morrowlife

Here’s Mark at the other end of the Abby’s Million Dollar Dream banner. We had a great time! The only problems were the cold, wind, and rain. But the event was great and the cause was worthwhile. Please donate, Loyal Readers! Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken during the 2014 Henderson Heritage Day parade, and part of my famous Event, Las Vegas, Medical, and Shannon series.

Nice day today. Joanne and I went to a very fancy Italian restaurant called Gaetano’s Ristorante. The food was excellent and the service was superb. The prices were a bit high, but we had a groupon! So we have that going for us, which is nice. It was a lovely evening out with a lovely lady. She had on a very pretty black and white sweater and looked like a million bucks. I had the prettiest date in the room.

Didn’t get too much work done today, but I did catch up on some communications. Still no registrations for the PhotoDoc seminar in October. I don’t think the invitations have gone out yet. At least I hope not – it would be kind of discouraging to invite 50 people and get no responses.

Carmen, our housekeeper, will be here tomorrow, so I think I’ll end here and go to bed. She gets here at 8:00 and I need to be up and ready to go before then. I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: bad-driver dog!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s the front of the City of Hope on February 1 of this year. They decorated the campus for Chinese New Year. I loved the decorations. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken at the City of Hope, and part of my famous Architecture, Event, Garden, Medical, Shannon, and Statue series.

Lots of famous series there. Today’s picture is also important to me because I took it on Shannon’s last full day of life. The City of Hope is still a sacred place to me and I’ll always remember it as the place where we had hope for Shannon’s recovery and life and where I rediscovered the sweetness of our love. That it had to be the place where her life ended doesn’t take away any of the meaning for me.

No posts on Thursday or Friday. Sorry about that, Loyal Readers. Stay loyal! I’ll try to do better. I might even succeed! But don’t count on it.

Pretty good weekend. I went out for lunch with Joanne a couple times and she invited me to a birthday party for one of her friends on Friday evening. We had a wonderful time. The honoree works for the company that runs the restaurant where the party was held, and they really did an amazing job. There was a never-ending stream of delicious appetizers. I met a few of Joanne’s friends and really like them all. Strangely, they seem to like me too. Kind of suspicious, if you ask me. Anyway, I’ve really liked everyone she has introduced me to.

Happy birthday to Nan McCulloch, my wonderful mother-in-law! I truly appreciate Nan for the kind person she is and for her loving care of Don all these years. I know she’s brought great happiness to his life and I trust it’s been a fulfilling life for her too.

Saturday evening, Mark and I went with some friends to the Jazz in the Park concert at the Clark County outdoor amphitheater. It was great! The evening was beautiful, the temperature was just right, and the music was very enjoyable. There was a bit of wind, but it never got bad enough to bother us. A few musicians had a bit of trouble keeping their sheet music on the stands, but that was their problem. Joanne and I are going to the one on the 24th of this month as well.

Shortly after we got home from the concert, the wind got very strong indeed. I thought we were in Kansas for a minute there and was starting to wonder which wicked witch my house was going to land on. I’m glad it didn’t get bad until after we got home.

Sunday, I went with Joanne to visit her late husband’s grave. He’s buried in a nearby veteran’s cemetery, and they recently notified her that his gravestone has been put in place. She wanted to see it but didn’t want to go alone. After our visit, we walked through the adjacent park and talked about her late husband Jerry and her extended family, and then we talked about Shannon and our extended family. We both needed to get some tears out. It was a good talk.

And that pretty much brings us up to today. The most notable thing I did today was to break the Business Casual Software website. I was trying to update WordPress to the most recent version and something went wrong. The installation got halfway done and broke the website. I pondered my options and decided to get on the GoDaddy website and see if I could reinstall the update through their website. It worked brilliantly and I’m back in business after just a short outage.

Spent 45 minutes or so in the jacuzzi this evening. It’s so relaxing I can hardly keep my eyes open anymore. So I’ll quit here!

I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this combination exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity and food violence news: genius chair-moving, food-stealing beagle!

Here’s Shannon getting ready for the first of her two air ambulance flights from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. She reported that the plane was incredibly crowded, even though the entire passenger list consisted of her. There were also two pilots and a nurse or two, so she didn’t get lonely. She didn’t have much to say about her second flight, which took place in January, 2014. She was quite a bit sicker by then and we had other worries. But she enjoyed this one. Great Art courtesy of Shannon’s iPhone 4S, taken by one of the air ambulance nurses, and part of my famous Shannon, Las Vegas, Medical, and Machinery series.

Pretty good day today. Got a reasonable amount of work done. We have a meeting room reserved for our October PhotoDoc seminar! And I wrote  a rough draft of the seminar announcement. Also started looking for new WordPress themes for the PhotoDoc website. Much more work in that direction due tomorrow.

And . . . I can’t really think of anything else I did today. Spent a bit of time on the phone. Transferred Flat Earth to Chris’s Apple developer account. Had leftovers from Monday for dinner, with the addition of some corn and tossed salad (with grated cheese!). Watched a few episodes of Top Gear. Did a bit of reading. And that’s about it.

