Today marks a special anniversary. It is exactly six months… - delta_november
Jul. 23rd, 2015
01:35 pm
Today marks a special anniversary. It is exactly six months from the day of J's last overnight hospital stay. She is now fully recovered, back at work, and living an active, happy life. Her only legacy from this unpleasantness is the ~20 assorted pills she has to take daily -- far more than will fit into the pill organizers the drug stores try to sell you.
It's taking me some time to adapt to the new reality. Like boiling the proverbial frog, it is not easy to say when this all started. Certainly by five years ago I was regularly checking J's breathing after finding her passed out around the house. A little less than two years ago was her first ICU stay with critically unbalanced blood chemistry.
While she's back to her old self, I remain anxious and hyper-vigilant. Anything that sounds like the thud of a body collapsing onto a hardwood floor (which happened too often to count) will set me off. I hope that time will fix this. A few months is not a lot of time to undo the habit of years.
During the time when it looked like J would be gone in days or hours I received a lot of support from people with terminal illness, or from those caring for them. Now I feel some sort of survivor-guilt-by-proxy. Their illness and grief remains, while I get to move forward with my life.
And so, moving forward: in two weeks 
probabilistic and I will load up my Mooney (now outfitted with crew oxygen) and attempt an IFR flight to Utah. There I get to spend a week with KS (and about a thousand other people, if we choose to acknowledge their existence). In September J and I are off to a Steampunk convention in Niagara. Then in October we head to the UK for a week -- targets include the set of Coronation Street in Manchester.
probabilistic and I will load up my Mooney (now outfitted with crew oxygen) and attempt an IFR flight to Utah. There I get to spend a week with KS (and about a thousand other people, if we choose to acknowledge their existence). In September J and I are off to a Steampunk convention in Niagara. Then in October we head to the UK for a week -- targets include the set of Coronation Street in Manchester.
We still don't fully understand it. For example, potassium levels were lower than would be expected even for complete NSAID poisoning of kidney enzymes. But ultimately we don't need understanding so long as we can manage it.