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| Human Respiratory Syncytial Virus (hRSV) |
There are two things to discuss here, as we can see by the title.
TEN DAYS
Looking at the countdown, I have 28 days to go until I retire. However, I was finalizing my last monthly calendar and discovered that when I include the "use it or lose it" time I've accumulated, I actually am only working 10 days spread out over that time. Even the term "working" is a necessarily ill-defined as I turn over keys, codes, and responsibility for -- stuff -- and disconnect from it all.
It's kinda like Neo blowing loose of all those pod connectors when he wakes up in the Matrix, except in slow-motion.
Anyhow -- Ten working days and I'm walking away from well over 50 years of being in the Game.
The Beneficiary says she loves being retired and I'm gonna love it too. I actually think that's true. I know I'll never look back.
I've had a mostly good time, and always liked the Job. It was worth doing and I was good at it. But I'm done -- burned out/tired/jaded/whatever you want to call it. Frankly, I literally never once in my life believed it was even conceptually possible for me to get here and it's making me smile even as I write this.
She also says she's looking forward to me being around a lot. Uhmmm....yeah. We'll revisit that opinion in a couple of months, although she does in fact seem to like me and has been here through virtually all of it.
But as always, nothing is certain. From our "never say never" "pre-hatched chicken counting" files comes:
ATTACK OF THE GERM POD
The Granddaughter and her Next-Of-Kin, accompanied by Great-Granddaughter, were in the state and came to visit for a couple of days before going on to fathers, mothers, in-laws and whatnot. Then she was supposed to come back and stay another couple/three days on her way back home because she likes us best. Also we're a convenient stopover, but I'm pretty sure the "likes us best" thing was the priority.
After a day with us, the G-GD began to be whiny and show symptoms of a cold. No biggie. She's almost 2, and having a cold and being whiny is kinda what they do for a living at that age. They eventually left for the in-law thing out in the east part of the state. Two days later GD called.
"We were just at the Emergency Room with (G-GD)," she said. "They knocked down her fever and we have meds to help out her cough, and she's going to be fine. But I wanted you to know that she tested positive for RSV."
For those of you playing at home, RSV (or hRSV) is Human Respiratory Syncytial Virus, and it's a nasty one, known at the moment for leading to pneumonia and death in infants (not toddlers - G-GD was fine) and old people. So, GD said that she was going to skip coming back to our place and head straight home. This would involve a REALLY long road trip with her Next-Of-Kin driving, which is desperately dangerous.
I told her to not be silly, if G-GD was testing positive, we'd already been exposed, and I could cancel hanging out with my parents for a week if we needed to keep from exposing any old people to anything the G-GD would shed.
"So," GD said carefully, in her 'leading a rather stupid child to a conclusion' voice, "as I understand this, YOUR parents are old people. You can't think of anyone else?"
Ouch.
Well, either way, we'd already been exposed, and would probably come down with it anyhow (it is REALLY contagious), and fuck that living in a bubble thing. So they came on back.
G-GD, in all her snotty, drooly, slimy glory was glad to see us again, and spent any time she wasn't sleeping (a lot) climbing all over us like we were a couple of jungle gyms, sleeping on my chest in my recliner, and hanging out with me watching TV. I am now the worlds foremost authority on Bluey the cartoon Blue Heeler Dog and his entire family, at least in any age-group over about 5. It was a good visit.
I wound up coughing a lot (as in sore stomach and rib cables, connectors, and muscles), but never even broke a fever.
The Beneficiary, on the other hand, went to the Emergency Room. She was re-hydrated, loaded up with steroids, and pumped full of oxygen while they tried to get her coughing under control enough so that she could catch her breath for a minute. Every time she took a breath it sounded (and her chest felt like) crushing cellophane.
After about 5 hours, they got her back online, confirmed it was RSV, and did enough X-Rays to convince themselves she wasn't crawling up on pneumonia. So they gave her roughly a gallon of codeine, a batch of inhaleable steroids, and various other meds and we came home.
Took us a week to mostly get over it, but between the two of us it still sounds like a TB ward around here.
About three days ago we got a text from GD. It consisted solely of a video clip of G-GD smiling at the camera. With her mom prompting her in the background, she said:
"Sawwy for make you sick Gamma!"
We laughed so hard that it set off a coughing fit that nearly needed another ER visit.
Or as one of my sons (G-GD's uncle) said:
"Cutest li'l Germ Pod Ever"
So it's again looking like we'll manage to collect at least that first retirement check....I'll let you know.
And, incidentally, yeah, it was worth it. I'm not bunkering into a bubble. Dying doesn't scare either of us. We've been around a lot of it, and its mysterious terrors that seem to grip a lot of people have long since faded and worn thin. We both know that we've been dying our whole lives, and every day is borrowed time. (shrug) It's just life.
No, death doesn't scare us -- but living like that does.
You're a g-gf and you still have parents? They are living great-great-grandparents? If so, this blows my mind. My direct male-line great-great-grandfather was born in 1812.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it ain't my fault or doing - just an accidental accumulation of good genes, mostly. I got one G-GF who was born in 1819. Most of the rest in the 1820s. They all marry young and have a giant wad of kids, which is compounded by the fact that the females tend to live near-forever.
DeleteAs far as I can tell the males would, too, except for a predilection for war, living borderline lives on the edge of civilization, and a clear streak of accident-proneness. They've died in battle, in Yankee POW camps, farm accidents, stuff involving horses and trains, and in one case, simply by disappearing into Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) while on the run after killing a neighbor in a land dispute in Mississippi. Although that last was rumored to have lived past 100 with his "widow" running up to OK a couple of times a year to visit. But overall, not so much by old age.
Anyhow, my parents were born in 1929. My my mother wound up in ICU at death's door for TWO WEEKS with pneumonia in both lungs last month. She's back out and about now, good as ever, or at least as good as 90+ year olds get. So, having multi-"greats" isn't unusual in my branch of family.
That's not to say that I might not drop dead before sundown. Genes, after all, are a pretty faint signal in the noise of life, with good luck and chance making most of the difference, as MY great-grandfather found out when he intersected with that westbound freight-train while walking across the tracks one evening.
He was only in his mid-twenties, but had already spawned my grandmother, who lived to 104. His wife (G-GM) had a life that would have killed any two normal humans. She remarried a lot by the simple expedient of outliving them, and died way up in her 90s. She'd probably have lived to over 100 except for the frontier-level sharecroppers' life, the depression, poverty, occasional starvation, and crippling labor.
People in those days were harder than a coffin nail, and now I get to sit around in my comfy house in front of a computer and reap the benefits of ruthless natural selection as far back as I can trace it...
LOL -- not 12, but we were both desperately young, at least by standards these days. Nowadays you have 28-year-olds trying figure out what they're going to be doing once they move out of mom's basement and "start their lives". By then I'd been married coming up on a decade, had three kids, and was starting my second career. So, I guess it's all POV...
ReplyDelete