What Year Is It? TF??? in Thirty-Seven

Good afternoon my friends. How are we doing today? It’s January 14th and I haven’t written in over a month. I am glad most of you are on my FB otherwise you’d probably think I was dead. Oy. LOL.

But it’s been a huge clusterfuck of things going on to round out ol 2021.

Soooo lets see, we were heading to Tucson the day after I wrote that last entry, which we did. We did our grocery shopping, got a computer from Adam and then ended up bringing home three baby ratties.

We brought home Louis, Egon and Gozer. Egon and Gozer are no about 9 weeks old and we believe Louis is a week or so behind, so about 8 weeks. They are already MASSIVE. OMG. I think Louis might be a tank. Louis is a fawn, he’s got ruby eyes, top eared. Gozer is an agouti hooded, maybe dalmation, he’s got some random spots on his body that aren’t usually present in just a hooded rat, one on his belly that is SOO CUTE!! Egon is masked. They area ll top eared. No dumbos this time :(.

Uhmmm yeah, we also celebrated my birthday on the 10th, so I’m 37 now. Blargh. haha. We made pork chops at home because I didn’t want to deal with another anniversary fiasco by going out to dinner or anything.

So, yeah. We made a bunch of apricot, pumpkin and zucchini bread, pecan snowball, bischochitos and some beautiful apricot thumbprint cookies that the dogs ate the entirety of the 7 dozen I made to sell. I also sold about 6 dozen almond joy.

Uhmmmm what else has been going on. We were trying to figure out what we were going to eventually do for Christmas. We had thought about going to Taos or to Tucson but COVID cases have been steadily on the rise, so we opted to stay home. We had some tri tip sandwiches and I don’t remember what else.

Before Christmas, the whole saga with my dad started happening. On the 21st I took him to the ER because he couldn’t breathe hardly at all and his stomach was hurting a lot. He had been waiting for a Nuclear Xray to be scheduled since the 14th because he’s got an ulcer or something. So he has been in some pain there and then his breathing is just diminished and they can’t figure out why. They ended up giving him a transfusion, two units of blood, because his numbers there were “critically low”. So that seemed to perk him up a lot. He was ashy gray when I took him in and after the transfusion he had his color back.

So Christmas happened, we kinda didn’t do anything. We didn’t get anything for Christmas either, which is whatever, but it still sucks.

On New Years Eve I took my dad back to the ER because he was having some severe pain in his stomach and that was making it hard for him to breathe as well as the fact that he hadn’t eaten much of anything in like a week and was also struggling to sleep.

So I took him in about 10:30 am and his heart rate was incredibly low. They kept looking at him like are you OK? He’d be like yeah, just this pain. So they started him on some meds for the pain and then his heart rate kept dropping to like 35. They took some blood and all that and then realized that his potassium levels were extremely elevated and that was putting added stress on his heart and kidneys.

He has Congestive Heart Failure and Stage 4 Chronic Kidney Failure or something like that. He’s not at the point of Dialysis yet. But that is most likely the next step, unless they can come up with some other thing to help his heart, like a goddamn transplant.

Anyway, so about 1:30 they said they were going to send him to another hospital to have the rest of the excess potassium flushed out of his system, but they were looking around for a bed because of COVID.

The lady that takes care of all that came in around 2:30 and said hey we found you a bed in the ER in Las Cruces so we’re going to send you down there. We’re just looking for transport. By that time, the weather was soggy and cold. We were completely overcast so they couldn’t fly him. The flight crew got in the ambulance and drove him the hour and a half down to LC.

I came home to figure out what to do, but by the time they got him settled in to a room and stable, it was like 6:30 and visiting hours were only until 8, so I opted to stay home. Plus it was NYE. I knew my dad was being taken care of, and I didn’t want to be alone on NYE, nor did I want to leave Randy alone here on NYE. So we ended up going to the store and getting a bottle of sparkling apple juice to toast with at midnight.

I don’t even remember what we had for dinner. I think we got tacos from Del Taco lol. Yeah. Then we just hung out and went to bed. Saturday morning, January 1, I got up at like 8, my dad had texted that they had moved him to a regular room in the main hospital. So I got up and showered, it was clear out when I got in the shower, but windy.

