Intervention

I had a dream last night. I was walking in the woods with some friends, and realized that Penny wasn't with us. We called, and fanned out to look for her, and I found her in a bed of leaves, unconscious. She didn't rouse, so I tested her blood sugar: 20. "I'll need the Glucagon," I said to whoever was standing behind me. "The big red box in her bag." In the dream, I was very calm. I explained to the person with me (it wasn't Matt, because he wouldn't need the explanation, having heard it before) that Penny was probably going to throw up when she woke up, and that as soon as I'd given her the shot, I would call 911 for an ambulance.

I woke up before I actually gave her the shot, much less calm than I had been in the dream. It was around 2:30 in the morning.

It was only a dream, I told myself. I got up and went into Penny's room. She stirred when I touched her arm. I didn't want to disturb her, so I kissed her cheek, then went to check on Alex (who was sleeping on his back with his hands tucked behind his head and his ankles crossed in the classic "lounging on summer grass" pose -- I had to giggle!) and then started to go back to bed. But as I sat down, I thought... it wouldn't hurt to actually check Penny's blood sugar. Just to be sure.

She'd been 138 when Matt checked her at 10:00 -- solidly in range. But except for Sunday evening and yesterday morning, when she was apparently fighting off the aftereffects of movie theater popcorn, she's been having a lot of lows lately. It was worth a check.

I had to fight her to get her hand out from under the blanket, but I finally got the drop of blood on the test strip... 54.

Crap.

I brought her a juice box, and by the time I'd got the wrapper off the straw, she was sitting up and ready for it. She sucked it down and then collapsed back into her nest of blankets.

I re-checked her fifteen minutes later, now approaching 3 am. She was at 108, a good solid number. I went back to bed, though it took me almost an hour to relax back into sleep.

This morning, when she checked her sugars before breakfast, she was at 58.

WTF, diabetes? WTF?

And what if I hadn't had that dream? Would she have bottomed out in the 50's anyway? Or continued her nosedive? Would we have woken this morning and realized Penny hadn't turned her alarm off, and had to scramble for the Glucagon for real?

It's almost enough to make me wonder if there's a higher power.

***

But lest we let diabetes take the upper hand and set the tone for the day, let me share something awesome with you instead. Penny's studying maps in school right now, and her big project, due today, was to make up her own map of a place, and write a paragraph to go with it. With help, she decided to map an island, and she filled it in, and then we thought about underwater movies we'd seen to help us add features to the surrounding ocean -- she put in caves and volcanoes and even a minefield (a la Finding Nemo). The map itself was very creative and imaginative, and I was pleased.

And then she wrote the paragraph to go with it. Matt swears she wrote this all at once, without a lot of pausing for thought (presented exactly as she wrote it, with our spelling corrections in brackets):

This Island is my secret hideout where my friends hang out. We also go on quests but of course we have to leave mine filds [fields] around our island to sink and stop our enmy's [enemies'] ships. We explore the water volcanos [volcanoes] to see what and when they explode. If our enmys [enemies] are near we hide in the caves. Also we find treasure on our island! If it's hot we run in the forest to cool off. My island is a safe place you can go. (Exept [Except] for the pirats [pirates].) And have fun!

When she read that to me, I just about fell over, I was so proud and happy and excited. How awesome is that?! The "(except for the pirates)" bit killed me! (The parentheses were her idea, even.) Volcanoes and treasure and minefields and pirates and sunken ships and forests and caves, and she managed to link it all together cohesively! Obviously, she's a born storyteller. Or possibly ready to start building her own D&D modules.

Either way... That's my girl.

Buggy

I know I don't usually post here on Writing Wednesday, but last night was pretty rough.

Penny had a persistent low at school and was complaining of a stomachache, so Matt brought her home early. The persistent low continued to persist, and Matt was feeling a bit under the weather as well, so instead of the planned dinner, I just made a couple of frozen pizzas. Penny ate three slices, I calculated the insulin, and we went on with the evening...

