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The Neon Nurse's Nebulous Natterings
Below are the 25 most recent journal entries.
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2009.09.12 11.17
Grandma Duty (Belated Report)
As the late great Gilda Radner used to say when channeling Roseanne Roseannadana, it's always something.
My coping mechanism seems to involve rapid vacillation between the extremes of trying to do too much and flaking out entirely. Hence my long absence with only a few cryptic messages.
Here's the short version. In August, one of my twin grand-girlies, Marisa, banged her head in a playground mishap. They took her in for an x-ray and found no damage from the fall, BUT discovered that she had a fairly serious case of Arnold-Chiari Syndrome, where parts of her brain were growing down into her spinal column, blocking the normal flow of spinal fluid and creating cysts that would eventually cause paralysis.
Once they had a surgery date set, plans were put in motion for me to come up and act as medical translator and general helper-outer. I'm not going to pretend that I was just too busy making preparations to be gone for up to two weeks to post anything. My radio silence was partly because I didn't know how to relate all this without making it sound like it was all about me, and partly because I was just quietly freaking out. Also there have been some really good TV shows on....
But seriously. I came up last Tuesday to be present at the pre-op assessment. After a LONG day of waiting (the surgery just before hers went into overtime), Marisa had her giant brain squished back into place Wednesday. She was in the PICU at Childrens' Hospital (NICE facility, btw) about 18 hours, then got moved to her own room. Her recovery is going along like gangbusters and she may get to come home as soon as tomorrow!
Back to it being all about me -- I tried to set-up my horrible HP laptop (recovered from its FIFTH major crash!) with all my backlogged email and the sites I try to keep up with. But I really haven't been keeping up or catching up all that well yet. So if I missed something really really important you think I should know about, let me know, and I will try to report in more regularly as well.
 Marisa and friend at Childrens' Hospital Gift Shop
Mood: drained
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2009.08.26 15.29
Kitteh! And stuff.
As you have possibly noticed, LoudTwitter started working again. So you will again get at least the quick highlights that prove I'm alive. I don't yet know what I will be striving for in online communications. Lots of self-examination going on in that department, plus Real Life Stuff.
But anyway, for those who only saw the tweets about the new kitteh, and not the Facebook stuff, here it is!

We were starting the return trip home from our End of Summer/Back to School Shopping trip in Amarillo, but we had one more stop to make for TheClone, at Michael's, the craft store. MrMike and I didn't really feel like shopping for crafts, but there was a Petco next door, so we went there.
The local SPCA had a display of adoptable animals there, and amazingly enough, it was the first day for a kitty with a neck ruff, a floofy tail, and tufts at her ears and between her toe pads, the traits of a Maine Coon type cat. Both Paws and Souvenir of happy memory were of this type, and we are hooked on their great personalities.
MrMike and I both held the kitteh for a bit, then we put her back so I could start the interview and paperwork. She had been tense while we held her, but after being back in her box a few minutes, she started trying to reach out to us through the screen! That was a good sign!
They agreed to the interstate adoption and gave us a cardboard box with holes in it to transport her for the four hour trip home. You know how some cats go mental in cars? With this one (quickly named Amarillo), we opened the box to see what would happen, once we had all the doors shut. She was perfectly content to just lay there in her box with MrMike petting her now and then!
She is about 1 1/2 years old. Her story is the same old sad song, former owners who latched onto a cute kitten one summer and were shocked, SHOCKED! when she produced six kittens the next. Solution: dump her and her babies at a shelter (and probably start over, if I know the type).
Once we got home, we grabbed a quick pic, showed her where the food and facilities are, and turned her loose. That was Sunday evening. Understandably, she has made herself scarce. Not only has she moved from a small cage to a giant two story house full of Stuff (and many hiding places) but there are two cats and two dogs to figure out how to interact with. We catch a glimpse of her several times a day, and I have set out her own source of food and water in the basement, which she seems to prefer because she only has to share it with the other cats a little bit. She does come upstairs some, though, and I think pretty soon she will have enough confidence to start getting to know her new family.
Mood: tryin' to remember how to post
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