ahh...the holidaze

well, christmas is upon us once again. i've finished what shopping i can do and hope there's nothing i forgot. this holiday season finds us, um, in a weird place. first meira was sick with the berry thing, then i got sick for a couple of days. i got home saturday night and felt fine. i ate some crackers and cheese and went to bed. an hour later i was up, hurting. i continued to hurt for the rest of the night and through the next day. i hurt at work.

i fortunately have quite a bit of flex time so i took 4 hours of flex and went home early (you cannot miss a day without an occurance...7 occurances and you are shown the door...you can't use more than 4 hrs of flextime without being issued an occurance....i have 5 occurances this year because of sickness....i can't get another for i'm up for promotion and if i have a 6th occurance i'll have to wait until another opening comes up in that department again...stupid rules).

i went to bed early. got up at 6am to take my mother-in-law to the airport. she is flying out to wichita to meet up with her brother, john. they are going to be with their sister, jane, whose husband, stan, just died of cancer.

i decided to start taking my medicine again. all this year i have had intermittent bouts of indigestion...bad indigestion. the kind that at first made me think i was having a heart attack. this went on for 6 months before i went to the doctor. he gave me reglan and prilosec. i took them a couple of times but i hate taking medicine. i just don't want that crap running around in my system. so i altered what i eat and when i eat. things were going great. until saturday night. so monday morning i took the medicine. after dropping june off (yes...june, john, jane are the siblings...there was another brother gene-hey! no 'j'!-but he died a couple of years ago) at the airport, the family and i went to the flying buiscuit in little five points to eat breakfast. i ate with reluctance and waited for the inevitable. it didn't come. so maybe the medicine does help.

today i called my mom while i was out shopping. she had been to the doctor, she said, about her lungs. we talked a while and then we hung up. i then got a call that wasn't a number i recognized so i ignored it. when i got home amy said that "gloria" had called and said my mother may have congestive heart failure. great. i had to hear it from someone else. my own mother won't burden me with her problems. serious ones. what has the world come to.

she'll probably have to be hospitalized. we had planned on getting together with her, my brother and his wife, my niece and her husband, and who knows who else, the day after christmas. looks like we'll be spending christmas at the hospital. who scripts this stuff for this time of year anyhow?

i'll not let it get me down though. all things being impermanent means that we're not stuck this way. but mom is old. she's tough, but old...86. hope she can pull through this one. time to meditate on it.