Last week was...quite a week, all right. I got a sinus infection (with bonus exciting lump that confused the doctor, who threw antibiotics at it!), Mr. Blinky the laptop with the exciting fainting screen finally turned up its toes and died, and then I got the call that my mother was in the hospital, had probably had a mild heart attack recently and (best of all!), probably hasn't been getting enough oxygen for a while. So when I finally saw the news on Friday, I was just done. I had no more grace for dealing with any more crap life might care to throw my way.

Now of course, life's crap isn't so bad considering that I can still hug all of my still-breathing children, but knowing that doesn't reduce the stress much. But this week has been a bit better. My sinuses are feeling better (although the lump hasn't entirely gone away, so I suppose I should trundle myself back to the doctor at some point). Although I'm pretty sure Mr. Blinky's graphics card is kaput given that we can't even get it to display to an external monitor, I was able to restore the achingly slow older laptop to a new speedy glory with a squeaky clean hard drive.

My mother is home from the hospital, but on oxygen. She was treated for several days for congestive heart failure, getting a bunch of fluid taken off of her heart. She's okay, for the moment.

I was never that worried, this time around. My stress was more that this is the third hospitalization in 8 months, and while congestive heart failure is something one can live with for a long time, hers is clearly not under control. It's about what this means for the future, and how much more future there might be, and what sort of decisions we might have to make. When I was talking to Lisa, her main aide, she said that she thought my mother has been slipping mentally, which is something I had been noticing as well. It will be worth seeing how much she improves now that she's getting enough oxygen, but it still presents a new set of issues to worry about. Somehow I hadn't worried about her not being able to handle her own affairs, since both of her parents were sharp as a tack until the end. What do I do if that's not the case anymore? I can't fly out to Michigan frequently enough to handle things. Moving her out here is something I only want to do as an absolute last resort, since the loss of her entire social life and everything familiar, not to mention Lisa, is something that would drastically reduce her quality of life.

To make everything more difficult, she's lost her voice, so it's very hard to talk to her over the phone. And since she has a hard time typing, she normally uses voice-controlled software, which means we can't really e-mail or chat online either.

Sigh. Things are okay again for the moment. We'll focus on that, and on the fact that we'll be there in a little over a week.

Argh. I was all set to attempt to limp across the finish line of NaBloPoMo after Thanksgiving, and my laptop decided to develop a fun habit of turning its screen off. Our other laptop, which we gave to Katherine, is currently doing its best impression of a snail with low blood pressure, and while I was able to use it to do things like read e-mail, it was unuseably slow for anything else. So I was without a computer for the end of November. Then just as Mr Blinky developed a spontaneous semi-remission wherein it would only decide to go staticky and blink out every day or two and otherwise work fine, the sinus infection arrived, and with it, the need to sleep 22 hours a day.

Anyway, here I am again! I have antibiotics and the hope my splitting sinus headache will soon be gone, along with the weird, worrying lump on one of my sinuses. The doctor was perplexed but threw some antibiotics at it. Mr. Blinky is being well-behaved today (and one of these days, we're going to do something about the slooooow laptop so it will be a viable backup). Unfortunately, there's no solution to it being obscenely late, so more anon.