Right up until I sat down to read to Penny at bedtime. I got through exactly one sentence and then she jumped up, ran into the bathroom, and proceeded to puke her little guts up.

Here's a fun quiz: when you give someone insulin, but then they throw up all the food in their stomach before it can be digested, what happens? That's right! Low blood sugar! Whoo!

(In fact, I'm thinking that might have been the cause of that persistent low of the afternoon -- if the stomach bug was already beginning, it probably drastically slowed the rate of digestion, which meant her lunch insulin was going through her much faster than her food was.)

She was well within her range at bedtime, so Matt and I went about our evening routine, but alas, she thew up again around 9, and when Matt checked her blood sugar at 10, she was under 40 -- so low that she was groggy and unable to sit up on her own when Matt woke her up to treat it. So we skipped the candy remedies (that would probably only upset her stomach anyway) and went straight for a big old spoonful of honey. Half of it smeared on her face, but she opened her mouth for me to spoon it in, so we got a good teaspoon in her and waited.

Fifteen minutes later, she was up a bit but still in the 40s, so we woke her up again. This time, at least, she came alert relatively quickly and sat up on her own to eat another spoonful of honey, and washed it down with half a bottle of Gatorade, and then she remained upright until I'd gotten a washcloth to clean her face.

Another fifteen minutes or so, and she was up over 80, so we relaxed a bit. Matt and I stayed up another half hour or so and checked her again (over 100) before we went to bed.

This morning, her blood sugar was over 300, but rather than the usual frustration that causes me, I was relieved. (And unlike the "where the hell did that come from? highs, I knew exactly where this one came from: two spoonfuls of honey and half a bottle of Gatorade, duh!) The dangers of high blood sugar are slight but cumulative; low blood sugars are much more immediately terrifying. I hate it when she's so low she has trouble waking up. We have not yet ever had to break out the emergency Glucagon injection, and I do not ever want to. I probably don't even have to tell you what the Mutant Worrybrain was whispering when I first woke up this morning, do I?

She was feeling somewhat better on the stomach front, too -- she said her stomach didn't hurt any more, but she was Not Hungry. She ate a little cup of yogurt and drank some low-carb juice (I thought she should avoid milk) and I gave her a shot to bring her back down into range. She's staying home with Matt today, so here's hoping they're both feeling better by this evening.

Pinch and Polish

A few weeks ago, my boss let me know that if we didn't pick up several new contracts in the next month or so, then one of my staff was likely to be laid off.

We'd furloughed most of our installations crew already ("furlough" being corporate doublespeak for "non-optional vacation without pay"), and reading between the lines, I got the impression that my boss was holding off even more massive layoffs with everything he had, but that corporate was starting to get more and more insistent.

I believe that the slender thread of hope for us rested on the big proposal I worked back in April and May. While it wasn't big enough to keep us going on its own, if we won that contract, it would give us enough work to keep everyone limping along while we scrambled for another contract or two to make us all actually safe.

I found out yesterday that we didn't win that contract. The company that got it underbid us by a huge margin, so honestly, I think we were doing well to still be in the final round. Though that's not really a consolation to the people who are about to lose their jobs.

I found out today that the layoffs are even more imminent than I expected. I figured they'd drag my boss back in from vacation today to make the decisions (or sign off on them, if corporate decided to get the bit in their teeth and do it for him) and then it would take about two weeks to push the paperwork through. But apparently the decisions have already been made, as a contingency. So most likely the layoffs will happen at the end of this week or the beginning of next.

Layoffs always suck, no matter which side of them you're on. I'm very slightly comforted by the fact that it wasn't my call -- no one asked me which of my staff to sacrifice. I'm feeling miserable for those who are about to be dropped, and relieved that my job is fairly secure, along with a healthy chunk of survivor's guilt.

Though for that matter, if corporate got the bit in its teeth, there's a small but nonzero chance that I won't be one of the survivors -- we recently promoted one of my staff with the intention of training her to take over some of my functions, so it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility that corporate looked at the bottom lines and decided to lay me off and leave it to her to put the pieces back together. I don't think that's the way my boss would go, if they gave him a choice, but corporate does not appreciate me the way he does, and they've done that kind of thing before.

