Bet y'all didn't know that hypoglycemia can lead to the funnies. (I'm pretty good at putting in those non-sequitur-looking openers that turn out not to be non sequiturs at all.)So, for those of you who have been playing the home game, reading along here, or reading along on the techops boards, Patrick's mother's bone marrow transplant is tomorrow. Today is her last day of chemo prior to the transplant itself. Patrick's in Houston, the fam's all rallied and everything's as ready to go as it's gonna get.

I knew things were a bit more serious than my original reckoning when I realized that over half of the skin of my bottom lip had come off in a single piece. Stupid, stupid girl; what in the previous twenty-four hours had failed to convince me that I'd had a major lapse in self-control? Did the insomnia and the twenty-four hours of shakes not serve as warning enough?

Stupid, stupid girl.

Day two of caffeine withdrawal. On the phone last night, in the middle of something that smelled halfway between chastisement and argument, I admitted to the voice on the other end of the phone that I should probably start treating caffeine with the same wary respect that most people give to alcohol.

My thoughts this week have been dark ones. My frustration with suddenly losing my job has been compounded with my frustration about my poor health since late November / early December.

It's pointless to rehash things that cannot be undone or changed. But I have spent a lot of time, especially in this past week, mulling over some things. We have a euphemism here in the States that we call "a moment of clarity."

Mine, I think, came in the midst of a 101-degree fever while lying in a hospital room. It consisted of a very simple thought that has stayed in my waking hours and my dreams ever since that moment:"If you do not find the courage to change your life, you will die before your thirty-fifth birthday."

I've only mentioned this to one person so far. It troubled me enough that I held it to myself for a while, trying to understand, trying not to let on to other people that something had happened that both confused and frightened me.

Hi. My name is Amy, and I seem to have a major problem staying well this winter.

I appear to have caught the same stomach bug that Heather caught. So much for my promise of a Wednesday night update—I spent most of Wednesday night praying to the porcelain god. It got bad enough (fever of 101, bits of blood coming up) that we got to make an emergency visit to the hospital in the wee hours of Thursday morning.

We got there, and they did some tests on me to determine how dehydrated I was. When lying down, my heart rate was very fast and my blood pressure was around 110/80. When I stood up, my heart rate accelerated even more (to somewhere around 135 bpm?), but my blood pressure dropped to 90/60.The end result: IV time.

I really shouldn't have taken that nap earlier this evening, but it felt wonderful to lie on the couch with the cats stretched out on me and drift quietly to sleep while Jeff was watching Iron Chef. I vaguely remember opening my eyes once and seeing something about an unusual preparation of fried rice, and then sliding softly back into sleep.

This was a good thing; I think I need the rest. My concern over my general health is starting to nibble at me a bit. First, a serious bout of stomach flu and strep throat within a six-week period, and now a week after finishing up my medication to treat strep, I appear to be coming down with a cold.I rummaged through our horrendously messy kitchen table this evening and found the cold medicine Jeff bought a few weeks ago. It seems to be helping a bit. If nothing else, it will probably help me sleep—once I get sleepy, that is. My nap has thrown my internal clock for a bit of a loop.

A joyous season to you, reader. It's good to be home.

I woke up this morning with a maddening snippet of lyric in my head. Somewhere in the last dream I had before wakening, I heard the song phrase, "Every time you walk into the room…" Some quick googling told me that what I was hearing in my head was a snippet of the chorus from Stevie Nicks' "Rooms On Fire."

"Maybe I'm just thinking
that the rooms are all on fire
every time that you walk into the room
there is magic all around you
if I do say so myself
I have known this

I told Jeff on the way home today that it felt like Tuesday. Most of this week vanished in a combination of sleep and fever. But I have answers now.

Jeff wasn't able to go in to work at his usual time this morning; the truck just wasn't able to make it up the ice-covered hills this morning. So he came home to me sitting in my overly-plush terry bathrobe. We talked. I mentioned that I wasn't sure if I'd be able to make it to the doctor's office because of the ice.

He offered to check my throat to see if he could see anything. In retrospect, it bothers me that neither of us thought to do this sooner. After a couple of mishaps and me nearly gagging on a soup spoon, Jeff says, essentially, "What are these white spots on the back of your throat?"

Obviously, I stayed home from work today. My fever dipped to 99.x for a while today, but it's gone back up to 100.3 again. That weird queasydizzy feeling is back again, so I'll keep this short. Same symptoms—sore throat, tiredness, stiff and sore neck, headaches, lightheadedness, fever.

I'm having trouble concentrating on things for more than a minute or two at a time. I have to point out, though, that some of my friends would probably say that this is beneficial for a worrywart like me, and not something that could be classified as a symptom of something wrong.

I'm trying to decide what to do about work tomorrow. If I'm still running this fever I have no business sitting in the middle of a cube farm. But I'm desperately needed there right now, and no kidding on the desperately part. (I have two major deadlines looming on the 29th that must be met.)

A compilation of a day's worth of entries:

1:48 p.m.:

While under the best of circumstances I could be considered a worrywart, I think I'm at least a bit entitled today. My father underwent surgery this morning to repair his aortic aneurysm. So far, I haven't heard anything from my mother. I'm going to assume that's good news, though in truth I really don't even know how long the surgery is supposed to take.The surgery is fairly serious stuff. From what I can gather, Dad's aneurysm is serious enough that a section of the artery has to be entirely replaced. (It can't be clamped off.) Mom reminded me that the surgeons will have to stop Dad's heart for the duration of time it takes to graft the replacement vessel into his aorta.

No matter how you look at it, that's just a little bit terrifying.

I'm going to warn you now. Some of you are going to finish reading this entry and scream TMI. ("Too much information!" for the abbreviationally-challenged.) If you keep reading past this point, it's all your fault if you're offended. It's my stinkin' journal, for goodness' sake.

I'm thinking of going back on the pill. I've been off for ten months now—and yes, it does take me a while to come to decisions like this, hush! I'm still not totally sure I'll do anything about it; perhaps I'm waiting for things to get so annoying that I feel I have to get back on the pills NOW or it's all going to drive me crazy.My prescription lapsed in January. For those of you who remember, I was finishing up at my helljob at the credit union in January. I didn't have enough time to curl up in a ball and cry, much less get to a doctor.

A snippet of lyric from the song currently playing:

it possesses me controls me it makes me run and it makes me kill