The house got cleaned today, which is always nice. It looks beautiful

Oh, I also made reservations for a few meetups during the coming couple of weeks. Tomorrow I go to a ramen restaurant with the “Sushi and more” group. I’ve never been out with them, so I’m hoping to meet some more nice people. Can’t remember exactly what and when the other ones are. I’ll figure it out in due time.

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: chainsaw-wielding man attacks Mr. Whippy van!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s my lunch from yesterday – sushi and a smoothie. Now what could be better than that? The nurse commended me for my bravery, but I ain’t scared. It was avocado and fake crab. Nothing raw in there at all. I may be brave enough to eat hospital sushi, but I’m not stupid. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken in Shannon’s hospital room yesterday at lunchtime, and part of my famous Food and Medical series.

I think it’s time to take a few new pictures, don’t you, Loyal Readers? Let’s not all speak up at once, now.

Okay, now for the reason my Loyal Readers are all here. Shannon had a pretty good day today. I believe the electrolyte replenishment project is going well, although slowly. Her arms aren’t shaking anymore, so she can hold her own drinks. She’s able to speak a bit more clearly. She stood up on her own this evening. So those are some good signs. Her electrolyte numbers were looking better as well. I’m assuming her recovery from that little episode has been slower than we expected due to her generally sick condition at the moment.

In other good news, her white cell count was down to about 10 today. That’s down from 13 yesterday and 15 the day before. That’s the direction we want it to go for now. She’s been getting a lot of platelets this week, which is also typical and expected. So we’re doing well on the leukemia front.

On the pneumonia/pleurisy front, there’s also some progress. The results of a nasal swab they did the other day are back and she definitely still has H1N1 influenza running around inside her. They treated her for that the first week or so in the hospital in Nevada, but then they shifted entirely to giving her antibiotics. So I think I understand why she wasn’t getting better after the first week.

They didn’t do the bronchoscopy today. Instead, they did an ultrasound of her guts to try to figure out if her intestines were causing problems. We haven’t heard the results, but she’s probably okay gut-wise, which is good. The bronchoscopy is now scheduled for Wednesday. They’ve scheduled and canceled it five times now between the two hospitals, so it will be quite a thing if it actually happens tomorrow.

Her infectious disease guy says that even though we know she still has the flu, he wants to do the bronchoscopy anyway, just in case there’s something else in there too. They really need to identify it so they can figure out how to treat it. They’re also working on whether it makes sense to stick a needle through her back to get some of the fluid from the outside of her lungs too. We’ll know soon whether they’re doing that one.

While we’re waiting for the bronchoscopy, they’re not letting the grass grow beneath their feet. They’ve started Tamiflu at a dosage twice what she got before, and they plan to continue it for quite some time – weeks or months – until the virus is well and truly dead. They’ve also kicked up the antifungals. In addition, they’ve given her something I didn’t know existed: intravenous immunoglobulin, or IVIG. It’s a blood product that contains antibodies from donor blood. It has several uses, but the apparent use here is to give Shannon yet another tool to fight off the bacteria/virus/fungus that’s ailing her. Check out the Wikipedia article – it’s pretty interesting.

I asked the infectious disease guy how long he expects Shannon will need to stay in the hospital. He said he never predicts. I said I respect that, but we would certainly appreciate some kind of guideline we could use to plan. He said to expect to be in the hospital longer than days but shorter than months. So weeks, I guess. Not fun, but doable.

Had a phone call with John this afternoon. We continue to get closer to having a releasable product and all the materials we need for the show next month. But there’s still so much to do! I think we’ll get there, but we’re starting to scramble.

Man, do I hope we sell a few copies of this thing. Please, forensic doctors and dentists, buy, buy, buy!

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this rare combination food violence and Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: kidnapped pig!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN4 with The World of Golf. We put that puzzle together ourselves! Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken at the City of Hope last April about one month before LRN4’s sadly failed stem cell transplant and when she was unfortunately feeling much better than she is now, and part of my famous Medical series.

Happy 2014! I missed a couple days of blogging there. The new year hasn’t started out extremely well for us. LRN4’s having a very difficult time trying to heal up from her flu/pneumonia. She just doesn’t seem to be getting any better. She can’t breathe. She can’t get out of bed. On a positive note, they took another chest x-ray this afternoon and reported this evening that she doesn’t seem to be getting worse.

It certainly seems like she’s getting worse, though. She’ll steadily improve for a couple of days and it’ll look like we’re on track for her to come home. And then she’ll start running a fever again and start needing 100% oxygen to be able to breathe at all. And we remain on track to stay in the hospital another week or so.

Worst of all, though, is LRN4’s morale. She’s finding it more and more difficult to keep her spirits up. She has felt terrible for far too long. I confess I’m a bit discouraged too, but I’m making it my mission to help her build her courage back up. Help me, Loyal Readers! She needs us.

Not much else going on. LRN2 and I need to put away the Christmas decorations. Maybe tomorrow. I also need to ship LRN1’s Christmas presents to him. Maybe tomorrow. I also need to do a bit of laundry. Getting that done tonight. Probably ought to buy some more Cocoa Krispies too. I bought some a couple days ago and already finished them. Oops.

And that’s about it for tonight. I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: retired chicken!

See you on Monday.