I don't deal with the financial stuff, so I don't know how many people we'll have to lose -- but I do know that we only have about ten contracts at the moment, and half of those are only employing about two people each. (We usually have around fifteen contracts, each of which supports about five people.) I also know that several of those are going to dry up and blow away at the end of the fiscal year. So, layoffs now or not, if we don't get some substantial contracts in here in the next couple of months, the whole office could dry up and blow away before the end of the year.

Might be time for me to polish my resume, and start considering options.

Just Not Working

My entire list of tasks for work this week is already complete. Well, I've got a few meetings left to go, and about an hour's worth of online training to complete. But we did a software delivery yesterday, and there are no more deliveries. No more audits, not even any paperwork. I'm going to be scrounging makework and doing things that look like work but really aren't for the rest of the week. Next week is not looking much busier. I'm just not working.

In the short term, that can be nice, but we've got another contract that's ending next week, and three more that will wrap up by the end of September, and we've only picked up two new contracts in the last year. If we don't get some work in here by then, there will be some massive layoffs because there's just no work.

I've got a story I should be editing so I can turn it in by the submission deadline next week. I finished the draft last week, then set it aside while I worked some edits to the one that's going to be published in August. The intention was to let the story rest and settle while I got into full-on editing mode, and then come back to it. But since I turned in those edits last Thursday, I haven't been able to work on this story for more than a sentence or two at a time. Some of that has been circumstantial, but most of it is simply that I haven't made myself do it. I'm just not working.

I was unable to summon much enthusiasm for my morning Wii Fit workout this morning. I dragged myself through it, but it's like it could tell my heart wasn't in it; the minutes-exercised calories-burned meters dragged up so slowly that I gave up and quit as soon as I'd hit the minimum threshold I've set for myself. And today's allergy shot day, so I won't be going to the Y, either. I'm just not working (out).

I found out over the weekend that a friend is getting a divorce. His wife has been cheating on him, and though he's willing to go to counseling and try to heal whatever rift is between them, she told him that she doesn't think counseling will help. Self-defeating though it is, she thinks it's just not working.

Stressy

At any given time, with work and the kids and Penny's diabetes and Alex's encroaching Two-ness and the diet and the working out and everything, my stress factor generally floats around a 4. (It's a scale of 1-10.)

Last night, I could feel PMS setting in. Stress factor: 6.

I've got a contract shutting down at work today, which means that I've got to put together a final delivery package -- and naturally the project manager has changed their mind multiple times on a) exactly when we're delivering it (it was originally going to be two weeks ago) and b) exactly what it's going to contain. Today is the drop-dead date, but as far as I know, they were still making changes to the software when I went home last night. Stress factor: 7.

We're also working on a major proposal at work. I hate working proposals at the best of times, but on top of contract closeouts, it's making me crazy. Luckily, I'm (so far) only in charge of getting peoples' resumes together. So far, one person has sent me an excellent resume, to which I made minor grammatical changes. One person sent me a sloppy resume that took me an hour to edit. Two people sent me one-paragraph career summaries instead of the two pages I asked for, and I had to send them back and ask for more. One person didn't even try -- he wrote back and said, "My resume from the last proposal is around on the LAN somewhere." And the other two people haven't responded at all. I've also been helping out one of the other people on the proposal team, which is great, except now the proposal coordinator (a person from corporate who has actually moved into our office for the duration) is getting us confused and sending stuff to me that is really meant for her. Stress factor: 6.

And yesterday I had to lay the smackdown on the Beast project manager and the local supporting manager because they were trying to poach my people for Beast tasks that -- between the contract close-out and the proposal on top of their other everyday work -- they don't have time for. Seriously, if there's an emergency with the person who usually does those tasks, of course we'll do our best to pitch in, but if they're just overloaded... Well, tough titties. So are we. Granted, this kind of protective snarling is my job as a manager, but I don't usually have to get quite as forceful as I did yesterday. And I suspect it's going to come with consequences for me, so I'm waiting for that shoe to drop. Stress factor: 5.

