A Hasty Departure

Our plans have changed ever so slightly. A storm is coming in in Sunday which could potentially make it difficult to land our plane. Because we're on a charter flight, we have the luxury of bumping it forward 18 hours or so, The current plan is to depart our location at about 3:30 p.m. tomorrow and to land in the State of the Desolate a couple of hours later.  My croup isn't quite at the stage that my doctor had hoped it would have been but he says I can make the trip. He's not really concerned that I'll  share the illness with my pseudoaunt, as croup isn't highly contagious, particularly when it is medicated with both antibiotics and antivirals to covers as many bases as is practical.

We will be hanging out not far from the Cedar Hills area, which is the same neck of the woods where Donny Osmond's son was caught illegally discharging firearms.  This is actually old news, and only recently received press coverage, maybe as an afterthought following the Connecticut tragedy. Still, Jeremy Osmond's less-than-photogenic mug shot has been plastered over tabloid covers and on front pages of Utah newspapers.   Perhaps we will have someone other than Daniel Kretchmer, the legendary  serial polygamist kidnapper from  Pleasant Grove, about whom to be concerned.  While it's true that the legendary  Krtechmer usually makes his raid down from the hills in the immediate hours surrounding February 14, with the young Mr. Osmond purportedly encroaching upon his territory, Daniel Kretchmer  may choose to hasten his escapades, as he surely wants the brightest and best of what's out there to add to his harem,  and not merely his pick of the litter among the survivors of Jeremy Osmond's most recent target practice.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Good King Wenceslaus Looked Out . . .

If  Good King (who was supposedly a mere duke and not  king, but once he was canonized and became Saint Wenceslaus, no one really fretted over the technical inaccuracy)  looked in my general direction, he would have seen and heard my barking and wheezing away, to the extent that I was banned from midnight mass.  Croup is a very large part of my destiny, and has been since my brother and I excited my mom's uterus because Uncle Jerry, the OBGYN of record, determined that the twins should be born at the optimal time fr the bigger twin.  Where the other twin was concerned, that was where the miracles of modern technology as it relates to saving micropreemies would come in.  As it turned out, the interventions would be minimal. all that was involved was tubes and an incubator for a few weeks . . .

That and the dreaded croup, which rears its ugly head in my general direction three or four times each year, and usually a the most inopportune times.  I've been told on numerous occasions that croup is an condition afflicting  babies, and that any doctors who have diagnosed me with such nooed to go baxk to medical school.  When I share this with my Uncle Steve, he either, depending upon his mood or on the control the person has over any aspect of my life, curses and tells me not to listen to them, hits a few buttons on his computer and prints out information relating to croup, and asks his secretary to mail it to them, picks up the phone and calls them out on their ignorance directly, or  puts a hex on the person so that someone over the age of eight in his or her family will be diagnosed with the condition in the immediate future.

Croup for me involves sleeping in a room in which my bedding has been made dripping-wet  with the proliferation of hunidifiers/vaporizers, and in especially pesky cases, sleeping under a nakeshift tent in my bed,  receiving steroid injections, and being force-fed doses of goshawful sludgy purply cough syrup that tastes something like I would imagine that congealed cow's blood would taste, not thatI would ever intentionally taste it.

I have company through this most recent  battle with the dreaded croup. My friend Meredith had been given permission to visit long before this dreaded plague struck. now what are my parents to do? Track her parents down in their cruise ship in the Bahamas? Send her to an orphanage? nope, she's happily stuck taking her chances with croup. My friends have a solid track record of avoiding croup even when residing in our abode. Meredith will sleep in a separate bedroom, but a few steps down the hall shouldn't that much difference. Still, she won't get it. my high school PE teacher would say it's because only babies get croup.  My Uncle Steve would say that communicability isn't all that likely among populations over eight or ten. Either way,  we hope the odds continue to work in her favor. If they don't however, we'll bark and wheeze together.

The goal is to be rid entirely of this affliction by December 3o, at which time we plan to travel to the state of the desolate, otherwise known as Utah, which, despite its state of desolation, does have   mountains with snow. We will, God willing, utilize the snow and the slope of the mountains to snowboard.

Pray for good health and continuing snowfall.

The Dreaded Croup Again

My PseudoAunt and pseudoUncle, PseudoAunt's brother, and I went to a restaurant together Sunday night. My PseudoAunt's brother knew the chef, so he went to the kitchen briefly to chat with him. he mentioned that a sous shef was hacking away as though he had tuberculosis or pertussis or COPD. He's just starting his second year of medical school. One would hope that by the time he's granted MD status he knows the difference between TB, whooping cough, and COPD in terms of the sounds of the coughs they each produce, but that's neither here nor there.

