29 March 2001

Last year: "What, this? Oh, I injured myself eating pizza."

I don't usually think of myself as a pessimist. Really, I don't. But yesterday one of my best friends was admitted to the hospital - the Intensive Care Unit, no less - and this morning my Powerbook is having problems starting.

It's not going to be my best day.

First things first. K.T. is in the hospital. Sunday evening, she was telling me that the drug she'd been on for her asthma seemed to be losing its efficiency after only six weeks. She went in to the emergency room on Tuesday with an asthma attack. It sounded to me like her worst yet; her lungs were refusing to expel the carbon dioxide built up in them, and they'd had to give her an arterial punch (which she said was at least as painful as it sounds) to fix the levels of gasses in her blood. They wanted to admit her, but she hates hospitals, so she'd talked them into letting her go home for the night, with the promise that she would see a specialist the next day.

Wednesday morning, Kevin took her back to the hospital, and this time they admitted her. When I talked to him on Instant Messenger around mid-morning, she didn't have a room yet. He got onto IRC last night, and he told us what he could, which wasn't much. She'd been placed in ICU. As near as Kevin could tell, they'd tried everything short of a respirator to get her breathing, but nothing had worked for more than a couple of hours. They've got her on oxygen, and can't take her off it even to eat. And they're doing breathing treatments every hour.

As near as I could tell, there was neither a diagnosis of what made this attack so much worse than it's ever been before, nor a prognosis of how or when she'll be better.

It takes a lot to get Kevin to admit he's not in control of a situation, but last night on IRC, after a day of pacing the hospital and trying to seem confident for K.T. and her mother, he admitted he was scared - panicked, even. Those of us who were there tried to assure him that it was only normal and that we didn't think less of him for it.

Ashby (who doesn't have a job at the moment) volunteered to come down and help out. Kevin waffled, "I don't know. I don't want to be a bother."

"Take him up on it," I said, "Or I'll invite him down to visit me, and he can coincidentally drop in on you." Without a choice offered, Kevin admitted that some company would be nice.

We told Kevin to eat and sent him to try to get some sleep. I called some other friends in the area who I thought might want to know. We were pretty glum for a while.

There's no new news so far today, but ICU's visiting hours aren't until later this morning.

I'm certain she's not in danger of dying. If things were that bad, the doctors would already have told Kevin that things were that bad. But it's still frightening. Still worrisome. Matt and I will go to the hospital tonight after work to visit for the slim half-hour ICU allows. What we'll do after that, I don't know.

I hate feeling helpless.

And now, my computer.

I didn't do anything unusual with it yesterday. Listened to music, logged onto Instant Messenger and IRC, played some games I've played dozens of times before. I hauled it in to work this morning like always, plugged it in and started it up while I checked my mail on my work computer and prepared to write this entry.

An error message appeared, warning me about some sort of conflict. I won't really get into it; Macintosh problems are both very like and very unlike Microsoft problems. I've got some software installed called "Conflict Catcher" that is automating the process of finding the problem.

But to do that, it has to muck with things, then restart the computer, then muck with things a little more. Every so often, I get another error as it reboots. The whole thing is making me rather nervous. Especially since almost all the pieces it's identified as being "part of the problem" are things I can't just exclude - the drivers for the DVD-ROM, for example. I can't really perform a liesurely exam of the problem items, though, because it keeps rebooting just as I start to read the list.

I'll have to wait until it's done identifying potential problem-makers, and hope one of them turns out to be something I can do without, and that removing it will fix the problem.

It's counting the reboots. I'm up to about 20 now. The whole time I've been writing this entry, my Powerbook has been sitting next to me on the desk, rebooting and occasionally offering messages for my perusal.

(I'm glad I have this software, though. Without it, I'd have to do this all by hand.)

What's funny is that the conflict is most likely to be because of something I installed recently, and the thing I most recently installed was Norton Utilities. I will laugh - really, I will! - if the problem is being caused by the programs designed to protect it.

It's a falling, flaming sheep. Or a flaming, falling sheep. Your choice. I drew it on my whiteboard yesterday after being inspired by something Karen said in an e-mail to me.   It won't be funny if I have to explain it. It was one of those "you had to be there" comments. But what the heck? Falling, flaming sheep are funny anyway. Enjoy.

--Liz

Word of the Day:
hors de combat - out of combat; disabled
 
Currently Reading:
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