On the plus side, I did get to the gym last night, finally. Stress factor: -1.

Adding that all up... Yeah, I'm kind of overloaded. The effing daycare manager noticed that I was looking a little strained around the edges this morning. Possibly because I spent half my night with stress nightmares. I dreamed about the contract delivery package today. I dreamed that my big toe got moldy and fell off. I dreamed about the contract delivery package some more. I dreamed about emails that slid off the screen and wrapped around my skin and couldn't come off.

So I'm going to go get myself a big mug of coffee, and fix my breakfast, and then I'm going to go bang my head against the wall of spikes that is this delivery package.

And when I fill in my Weight Watchers plan for today, I think I might save myself a few extra points, so that tonight after the kids are in bed, I can have a couple of Drinks.

Projects

My to-do list is getting pretty unmanageably long.

• Research entry-level digital SLR cameras (my under-200 diet reward to myself)


• This year's scrapbook, which I haven't even started yet, though I have the pages and several months of prints ready to go.


• Several solid story/novel writing ideas that need to be fleshed out, and half a dozen snippets that I'd like to capture somewhere before they fade.


• A game plot that I need to sketch detail into, so it's ready to go when the current scum plot is done.


• A vague notion of adding footnotes (translations, whispered comments, unexplained motives, etc.) and some side conversations to the Hall's transcripts.


• The long-standing home decluttering project.


• I promised Penny I'd take her to the beach one day this summer -- need to figure out when I'm doing that. (And buy a swimming suit, beforehand.)


• Get invitations put together for Penny's birthday party.


• Buy and install new filters in the air purifier.


• Move the rest of my old journal posts over here.


• Make appointments for various home improvements and repairs.


• Go through all my clothes and pack up everything that's a 2X or bigger (I'm in a size L now, mostly, but some of the XL stuff still fits okay), and take it to the thrift store.


• Go through the kids' things and get rid of the detritus.

And that doesn't even include my busier-than-ever work list, or the everyday stuff like housework and exercising and allergy shots and...

Am I doing any of it? No. No, I am not. I'm sitting on my ass and reading and re-reading and re-reading old Hall transcripts and other things I wrote five or six or eight years ago.

I told Karen last night that I feel like I'm looking for something, but I can't figure out what I'm trying to find. But I begin to wonder if I'm not hiding, instead. Trying to escape to a time when things were less crazy, when I had time to be me, when I didn't wonder what was slowly slipping away while I was lost in the noise.

Sleeplessness

The carnival was great. I took pictures, but haven't pulled them off the phone yet. I escorted Penny to the bouncies and the petting zoo while Matt sat in the shade and watched Alex play with pine cones.

The petting zoo was adorable; Penny got to pet a chicken, a goat, a sheep, a donkey, a pony, a rabbit, and some ducklings. All the animals were tiny -- the biggest of them (the donkey and the pony) only came up to my hip. Penny loved it, though, and spent a lot of time cooing, "Awwww! So cute!"

After that, we headed into the gym to see what games they had, but once we were there, Penny didn't want to play the games -- she just wanted to run around the gym. It was too hot to argue the matter much, so I sat down by one wall and watched Alex watching the juggling demonstration on one side and a karate demonstration on the other while Matt played with Penny.

He took her to the cafeteria to see if she wanted to do crafts, but she was only interested in the snack table, right up until about half an hour before they were ready to shut everything down, naturally. She planted some flowers and made a card for me for Mother's Day (I haven't seen it yet; I was told to not look and then she and Matt hid it when we got home) while Alex ran around and giggled.

Of the 20 tickets we'd bought, we only ended up using four of them (I got some fruit and a juice box for Alex from the snack counter) -- but that's okay; the point was to help sponsor the PTA anyway, really. And the kids had fun. We even arrived and left all together -- Alex was in fine spirits the whole time (though ready for a nap by the time we got home).

