12 December 2002

Mom: A step forward, a step back. The toxicity level of her blood was back down to within normal ranges, according to Dad's report when he called at 1:30 yesterday, so that's excellent news. The bad news is that he thought she was even more disoriented and confused and incoherent, and the tremors that were brought on by the high levels of toxicity hadn't subsided. The hospital, when he left, was rigging her up for a brain scan, so they could see if she'd had a seizure or a stroke or something like that.

I didn't hear from Dad in the evening, which means he didn't find out anything new. But if he follows yesterday's pattern, he'll call around 10:30 and 1:30, after the morning and noon visiting hours. And I'll go down to the hospital myself this evening, though I'm still debating whether I'll go for both visiting hours or just the late 8:30 - 9:30 (which is when Matt will be at basketball anyway).

What's that Black Adder quote? "We are as private parts to the gods: they sport with us for their pleasure." Something like that.

Dad had calls in to Mom's psychiatrist (who prescribed the drug that put her in the hospital) and their GP (who's the one who finally told Dad to take Mom to the hospital) and the admitting doctor at the hospital, whom he has yet to meet. I hope some of them called him back yesterday afternoon. He was starting to get a little irritable about it, but nowhere near as irritable as I would be.

So I'm pretty much just sitting here waiting for Dad to call with news.

We went to K.T. and Kevin's last night to game, since we hadn't managed it Tuesday. It was a fun game. I got to decrypt the runes on the map, which I always like doing (even if K.T. got tricky and used the same rune for 'H' and 'S' the whole way through), and Kevin got to smite some evil, and Matt got to run his mouth and cast his favorite spell.

So, all in all, a good evening gaming. Of course, we'll game next week, and then we'll be on haitus for a bit - the week after that is Christmas Eve, for which K.T. and Kevin will be out of town; and the week after that is New Year's Eve, for which we'll all be together, but it'll be the New Year's party, not a game.

So we'll have a game on the 17th, and then not again until the 7th. Ah, well. Let's hope we stop in a good spot.

Pregnancy update: I had some weird cramps in my lower left abdomen yesterday, so I spent most of the evening being irrationally paranoid that I was about to miscarry. According to my book, though, it looks like there's nothing I could have done to stop it if I was, and that most early-term miscarriages are due to gross defects in the genetic code anyway, so if I *was* having a miscarriage, it was probably for the best.

That didn't make me any less paranoid. Poor Matt, though. I knew it was irrational, so I was keeping it to myself, but that just made me kind of moody. Matt just thought I was being quiet and irritable because I was in pain, which I guess is better than my having shared the paranoia with him.

And I've got another two months of this - the longer I'm pregnant, the less likely a miscarriage is, but the first really significant drop in probability doesn't come until after the first trimester is through.

---

"By the end of this week," I told him as we were driving home, "the baby will be about the size of a grain of rice. But shaped like a comma."

"So... a bent grain of rice," Matt said. He sounded unimpressed.

"And it'll have a heart!"

"But no brain."

"Well..."

---

TMI alert: I woke up this morning when Matt got up to put the cat in the bathroom. Satisfied that the cat was being taken care of, I rolled over to go back to sleep - and immediately woke up again as it felt like my boob had been squashed in a vise. They'd been "tender" before - now I think we're up to what might be labelled "sore". Whee.

--Liz