Fifteen Minutes of Delusion

Kara got out of the hospital yesterday. With the help of some new enzymes and medications, she has done very well with the liquid nutrition that her doctor has prescribed. She is also eating vegetables and some meats, which is really good news. I was concerned that the kangaroo and yak were just going to sit in the freezer forever. The goal is to get Kara home. To that end, my mom is here for a few days to help me get things cleaned up and put in order. For example, I still need to finish tile work on the office door, and the Christmas decorations are in boxes that need to return home to the attic. But hopefully it will only be a few more weeks before Kara is home with us again. I wanted to get a good start on the projects today, but we ended up spending a good chunk of the day with Kara in Dallas.

Several weeks ago, Anna took her reading TAKS test. This, of course, was the cause of great consternation and high anxiety. Today she informed me that her score for the test was 98%. I asked her to please remember this when it's time to freak out about the math TAKS in a couple of weeks.

Kara has been eating some foods, and is able to drink the liquid nutrition. She is still in the hospital, but may be out as early as Friday. I have been picking away at various projects while she's been gone, and I don't know how in the world I can possibly be done before May, let alone Friday. But I guess we'll just have to make it work somehow.

We made it home. The house is still here, the cat still has food and water left, and the Christmas decorations are still out. Carly's return trip report: Total time: 24 hours, 46 minutes (no dawdling at the hotel today!) Moving Time : 20 hours, 14 minutes Trip Length : 1458.9 miles Overall Average : 58.9 mph Moving Average : 72.1 mph Maximum Speed : Less than last time (which is interesting, because my mom was riding shotgun on the way up) Girls go to bed in 20 minutes. I go to bed in an hour. Yeah, I realize that probably won't happen, but this is my delusion, after all. Photos and writer's conference updates go on the other blog tomorrow.

Yesterday was a great day - I really enjoyed the LDStorymakers conference even more than on Friday. And I took pictures. I'll post an update and the photos on my writing blog . But not tonight. It's time for bed. I didn't go to the Whitney Awards last night, because we had a big family birthday party for the five people with March birthdays. Plus there was an Easter egg hunt for the kids. It was really nice to spend that family time. This trip was so busy I really didn't get much of that during the rest of the week. We got up this morning at an hour that was both too early and too late. We drove for eleven hours or so. I don't have the full details, as Carly is in time out down in the car for taking us to an agricultural warehouse and telling us it was our hotel. The girls did well again today, though not quite as well as the first drive. This is understandable, as they we were all fresh and excited for the drive up. Now we're worn out and our bottoms still hurt...

I should really be sleeping now, but I was awakened an hour ago and just can't get back to sleep. A perfect opportunity to blog! Yesterday was the first day of the LDStorymakers Writer's Conference. I enjoyed the panels and workshops, but the highlight of the day was meeting some wonderful people that until then I had known only from the blogosphere. I had very nice visits with Tristi Pinkston , Candace Salima , Autumn Ables , Marsha Ward , Marcia Mickelson , Stephanie Humphries , Shirley Bahlmann , Rachael Ann Nunes , Janette Rallison , Annette Lyon , plus quite a few others wonderful people whom I met for the first time. I took my camera, but it never came out of my bag the whole 13 hours I was there. Bad, bad delusional blogger! I will repent and do better today. The girls had a lot of fun playing with their cousins. Alyssa was recovering well from her sixth tooth extraction, which occurred on Wednesday. Poor little mouth! She and Auntie Noreen spent some nice quality time t...

It's been a busy couple of days - but busy in a (mostly) good way. Monday started with a trip to the dentist for Alyssa. The poor kid had one filling and five (5!) extractions. Yowsa! It was good to see everyone at work. We had a St. Patrick's Day potluck barbecue. I got up early and made Irish soda bread - it's a Carey family tradition. Today after work we went to Ikea for dinner, then Carly guided the girls and I to The Kings English Bookshop so we could meet James Dashner . As mentioned earlier on this very blog, I was given an Advance Reading Copy of his book The 13th Reality - The Journal of Curious Letters , and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. Unfortunately, reading time has been scarce so I'm still not done with it, but I've read about half, which is more than enough to know that my nieces and nephews will like it. I picked up three for the cousins who just had their birthday last week. It was really great to meet the Dashner Dude in person. He seemed like ...

The girls and I are in Utah tonight. We just spent the last two days out on the road. My mom drove back with us as well. As road trips go, it was really pretty good. Although there was a threat of bad weather, and we saw quite a few snowflakes, the roads were clear and dry most of the way. And the girls were as good as gold, and better. DVDs and electronic games are a real lifesaver in the car. This was the first long road trip I've ever made with a GPS, and it was really nice. We've named her Carly. She talks to me, and I talk back, so I figured she needed a name. Carly is a Garmin nuvi 200 - just a simple, entry level GPS, but she kept us on the straight and narrow. Well, except for that little detour through Podunk County, Kansas. I'm still not sure what that was about. I told her if she ever directed me to get off the freeway and take the little red road, I wasn't going to do it. Now, driving from Texas to Utah isn't terribly hard, especially since we picked the...

