Well, I’ve got a lot to catch up on. Yesterday’s entry got flumoxed (see how I’ve been working that word “flumox” into two diary entries in a row? I’m certain that this is a record of some sort… I’m not even certain that it’s a word, actually.) when Esteban accidentally turned off the power to my computer as I was entering. I got so cheese off that I didn’t have the tenacity to retype everything, hence no entry yesterday. Then today was completely out of whack, so no entry this morning. So here’s a recap:
Drafting for the Fantasy Football team was so-so. Here’s one of the nasties of being a female pioneer in a male-oriented venture: I made my first draft pick. “Jamal Lewis”, I declared. Esteban relays this over the phone to the commisioner in Mystic, Conn (where the other half of the draft was being held) who happened to be that harmonica playing, Biker Bar Semi-Trailer stage singing Phil. As the words “Jamal Lewis” were leaving my lips, Joe mentions, “Oh, he’s out for the season”. Esteban says “Oh, wait, he’s out for the season… does she still need to keep him?” to Phil over the phone.
I kid you not– I was over ten feet away from Esteban and the phone and I could actually hear the gloating tone of Phil’s voice through the phone. Esteban didn’t even need to tell me what he said. I actually summed it up thusly, “Let me guess…. ‘she should have done more research and it’s her own fault’ or something along that lines.” Esteban nodded sadly, and the draft continued.
Fast forward several rounds… a team owner from the Mystic contingent made a draft pick and then realized that he already had someone from that team and recalled it, picking someone else.
“What????!!” I sputtered. “Isn’t that like finding out your wide receiver is out for the season?” I mean, Christ, that’s just stupidity, since you’ve got it all right there in front of you and you’re just not paying attention that you were drafting two guys from the same team. It’s not even against league rules to do that, it’s just not a good idea strategically. You wouldn’t be as screwed if you, say, drafted someone who was out for the entire season.
Esteban poo-pooed me and the draft continued.
Fast forward several more rounds. Another team owner from the Mystic contingent drafts and accidentally drafts someone who is sick for the next four to six weeks. “Oh, wait,” says the commissioner, “He’s picking someone else.”
“WHAT????????!??!!” I mime to Esteban.
“Um, Phil,” Esteban begins, “In all fairness, when Weetabix did that, you made her keep the player.” I could hear frantic back-peddling from the other side. “No, no it wasn’t….. Yes… Yes, she did…. No, you didn’t….. Jamal Lewis…. Ok….Ok…”
So, apparently, Phil’s side of the issue was that another team member in Mystic had already made his pick by the time I wanted to cancel my draft pick of Jamal Lewis. Esteban begged to differ, but the ruling stood. In reality, not two seconds had passed between my asking to recant my pick of Lewis to the point when the cackling of “Be More Prepared” began from the East Coast.
Sexist Bastards.
Doesn’t matter. I’m going to skunk them all and they can just chew on a little crow while they’re nursing their sad little egos.
The Congested Hedgehogs will reign supreme!!!!
Now, today:
This morning, I was to have my blood sugar tested. I haven’t been feeling my normal chipper self recently, and my doctor feels that possibly I am hypoglycemic or some ‘cemic’ type thing. I dunno. Anyway, for this test, I was told “don’t eat or drink anything after ten o’clock on Sunday.” Ok, I can do that. So last night, I had dinner at six o’clock and then didn’t eat or drink anything after that, including water, because hey, water is an “anything”, right?
Then around midnight when Esteban came to bed, I stumbled to the kitchen and, without thinking, guzzled two big glasses of water while I was half-asleep. Whoops! Well, that shouldn’t be a terrible thing. It had another eight hours to get out of my system, so I wasn’t too worried.
Then in the morning, I got up and went to the doctor’s office, where they were fucking late as usual. At quarter after eight, I went up to the window and asked what time my appointment was supposed to be, since I’d come ten minutes early and now I had been there twenty-five minutes and I hadn’t eaten in 14 hours and was a little, shall we say, TESTY!
Finally, they come and get me and draw my blood the first time. That was my “fasting” blood. Then they brought out some orange soda pop looking stuff. She opened it and it made a “pffft” sound.
“Oh, is it carbonated like soda?” I asked, making conversation.
“Yes, it has a little fizz to it. They found that if they made it fizzy, not so many people threw up afterwards.”
Oh.
Yeah. I’m reallllll excited to try THAT shit.
The idea behind this test is that they test your blood without any food in it, then they give you mega-refined sugar and then continue to prick you over the next two hours to see how your body deals with the sugar.
Do you remember when you were a kid and liked the taste of overly sweet things? I remember I used to make a Orange Tang sludge that was six ounces of water and three tablespoons of Tang. Well, the stuff they made me drink tasted a lot like that, only moreso and with bubbles.
Then I had to wait. A half hour later, my hands were starting to shake. 30 minutes after that, I fell asleep for an hour until they needed to pick me again. I’m not talking a light sleep either. I was snoring and drooling. That’s some mofo breakfast drink, let me tell you. They need a warning label on stuff like that. Now I know why they won’t let you leave the office during that test.
So, after being pricked five times, I bust out to a grocery store and pick up some pineapple, a bagel and cream cheese, some celery/carrot sticks and dip, and a sandwich. Because at that point, I was in a feeding frenzy. Then I went to work and several of my coworkers were afraid to actually come near my desk for fear that they would lose a finger.
Then I get the email from my sister.
Warning: what follows is pretty depressing… you don’t have to continue. Just so you know.
“Betty’s back in the hospital and she probably won’t last the night.” was all it said.
So immediately, I send out an email to my team saying that I had to leave again due to a family emergency. I felt really bad since I had only been there two hours by 1 o’clock, but it was, after all, an issue of life or death.
Mo and I actually got to the hospital at the same time as my mom. We went up and Mafia Grandma and my aunt had left, so we spent some time alone with Betty. Her nurse came in and told us that she had acutally suffered a heart attack yesterday and was no longer on any sort of life support, due to a decision which was made by my Mafia Grandmother and my Aunt. She was only on some morphine to make her more comfortable and some oxygen to make it easier for her to breathe (as opposed to breathing for her).
It was disturbing. The entire solution of legalized ethanasia is disturbing. It is legal to allow someone to whither away without food and water, but it is illegal to give them something to ease their suffering, to allow them release. It is somehow more humane to starve a person to death or deprive them of water so that they die of thirst. That is essentially what is happening. They die of thirst in most of the cases where “they removed the tubes”. The difference between giving someone an injection to ease suffering in minutes and withholding fluids so that they linger over eight to eleven days is simply semantics. There is no difference. Only cruelty. And if anyone has anything other than that to say about it, fine, I will respect that IF they have ever watched a loved one go through it. Only then. Because only a monster could watch their beloved falter due to a lack of something as essential as water and then tell me that it was more humane than giving them a chemical release. I just can’t believe it.
So anyway, it became too much for my mom, so Mo and I stayed and held Betty’s hand and sang to her, moistening her lips with ice water. She’s more or less alert, but I know that that will be only for a little while. I cringed when I realized that all of the signs of dying were coming back to me, filtering up through the repressed regions of my brain. The whole deal about the heart beat, how it gets remarkably slow and the blood pressure drops and the temperature rises to a fevered pitch. The way that the hands will start to pull toward the body into almost an embryonic embrace. When my great-grandmother died, she reminded me so much of a little baby robin in a nest of hospital whites, mouth open, eyes rolled back, and I don’t know if I can watch Betty get to that state.
I don’t know that I can do this again.
It’s so very hard.
