A pretty painless procedure

Mary and Gayla were so fast with the morning injection they got in and out of the Stanford parking garage in less than 45 minutes. That's good because there is no fee for 45 min or less. For the 46th minute to six hours is six dollars and over six hours is 12 dollars.

Marge, of course, doesn't have the parking problem. As soon as she drops Mary off, she zooms over to the Stanford shopping center and returns when Mary calls. Interestingly, the campus is so large they have their own bus system running around the campus. You can, theoretically, park at the shopping center for free and then take a free bus to the hospital and avoid the parking fees altogether. If you have the time, of course.

We watch the TV show House tonight. At one point during the show, the patient exhibited liver failure so the team started rattling off all sorts of strange terms: bile duct blockage, Klatskins, PSC, ERCP, etc. Mary looked at me and said, "I know exactly what each of those terms means!" After the commercial break (love TiVo, that only takes a few seconds), they were doing an ERCP on the patient. Mary's comment, "That isn't how an ERCP is done" and then proceeded to describe the real method. Of course, the other part of the Hollywood treatment is that they appeared to solve this problem in two working days. Oh yeah, sure.

Mary had a pretty good day overall although by the time I got home, her back was really killing her. She is taking her meds by the clock and not by the pain level so when she got to the proscribed hour, she was really hurting. She took the meds on time and within a few minutes was feeling better but then she was feeling pain by bedtime. I gave her a back massage and tucked her in. I hope she can rest comfortably tonight.

The bone scan was two trips, one for the IV that took less than 45 minutes. The second trip in the afternoon was to do the scan. Mary said it was kinda creepy because you lay quietly on the table and this machine moves around but it doesn't make any noise. No shutter snapping like an x-ray machine, no banging on a tube like an MRI, it was just eerily quiet. Mary told me they scanned her abdominal area twice, and then a whole body scan. All in all, it took about 45 minutes on the machine. And, she was wearing her street clothes. Easy.

Now we wait for the doctor's call. Hopefully tomorrow (Tuesday) with some indication of what this back problem really is.

And lastly, for all of our non-California friends, winter is starting this week. Cold temperatures at night--under 40! High's below 70! Rain starts on Thursday! Rain!

When I grew up in Minnesota, we always had a big blizzard in March. March is also the month of St Patrick's Day, St Joseph's Day, the State High School basketball and State High School hockey tournaments. So depending on the year and the predisposition, the annual March blizzard took on the name of the closest major calendar event. The St Pat's blizzard of 82, the hockey tournament blizzards of 79, 81 and 84--that kind of thing. I made up these years for telling the story, I know my Minnesota readers will shoot back with "Oh you know, 82 was the basketball tourney blizzard fer shure. St Pats was in 81, you betcha!" Anyway, you get the idea.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I call our terrible November weather "Thanksgiving Weather". Fortunately, this only happens when we have out of state visitors coming for Thanksgiving. It started years ago when my parents would come to visit. Dad would wait until late October to buy tickets--remember when airfares were fixed and didn't change? Anyway, he'd wait to make sure "Your weather is good, right? I don't want to buy these tickets if the weather isn't good." Well late October, early November is stunningly beautiful most years as I have reported in this blog. And, Dad and Mom would get off the plane in a rainstorm every time they came for Thanksgiving. Never failed.

So Reenie and her husband, Tom, arrive from Da Loot next Sunday. Reenie is Queen of the Kitchen for her visit. Mary's youngest, Daniel, has leave from Fort Bliss (no, not Ft Hood and Ft Bliss is in Texas) from Sunday to Saturday. And Daniel's girl friend, Kamie, arrives from Harrisburg PA for a Monday to Saturday visit.

Let see, the weather report showed the rain starts on Thursday this week and it is at least two storms coming in off the Pacific. Thanksgiving Weather!