We got a few bits of good news on Wednesday - good news worth sharing. 1. Anna's purse was returned to her. She forgot it last week after her acting class, and we worried and fretted for a week, given that nearly everything she owns of value was stashed inside. Her teacher had picked it up and put it in his dressing room for safe keeping. Big time relief. 2. Kara's antibiotics seem to be helping. She is feeling a bit better, and can tolerate her new PPN better. 3. Kara's new Gastro specialist seems to be on the ball. While the doctor assures Kara of a long and difficult recovery, she seems to truly understand the problems with Kara's digestion and is confident she can help. While not giving a specific time line, she said Kara will be in the hospital for a while. At least she isn't another one of those trying to write Kara off as someone with a mental problem who just needs a psychiatrist and an eating disorder support group. (If it were only that simple ...) 4. We s...

It's been quite the week, trying to help with Kara in the hospital, keep down a job, and prepare for a trip back to the home office. We are very fortunate to have both Grandmas in town to help out. This is the kind of cute hair that you get when Grandma can spend a couple of hours combing it out and clipping it up in curls. And now you know why Alyssa is nicknamed "our little Hermione ."

I didn't know about the whole "100 things about me" tradition for the 100th blog post until around post 230. I have now made it to post 300. Here are my 100 things, a few posts later than traditional. I was born in Provo , Utah I lived the first year of my life at Wymount Terrace – BYU’s married student housing I have four younger sisters They were all born in Omaha , Nebraska , where I lived for the next ten years Our family moved to Laie , Hawaii when I was 11 Music has always been very important to me. I started piano lessons at 6 I stopped piano lessons at 11, when our piano failed to make the move to Hawaii Our family owns two pianos now – one is over 100 years old They are both in the storage unit right now I really don’t play the piano very well. But the years of piano lessons gave me a good foundation for music I played the saxophone in the concert and jazz bands And the xylopho...

Sunday was a pretty good day. The girls and my mom came to visit at the hospital, and we took pictures. This is Kara and the girls. This is the whole family. Here is Kara with the two grandmas. Mother and daughter.

I spent the night here at the hospital with Kara, so her mom could have a break. My mom is here to help with the girls, and she's going to bring them over this afternoon for a visit. I haven't decided if I'm going stay here tonight or go home and help get the girls to school tomorrow. It's quite a morning routine, much like running down an icy hill. And there are two buses at the bottom. The hospital experience has been a mixed bag so far. There are a lot of really good people here to help. As with nearly everyone in the "real" world, they all have fairly significant fragrances. Kara's line is still in - there is a glimmer of hope that it can stay in. They aren't using it for her antibiotic or her electrolytes, though. For that she has a heplock - a short line in her arm. She began reacting pretty bad to her saline and dextrose IV, but Jenny and I comforted her with songs, and she soon relaxed enough to sleep. We both slept as well as is possible with ...

Kara's blood work came back showing she has a staph infection. Standard procedure with an infection like this is to pull the line and treat with antibiotics. This presents a couple of problems. First, although Kara is having a hard time making it through even half a bottle of TPN without debilitating pain, she was at least getting the nutrition from that half bottle. She's been eating a few things, but not without equal amounts of pain. The other issue is that historically she has reacted badly to the antibiotics after two or three days. This is a situation where there we have to pick the lesser of the evils. I'm afraid the only real option is to have the line pulled and start the antibiotics. The only other option is to try and see if her regular doctor would treat the infection with the line in place (which he as done in the past), but I feel it is very likely that the line would need to come out anyway.

I promised Autumn I'd give her a little background on our current situation. It's a little confusing if you haven't been following along. It's a little confusion even if you have been following along. I'm not going to go into much detail on the medical side - just the specifics of who is living where. In 2004, Kara had become sick enough that she asked her mother to come and stay with her while I took a week-long trip. That visit lasted for seven months, and involved visits to clinics in California and Mexico. By the end of 2004, Kara had gained back a fair amount of strength, and we believed that she was finally on the mend. Part way through 2005, though, she began to lose ground again, and on Halloween Day Kara and I flew to Dallas so she could get treatment at a clinic that specialized in environmental illness. The trip was supposed to last for a few weeks, but Kara was still not much better when she came home two months later. In February 2006 she returned to t...

One more day of child care instruction - we should all be experts by now.

I was going to do a boring blog about how high fructose corn syrup in a can of tomato soup made my children grouchy today, but then I got an email from my sister that made me laugh till I cried. Always one to share the mirth, I have shamelessly appropriated these images from the baby instruction manual. I plan to get three full posts out of these things.