I got done in the shower and was getting dressed when I glanced out the window in the door to my room…and noticed it was rather white looking. There is a lace curtain over, so I moved the curtain and boom it was snowing.

FUCK! So I watched it get heavier and heavier for the next three hours, we ended up with about 3 inches on the ground. By noon it had started to blow itself out, so I got everything together and headed out. It had started to snow again when I was leaving my house, but by the time I got out to the highway, it was clearing up.

So I made my way down to LC, some friends generously donated some funds to get me a hotel room for a couple nights because We didn’t know when my dad was going to be out of there. However, my cousin Rosa offered me a place to stay which was great.

Ended up just getting lots of meds to flush everything out, and just to get him to a point where he could tolerate being at home again. He ended up being there Friday through Tuesday. We got out of the hospital Tuesday afternoon and then went over to Rosa’s so I could get my stuff, and then we ordered some lunch and ate and headed home.

Since then we’ve been dealing with my dad’s stomach as best as we can. We’d called 3 or 4 times to let them know nothing had been scheduled and they kept telling us that they sent the referral but where they sent it to never received it because it was Faxed. I’m so fucking OVER fax machines and their unreliability to get information where they need it.

So I finally went and hand delivered the dang thing. They scheduled him for the next day. OMG are you fucking kidding me. So from now on we are going to hand deliver all referrals we get because fax machines SUCK!

Anywho, so that got done yesterday. We had to make him an egg sandwich so they could put the nuclear stuff on so he could eat it and they monitor the stomach issue that way. So that took an hour and a half. Came home and he slept pretty much the rest of the afternoon. Got up about 6 and then was finally able to eat a bit more than usual which is good. He had some potato salad and some chicken and rice soup I made. Also had a nutrigrain bar. That’s probably the most he’s eaten in a month.

He’s got a follow up with his stomach dr next tuesday. We have to go back to LC on Monday to see the Kidney dr and hopefully they’ll get that situation sorted out. See if they don’t put him on dialysis. They did remove two of his meds, one is a diuretic though which he needs because of the CHF, so they’re playing with that med. They also obvi took him off his potassium supplement.

But, uh yeah, so we’ve been home, doing not a lot. I felt awful for a couple days, but it seemed to pass pretty quickly.

We’ve probably got another month before we might get to see our House Money. Randy talked to the lady that’s handling it for us, and she explained everything. Fingers crossed that we don’t get a judge that wants to be a stickler and drag it out the entire 180 days, because that would put us into May. If that’s what happens, that’s what happens, but we’d definitely like to not wait that long.

On our docket once we get the money is the following
-Remodel the back room so we can have an actual bedroom and not this bedroom/office/rat room/pantry that we currently live in (yes I said pantry, ask me about it).
-Get a new, reliable car!
-Give $2k to my dad and $500 to MIL (since they’re the only ones that have supported us)
-Get Dice’s eyes fixed.
-Get a fence put up in the back yard
-Get insulation in the walls, redo wiring in the house, put up a ceiling, seal the roof.

It has been SO FUCKING COLD on the nights where it gets down into the 20s. We just have our little fireplace (electric) heater in the corner and then we bought an all direction heater that works well. I’ve had to use Sam’s Club insulated shopping bags to cover some parts where there’s no insulation so that way we don’t literally freeze. It works ok, but you can still feel a slight breeze coming in through that area.

I’m gonna be posting some pictures up because people seem to think I’m lying about the state of this house. It’s 80 fucking years old. Original wiring, no insulation, etc. But yea let me lie about literally freezing my ass off.

In other news, Randy won our Fantasy Football Superbowl for the first time in 8 years LOL. I took 3rd so that was good stuff. He bought me my UV/LED lamp so I could do my nails and then I went to do my nails and I found out that my monomer (the stinky liquid for acrylic nails) was one solid block LOL. It had gotten left in the shed and the temp fucked with it. SO I just painted my nails with the new gel polish (that I got in like November lol), so that should suffice for now until I can get some monomer.

At any rate, I think that is all I have to say.

Last updated August 18, 2022