Life, the universe, and lunch

Mortality a phone call away

So I got a call from the nursing home while at an employee farewell lunch today. I let the phone take the message (because nobody should ever [ever!] answer their phone in a restaurant) and then grabbed it to see if it was anything urgent. The message said 'call us back' but didn't sound particularly urgent, but I went outside anyways and returned the call. Good thing: Tammy had been choking on her own saliva for the past hour! They handed her the phone so that she could hear my voice, hoping that that would calm her down enough to stop the choking. Talk about really fucking scary -- for the first minute or so all I could hear were coughs and gags in response, but then damned if their idea didn't work and all of the sudden she wasn't choking anymore!

One of the things I said to her was that I'd be there soon to hold her hand. Liar. That was 1:15 and I'm still not there yet... I can blame work but it also doesn't help that my left eye's been swollen and watering out of my head since saturday for no apparent reason (it got stuck that way at pirate practice; ahrr) and my friend Yas has been scare mongering me all day that it's pink eye and really contagious. (Due to the way he's seen schools respond to it, but since when don't they overreact to cover their ass?) I thought I'd swing by Urgent Care on the way to the nursing home but now if I do that I won't get there until long after Tam's asleep. Sigh. Google says that pink eye is only really contagious if you got it from a virus, but after 48 hours it's still just in my left eye so that's not it. (Hey, left one's lucky.) Yeah.

So since that phone call came in I've been useless and I'm still here at work. Hiding. I've said for a while now that Tam probably only has a year or two left and that we've made our peace with it. Apparently not. Today I've drifted off and imagined not making it through christmas, or to next christmas, and it sucks. Fuckingly crushingly sucks. And I got frustrated and yelled at Tam again this weekend over something stupid. Why?

(Huntingtons kills off part of the brain and sufferers lose coordination to the point where even swallowing doesn't work. Pneumonia due to aspiration is almost always the cause of death.)

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posted by ...K @ 7:35 PM