and stuff hit her harder, plus there's some antibiotics that she can't take because of that, and she's allergic to most of the rest of them. Somehow she lost a piece of skin on one of her toes without noticing, and it got infected.
So infected, in fact, that her entire lower leg is more swollen than usual, and they're thinking that if they can't give her antibiotics to stop it, they're going to have to amputate.
The problem here is that they don't think she'd live through that operation. And even if she did, then they have to keep that wound from getting infected too, and making the whole thing even worse.
So Mom and aunt Barb are flying out to Ontario first thing tomorrow morning, provided that the road conditions cooperate for both of them long enough to get there on time. Mom hasn't booked her return ticket; we don't know when she's going to be back or how long this is going to take or if Grandma's even going to make it to Christmas.
I mean, it's not like Grandma's been the healthiest lately. She's over eighty, and diabetic, and overweight, and has had some other fairly serious health problems in the past, but never enough to bring both Mom and Barb flying ASAP out to see her.
I'm really worried.
... I don't know what else to say. D=>