OK - a few people wanted to know more about the avalanche of stuff that descended on me this past week! It's not a secret or anything - friends/family/everyone at work knows - just thought maybe blog-readers mightn't be that interested ... But anyway - here goes! (No yoga this post!!)
So, to re-cap: 2-3 weeks ago it was discovered that I had this rare disease - autoimmune haemalytic anaemia being one of its names! - where my immune system decided that my red blood cells were the enemy and was killing them off faster than my bone marrow could create new ones. So I was in hospital for 6 days having treatment for that. I felt so much better after that (and still do!) - had a few days relaxing at home and then went back to work this past Monday.
Now the main part of my job at the university is as part of a 2-person team that supports a software platform used for student course content - Blackboard. We support the lecturers' use of this, fix problems they have. So, I walk into work and the other team member says to me - glad you're back - I'm being called into hospital for a few days! Well, that was fine ... he'd been doing everything while I was away, now it'd be down to me to do similar.
But then as I'm going home that afternoon I start getting phone calls etc. to say that my mother, who lives in another state, had been taken into hospital. She does have various health conditions (including emphysema) and although she'd been really well (relatively!) when she'd been up here at Easter, she'd been having health problems since she'd gone home again.
Over the next couple of days I'm having to grapple with what to do. Whether I should just abandon all work responsibilities (remembering that I was the main person 'on board' for Blackboard support), jump on a plane and go down to where she was in hospital. Could we find someone else with the required knowledge to come in as a casual and help out? Or whether I should wait until the situation stabilised itself - in fact wait until she is able to leave hospital and spend a week helping her at home.
Then my doctor tells me that he doesn't believe the treatment I'd had in hospital was working well enough and I have to come in for half a day once a week to have this other stuff dripped into me. And - I did ask, but he told me I can only have this done at the hospital in Brisbane - not down where my mother is! Which of course means that (except unless things go seriously downhill) any trip down to see/help my Mum will have to be timed around that.
All this time I'm talking to my Mum, her doctor, her literally zillions of friends, neighbour who helps her out a lot. Reports from her friends and the neighbour say she is looking much better than she had been, she is in the right place, etc etc. My Mum, however is tearing her hair out! She was taken into the public hospital into a 'high dependency ward' where it is extremely noisy and there were 5 men in the ward with her. She wants to move into the private hospital (which is right next door) where she could have a private room etc. but it is full!
Finally yesterday (Friday) a bed in the private hospital became available and Mum is there now. And - she sounded like a different person! Such a relief. Hopefully she can now rest and get better, and when they are ready to let her go home we will be able to time the release so I can go down straight after one of my weekly hospital visits, and come back home just before the next one!
My workmate is back at work - they won't know for a few days whether the medication he has been given will do the trick, or whether he will have to have other in-hospital treatment. But that's a bridge to cross if/when it comes up!
It's funny - I've actually felt I was handling this all amazingly calmly - at least during the day time! Feeling a bit detached, philosophical - don't know how to explain it. But at nights - I never do this, but when I was in hospital I'd been given some sleeping pills (as I was on a steroid - prednisone) and I have had to use them quite a few nights this week. I just found myself lying awake trying to work out what the best thing to do was - planning this and planning that! Last night was the first night I didn't!!