That evening, Matt went to his monthly D&D game, so I packed the kids up and took them out to eat by myself. I was a little hesitant about it at first, but it worked out great. We went to La Tolteca, and both kids were really great. Penny wanted to sit next to me in the booth at first, but relented to sit across from me when she realized that was the seat that would let her see the TV. She even ate her chicken nuggets before starting on her fries entirely without my reminding her -- and then only ate a handful of the fries. Alex ate an entire cheese quesadilla, and was happy and flirty for the entire meal. All in all, a success!

I lowballed Penny's insulin a little for dinner, thinking that her active afternoon would still be dragging her sugars down a bit. But when I checked her at 10, she was over 300, and I had to give her another shot. I sent Matt a text message, asking him to check her again when he got home from his game. Myself, I stayed up until 11:30 or midnight playing WoW and then reading.

Matt got home at 2, and Penny'd come down some, but was still over 250. He decided not to give her another shot, because a day or so previous, she'd dropped by more than 100 overnight. I concurred (I'd woken up when he came to bed) but the fact that the 10:00 shot had done almost no good at all prodded the Mutant Worrybrain into high gear. (My coworker's wife who died a few weeks ago went from 150 to 550 in the space of eight hours, was in ICU before another eight hours had passed, and died two weeks later. Nothing short of a cure is going to pry that out of the Worrybrain's stockpile of ammunition.) I gave up and checked her again at 3 -- 240, which at least meant she was holding more or less stable, and not going up again. I think I finally got back to sleep around 4 or 4:30.

So naturally, Alex woke up at 6 instead of sleeping in until 6:30. Sigh. As I said on twitter: I could tour Europe with the bags under my eyes.

And once I'd administered a correction for her still steady-around-250 morning sugars, Penny's sugars stayed neatly below 150 for the whole day, so I have no idea why she was so high Saturday night. Maybe she ate more of those french fries than I thought.

Time Passes

Missed a day, there.

So this is what happened: Mid-morning on Friday, the daycare called us to say that Alex had a fever of 102.6 underarm (translates to 103.5 oral) so we needed to come pick him up. Matt did that, and I called the pediatrician's office, who eventually opined that it might be a delayed reaction to the immunization shots he'd had on Tuesday. (Specifically, the Measles/Mumps/Rubella one, which apparently does this often enough to not raise eyebrows.) They said that if Tylenol didn't bring the fever down, or if he was still running high Saturday morning, to call and make an appointment.

Tylenol did work -- it at least brought it down a couple of degrees out of the "scary-high" range, so we put Alex to bed Friday night and I wrestled with the Mutant Worrybrain for a while before going to bed.

Saturday morning, even though the Tylenol had worn off sometime in the wee hours, Alex's temp was low-grade, and we thought the crisis was pretty much over. We didn't bother to re-up the Tylenol, since fevers do actually have a useful purpose in germ-killing and he didn't seem to be in any pain.

Naturally, then, that evening, after the pediatrician's Saturday hours were done and after Matt had departed for his monthly D&D game, Alex's temp climbed again. I gave him a dose of Tylenol and put him to bed early. When Matt got home at about 1 in the morning, he checked on Alex, discovered that the poor kid was burning up, and woke him up for another dose of Tylenol. As long as he was awake anyway, he did another temp check and he was clocking in at over 104.

(Alex woke up crying again around 2:30 -- we'd been dutifully pushing fluid on him all day to help keep him hydrated, so he'd peed and, as we say around here, exceeded the limits of diaper technology. We got him changed and soothed and back to bed, but that was another sleep interruption for Matt and I. Whee.)

He was still hot Sunday morning, and you're not supposed to give Tylenol more than 4 times in 24 hours. But I remembered the hack they'd used at the hospital after he was born -- alternating Tylenol with ibuprofen to allow more frequent pain relief without overloading the system on either drug. I broke out the Children's Motrin.

