Cold Spring

Well, I was just about to tell you about my good weekend. There's some pictures over at flickr of Penny dying eggs and the kids with their bunny ears, if you're looking for something cute and uplifting this morning. (Alas, I didn't take any pictures while John and Sam were over for dinner, but that went well, too, and we had a good time with them.)

But my post-good-weekend mood just got crushed.

There's a guy I work with. He's closer to my dad's age than my own, and in fact was kind of a buddy with my dad, when Dad used to work here. He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he does his job well, and he's a really good guy. He always stops by my office when he walks by and says hello, and tells me to say hi to Dad for him. When he goes on travel to foreign places, he always brings back little souvenirs for all the non-traveling folks. I've got probably half a dozen little bric-a-brac things in my office that he gave me.

Last week, on Monday, I found out that his wife -- whom I've never met, but he always speaks of her in terms that let you understand she's the light of his life -- was in the hospital, in ICU, and expected to be there for the next several months.

What puts a fifty-something woman in ICU for months? Well, she's diabetic, and she scratched an itch, and didn't notice when it got infected. Then the infection crossed into her bloodstream, and it was a matter of hours before she ended up in the emergency room, and from there admitted to the hospital and installed in ICU. There were gory details, but I won't pass them on. It might've been less serious, but her religious beliefs forbade her from allowing a blood transfusion.

("I wish I hadn't been there when she went to the ER," the guy told me last week. "Then I could have told the doctors to go ahead and do it, and claimed ignorance. But she told me, 'No blood,' and I can't go against her wishes.")

He stopped in this morning to tell us that she died on Saturday, after several days of apparent improvement.

So somehow, I'm not quite ready to talk about chocolate bunnies and lamb chops, just at the moment.