16 December 2002

I have to say that it was a good weekend, despite the rollercoaster around Mom.

Friday morning, the hospital released Mom and sent her home. Matt and I went to take them some chili for dinner, and found her mostly coherent, though tired and physically very weak. But she chatted with us for a couple of hours and ate almost a half a bowl of chili. We went home much cheered.

Saturday morning I got up early (as I've been doing for the last few weeks - my rhythms are all screwy) and wrapped all the rest of the Christmas presents in the house. I put a couple of boxes together for shipping. After Matt got up, we went out and did a few errands, and then came home to watch Amadeus, which I thought was very good, even if I couldn't stop wondering who the actor was who played the Emperor of Austria, or noticing how much the priest taking the old Salieri's confession looked like Christian Slater (though it definitely wasn't).

After the movie, we went down to Random's house for the Christmas party he and his wife threw. That was fun, even if we spent most of it talking to the same small group of people that we already knew.

S., Random's wife, didn't know we were keeping news of the pregnancy to ourselves still, and she told T., the wife of another guy that Random and I work with. T. was pretty sloshed by that point, and she literally *shrieked* with excitement, latched on to my leg, and spent about twenty minutes drunkenly telling Matt and I how a "whole new dimension of emotion was about to open" for us. It was kind of funny, actually.

Sunday morning, I got up early again (though not quite as obscenely early as Saturday) and packed the rest of the boxes that need to be shipped. Matt got up a little later, and we had just gotten the laundry started when my dad called to tell me that Mom was back in the hospital.

It seems that Saturday evening, she was about to go to bed when she collapsed on the floor, having trouble breathing. Dad called 911 and they went back to the emergency room, where the cardiologist on duty told him that she'd had a "congestive heart failure" - which is to say (as I understand it) that the cavity where her heart and lungs sit had fluid in it, hampering thier function. They re-admitted her to the hospital, though at least this time she's not in ICU.

By the time they'd admitted her, she'd recovered and was mostly back to normal. I went in Sunday afternoon to visit her for a couple of hours. Personally, I thought she'd backslid a little, mentally, from Friday. Not much - maybe to about where she'd been Thursday evening: Mostly okay, but still obviously wandering and making leaps of logic that no one else could follow. But it did sound like her senses of smell and taste were finally returning to normal, allowing her to eat better. So that much is good, anyway.

The doctors made it sound like they only planned to keep her until they could get a couple of specific tests run - though of course the guy who could run those tests didn't work Sunday. But she was hoping she could go home today. We'll see what happens. I almost hope they don't release her today - Dad was talking like they might still go to Texas tomorrow if she gets out of the hospital today, and I think that's a terrible idea, no matter what the doctor said.

But that was the only real downer for the weekend - after I visited Mom, Matt and I met Braz and Kris and Jeremy and Elizabeth for dinner at Nawab. I wimped out and got the same dish I'd had the first time we were there - though Elizabeth and I swapped bites and I thought hers was pretty good, too. We were a little cramped - Emma's expanding reach forced us to keep most of the dishes squashed up on the other end of the table, and it wasn't that big to begin with - but the food was very good and it was very nice to do social things.

Then we came home, and K.T. and I got to talking online about our next novel. This one has three intermingled stories, and she'd done up an outline of the major events of one of the three. She sent it to me, and when I read through it I had this flash of an idea for how to make the other two stories run sort of parallel in development. I stayed up quite late for a "school" night - until after 11 - to finish, but by the time I was done, I was very pleased with it. K.T. liked it too, so we're using it as our working outline. It was a real sense of accomplishment, a nice way to end the weekend.

It just doesn't seem fair to have to follow up a weekend like that with having to go to work, though.

Ah, well, it's the week before Christmas, so I imagine things will be somewhat slow around the office anyway.

My first appointment with the obstetrician is this morning. I'll be leaving the office around ten and meeting Matt there. I'm nervous and excited. What more is there to say? Not much, really. Today marks the beginning of my fifth week of pregnancy. Was it nerves or lack of sleep that made me queasy this morning? I have the admittedly irrational fear that I'm going to get to the doctor's office and they'll examine me and say, "Oh, no, sorry, you're not pregnant. You have a condition that makes your body think you're pregnant and release pregnancy hormones, thus generating false positives on pregnancy test kits and giving you all the symptoms of early pregnancy. But no, no baby for you." It's dumb, I know, but I think I'll still feel better when the doctor's confirmed it.

I'll be relieved when Christmas is over and we've told our families and I don't have to keep talking about it in comments over here. I'm trying to decide, when that happens, if I want to go back and de-commentize all this stuff to make it visible in the journal again. I think I probably will. I'm writing it, after all, because I wanted to track my feelings and thoughts and the events of my pregnancy. It'll be easier to reminisce if they're easier to get to.

--Liz