We called the Ask-A-Nurse line to see if we needed to take him in to the Urgent Care center; the consensus was that it probably wasn't necessary but that if he was still sick Monday to take him in then.

Penny and I went to the grocery store while Alex was taking a morning nap, and when we got back, Alex was awake and cranky, but his fever had broken. We celebrated.

Prematurely.

The fever came back in the evening, again. We dosed him up and sent him to bed, and Monday, while Matt was taking Penny to her quarterly endocrinologist checkup (she's doing well -- A1C of 7.9, smack in the middle of the goal range for kids under 6) I took Alex to the pediatrician, who took all of about 2 minutes to spot a double ear infection, and another 5 minutes -- just to be on the safe side -- to rule out the flu.

So there we have it. Ear infections, and Alex is on antibiotics now and feeling much better, though he was kind of whiny and clingy this morning, right up until I got him to school, at which point he morphed into the happiest kid ever. (I did give him a shot of Motrin before school, in case the whining was because his ears were bothering him.)

Whew.

Anyway, I'm excited for tonight -- I'm taking Penny to see an acrobatic troupe at William and Mary. I love acrobats, and I think Penny will have a great time, too. She's excited, too, if only because she's going to get to stay up late. I wish Matt could have come with us, but I didn't think we could get a babysitter for Alex who could stay up that late on a school night.

(Penny was, by the way, extremely good while Alex was sick. She was mostly understanding of us having to give him so much extra attention, and not too whiny about being bored, and even made up little songs to sing to him to help him calm down and rest in the evening. Best. Big sister. Ever.)

At any rate, I'm really looking forward to the show tonight!

Ablaze

Funny how quickly things can get shoved into perspective.

I was feeling mildly irritated: Alex seems to have a cold or a sinus infection, and it's raining out. Penny dragged her feet on leaving the house and then had trouble getting her seatbelt fastened, so we wound up behind a school bus on our way to take Alex to daycare. And then we had to wait for a train crossing, featuring one of those insanely long trains with three engines and like four or five hundred cars. Alex pulled a sock off in the car, and I couldn't find it (though I did find a sock he'd pulled off a couple of weeks ago). The father of one of Penny's best friends at the daycare wanted to stop and talk to me -- in the rain -- about a possible sleepover for the girls this weekend. The same no-passing road that we'd been behind the school bus on the way to daycare had a guy on the way back who didn't want to go faster than twenty. And about the time we got to Penny's school (late, of course), the rain decided to increase its intensity. And leaving the school, I wound up behind someone who apparently had never turned out of a parking lot before in their life, because they wouldn't pull forward far enough to actually see the oncoming traffic. It took them -- no joke -- three minutes of sitting there to feel comfortable enough to pull out onto the street. And then they gave me a dirty look when I passed them. The hell?

As I approached my turn, I saw a low, very dark cloud hanging over the street, and made a face: a specially-heavy bit of rain just to complicate matters?

But no, it wasn't. It wasn't a cloud at all. It was smoke. Lots of it, thick and billowing and black. Something was burning. Who burns leaves on a rainy morning like this? I wondered, and then I saw the flashing lights.

Three houses down one of the side streets, I caught just a glimpse as I went by of a house in flames. I didn't see many details, but it looked like the entire house was gutted. The flames were a huge orange sheet across the front of the house, reaching half a story higher than the roof.

When we first moved into our house, almost ten years ago, that was my biggest fear. The Mutant Worrybrain wasted endless cycles, every time we left, on the possibility that we would return to a smoldering ruin. I used to crane my neck to check the sky, and I looked diligently between the houses on the adjacent street to make sure it was still standing. I fretted when one of those houses put up a fence that made it harder for me to see our place.

It was 8:21. Were the residents of the house on their way to work and school, blissfully unaware of what waits them this evening? Or had they been home? Trapped in their beds by that malevolent orange and black?

From the top of the overpass, as I circled around, I could see the flashing lights, and the orange again, through the trees. At the light, I had to wait longer than usual because of a parade of additional police and fire and ambulance vehicles.

I wasn't irritated any more, though.