Faith Healers and Snake Handlers

[bodlon]

At around 7 o’clock Thursday evening, my mom called me and asked me to take her to the emergency room. Her blood sugar had been playing up since early that morning, and she’d been self-administering small doses of insulin all day but couldn’t get it back under control.

The A&E doctor prodded her, did some tests, and admitted her to a low-intensity ward just before midnight. She was seriously anemic, and her blood sugar was still a bit wonky, so they wanted to hydrate her overnight and give her a couple of units of blood. Prospects were good that she’d be out by Friday night.

And then, sometime Friday afternoon, she got moved to the step-down unit because of bleeding in her stomach copious enough it manifested in ways that have given me real-life points of reference for certain horror visuals.

Today they moved her into an ICU ward because it’s the weekend and that’s the best place to do scope work on weekends/holidays. The GI doc I spoke to says they’re guessing its an upper GI ulcer of some sort, but until they get in there they can’t say anything for certain. They’re starting the scope procedure right about now.

My mom hasn’t got much stomach left. She had bariatric surgery in around 1986, and massive complications after. For many years her diet was extremely limited. These days she says she doesn’t actually get hungry as such. She can’t eat much. So this isn’t exactly welcome news.

When they asked her in the ER about resuscitation — the typical “if your heart stops or if you quit breathing” question — she gave them her usual colorful directive: “Try everything up to and including faith healers and snake handlers.”

Based on that, I figure any and all flavors of good thoughts are welcome.

~*~

Here. Have some links.

Doctor Who Series Five in two minutes. Spoilers for all episodes. Gorgeous. Makes me smile every time I watch it. Which…has been a lot of times.

Chris Buckley at Ctrl+Alt+Delete gives us a terrifying, all-too-possible vision of what Doctor Who might look like if Hollywood had its way. Ironically, I’ll pretty much watch anything with Jason Statham in it, so I’m getting a pretty good laugh (to say nothing of the continuing visual).

Mystery object orbiting distant star baffles astronomers. I’m with io9 on this. The science fiction explanation is presently as good as any until such time as Actual Science figures it out.

Are you a UK resident, or a resident of any other Commonwealth country or the Republic of Ireland? Are you an unpublished author working on an 80k+ first novel? Sir Terry Pratchett may want to give you a prize.

I’ll be the first to say that the legal issues here are nebulous, and may vary depending on things like contractual obligations, but io9 gives some perspective on why pitching things to strangers out of the blue can be troublesome and unwelcome.

Phill Barron, meanwhile, reminds writers (particularly individuals looking to write scripts in the UK, though much of what’s written here applies to any writer) that life isn’t fair, and to just fucking well write, already. I laughed, I cried, I got off my ass and started working.

Functional fitness will help you survive the impending zombie apocalypse.

More links later when I’m a little saner.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com