Rollercoaster week

Note: None of this post is publishing related. Skip if you only want book news or professional updates.

I can’t believe it’s already Friday, and I’m not saying that in my usual “yay, Friday!” way. This has been a week of significant ups and downs. For starters, I got a migraine on Sunday that only showed signs of letting up by Wednesday morning. This isn’t terribly unusual; I have a long history of migraines and sometimes they last for days. Yes, I’ve been to a doctor (a few.) Yes, I have tried lots of different remedies from prescriptions to naturopathic to holistic treatments to specific trigger-point massage to aromatherapy. Those things can help, but they don’t cure my migraines. I must have inherited them from the maternal part of my lineage since my mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great grandmother all suffered from migraines, too. On the bright side, they’re supposed to get better after menopause, so that’s one thing I have to look forward to after “the change” when it happens. 

Bu that’s why, when I woke up on Wednesday and didn’t have a blasting headache, I was happy the migraine had finally left me. Between the pain involved and the meds for them, I hadn’t been able to get any new writing done Monday or Tuesday. I was therefore hoping for a very productive remainder of the week on the writing front. And then the phone rang. It was one of my sisters, crying, to say that my other sister had found our Dad slumped over in his bathroom, unresponsive. When the paramedics got there, they said he was no longer breathing and it was “very bad.” This is exactly how my mother died a little over two years ago. During the next fifteen minutes between that first call and the one that came after it, I was sure my father was dead. “Not breathing” and “very bad” are usually terms you hear from a paramedic right before “I’m sorry, he’s gone.” As you can imagine, I burst into tears from grief, which caused my migraine to instantly return. Then came the unbelievably happy news I hadn’t been expecting – the paramedics had gotten Dad breathing again, so he was still alive and being taken to the hospital. 

He’s in stable condition now, thank God, and I swear, my father must be part cat because he apparently has nine lives. In 2014, he was diagnosed with cancer and had to have half his renal system removed. He was then diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2015, yet has been able to keep that at bay with periodic treatments. In 2016, he had a triple bypass after the doctors discovered massive arterial blockages. After that surgery, his lungs failed and he nearly died. He recovered from that to have a major internal bleeding incident a couple months later that almost killed him. He then recovered from that only to have a mild stroke, fall out of bed and break his neck a couple months after that. Then a tooth extraction turned septic a couple months ago and he nearly died from that. Now this. Seeing a pattern? *falls over from stress and worry*

Even with the very happy news that Dad wasn’t dead, my migraine decided to stick around for another two days. It’s finally gone today *knocks wood* but I had other family issues with another relative filling my time, plus trying to get my neglected inbox in order, plus other business stuff, so my word count this week is still zero (sorry, dear long-suffering editor!) Still, I’m not planning a funeral like I thought I’d be, and that is the most important thing. I can’t tell you what it means to be able to talk to my father and tell him that I love him when I thought I wouldn’t ever get the chance to again.

Finally, let me end this post with one of the cutest things I saw this week: the story of an unlikely friendship between a baby hippo and a baby rhino. If you need a smile, watch this.

This baby hippo’s best friend is a baby rhino, and he loves her more than anything in the world 💛 pic.twitter.com/p3KcZCJE1c

— The Dodo (@dodo) March 15, 2018