Helen Back

Monday, aka Day 28, spent in the hospital, wasn't nearly as grueling as the first time. For starters, I brought my own breakfast, lunch and dinner. It's amazing that they serve such spectacularly bad food. It's almost like non-food, or negative food. And they serve it to people who are already sick enough to be in a hospital! I also think that I was so sick, it just drained a lot of the contrariness out of my system. I made an effort to get out of bed every couple of hours and walk around the ward for a few minutes instead of laying there like a beached whale (as I did before and after) and maybe that helped pass the time. Still, there's nothing like a day in the hospital to give you fresh appreciation for life outside the hospital.

Sis had me back home in time for the last half of Dancing With the Stars. Still too much hype and too many bad dancers. I really like the show better after they've thinned the herd to the best 3-4 couples.

Then I spent the night wide awake. I'd napped most of the day and the doc has started me on another antibiotic and a steroid dose pack. Ding! Ding! Ding! It's Crazy Steroid Lady! (cue Psycho violins - rhee RHEE rhee!). And of course I had night sweats and bone pain and just all kinds of fun. By morning I was cranky, sleepy, sweaty, crazy -- I was like all Seven Dwarves compressed into one. Just add water.

That was my frame of mind as Torment Day 2 began at 8 am. Phase 2 of the Villa's Great Remodel Debacle was replacing 10 windows. I would rather have repaired the old wooden windows but from a resale standpoint, it's a no-brainer: everybody wants new, easy, vinyl windows. I found a young guy, a real motivated go-getter who's starting his own remodeling business and was very highly recommended. Well, bless his heart, he was here with his crew at 7:59 am, ready to go. And every minute for the rest of the day, there was noise, chaos, dirt, sawing, hammering and hollering.

The icing, the highlight, was a giant air compressor parked in my kitchen, to power their pneumatic hammers. Every 15-20 minutes this thing would go off, only for about 20 seconds, but the noise was... I don't know, maybe like standing three inches from a foghorn? I don't even know how to describe just how loud this monster was, except to say I was surprised my ears weren't bleeding. Sis was here to attest that I had to be physically scraped off the ceiling if it happened to go off when I was actually in the kitchen. There were four workers and by 5 pm they had replaced 9 of the 10 (one has to be remade). Which is great, because I'm sure two days of that would have killed me.

And today the house painters arrived. Because they didn't bother bringing me the samples until this morning, I had to look at them and make a decision on the spot. It's a little unnerving to have lived in a white house for 20+ years, and then have to pick a color in 20+ seconds. But they wanted to start today, and so did I. They weren't nearly as loud as the window guys, but it's still been 8+ hours of paint sprayer, clanking ladder, and boombox blaring country music. Throughout, I'm still horribly sick, and congested, and back-achey and now crazy sleep-deprived. Just for giggles, I threw in a Rosacea outbreak, yeah, love that purple face o' mine. (I think in football, it's called "piling on?")

It's supposed to rain for the next 4 days and I really, REALLY want to have this over and done with. I have completely abandoned the idea of remodeling the kitchen; I think it's going to take every bit of 6 months to try and grow some nerve endings back again. But Hell Week is almost half over. That alone is reason to celebrate.
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Manifold, myriad, multiple thanks to Gracie and her parents for keeping Molly with them until Tuesday night. What would I do without them? I can't even imagine.