The bottom line is that just under three days later, three of the four of us are sick with a respiratory illness. It wouldn't be a huge problem for me or for Tim, PseudoAunt's brother, as we're relatively healthy, but PseudoAunt has cystic fibrosis, so something as simple as a cold can cause major complications for her. She went to the doctor today. I was forced to see a doctor as well, mainly in case either we had different illnesses or the illness was one that I could reinfect her with after she had successfully fought it off. Such was not the case -- the basic diagnosis is influenza -- but PseudoAunt has bronchitis with it, while I have the lovelely childhood disease I can't quite outgrow: croup.

I'm back to drinking purple sludge cough syrup and receiving steroid injections in addition to taking antibiotics. It's a lovely way to spend my final ten days or so of freedom before full-time university enrollment. It's probably better than having croup during class and being kicked out because my barking seal coughs are louder than the voice of the lecturing professor.

The central coast of California is the perfect place to be when you have croup or bronchitis. The Pseudos and I wrapped up in blankets and sat on steps leading to a beach just to drink in the moist air. It's more effective than the use of a vaporizer. We have those in the condo as well, but the moist anf foggy ocean air is more therapeutic than the most sophisticated machine technology can create for the same purpose.

I'm hoping this is a short bout with croup, because PseudoUncle and I are already starting to but heads over how much purple sludge I need to consume. I know he's an MD and all, but it's MY body, and sometimes one just has to know when to say when. The stuff is every bit as potent as 80 proof alcohol, or so I've been told.

"sick" & perp identified

Sleep is a difficult thing for me to acquire. I've never been a great sleeper even before my accident last spring and the events that occurred at the beginning of this school year. Those two things made sleep an even rarer commodity.

I turned on my TV at somewhere around 2:00 a.m. last night when I was unsuccessful at falling asleep. From now on I need to put a towel along the bottom of my door before I do that. My parents are spies. They see light under my door even in the middle of the night. My dad came into my room with his guitar. He plays music in the key of A major because for some reason guitar music in the key of A usually makes me sleepy. I've had musician friends tell me that this is totally crazy and that there's no way it could make a difference as to what key in which music is played in terms of its soporific effect, but it works. I don't know if it works that way for anyone else other than me, but the key definitely has an effect on me. My dad is the very first person to recognize bull manure when I spout it, and even he doesn't argue about the effect of guitar music on me when it's played in the key of A. Last night it was ineffective, though.

So then my mom came into my room. She was starting her annoying habit of rubbing my head to make me get sleepy. I begged her to stop and told my parents that I would be happy to lie in my bed in the dark with no TV, computer, books, music, or movies if they would just leave me alone. My dad said no because I was awake all night last night (which was, incidentally, my parents' fault) and they don't want me to miss more than one consecutive night of sleep. So my mom went to the hard-core sleep-inducing tactic of drawing pictures on my back. I finally gave up fighting them. I tried pretending to be asleep but they can tell if I'm really asleep or not. I can't for the life of me figure out how they can tell. So eventually they bored me to sleep with their guitar playing in the key of A (I can only listen to so much Simon and Garfunkel or music of that genre without being rendered unconscious) and my mom's really lame artwork on my back (I can tell even with the limited sensory receptors in my back that the stuff she says she's drawing would look nothing like is is supposed to look if she had used an actual pencil; the woman can't even draw well enough to play Pictionary). Then I woke up this morning with a horrible barking cough that my dad is calling croup but that I'm not sure he is qualified to diagnose.

So now no one will let me leave the house because I'm "sick." My friend Caitlin is supposed to get back from San Diego this afternoon and is coming to visit. My parents say I can have company but that Caitlin can't spend the night because I can't have friends stay overnight when I'm
"sick." My Uncle Steve is supposed to come here after his office hours to give me an official diagnosis and possibly medication. He's qualified at least on paper to offer a diagnosis. My dad think's he (my dad) is qualified to diagnose my "illness" because he's board-certified in emergency medicine. How many cases of croup does the average E. R. doctor see with patients over the age of five in an E. R.? If your answer is "zero," "none," or even "not many," you receive credit for having provided a correct answer. I hope my uncle doesn't force me to have an injection. Though I'm not actually "sick," I don't feel great enough to run away from people with syringes today. I let my dad give me an flu shot on December 24. One injection per kunar month is my absolute maximum acceptable quota if I'm not in a hospital, where I have no choice but to tolerate more.

My Aunt Victoria's super-sleuthing skills have come to be useful again. She was able to ferret out that this creepy kid named Justin whose father is a cowboy acquaintance of my Uncle Ralph was the one who made disgusting tweets on my computer. My dad said we can't go to their house again if Justin is there. My Uncle Ralph said my dad doesn't have to worry because Justin won't be there. Justin probably needs counseling or something. I hope he doesn't grow up to be a sex offender. I still don't know exactly what was in the tweets that were deleted, but apparently it was incredibly disgusting. everyone thinks my dad was really stupid for thinking I was the author.

Even though I enjoy seeing him in trouble, I'm glad my brother didn't do it. It would have made me feel sad if he did something so gross solely for the purpose of getting me into trouble.