That boy ain't right

A brief chronology of yesterday and today:

• Yesterday, we visit P&A and their son R -- and I begin having a severe allergic reaction, no doubt to the collection of pollens they have from various fruit and vegetable plants they have growing in their backyard. This doesn't abate as time goes on, and in fact gets worse.
• After the visit, Mer begins to complain of lower abdominal pain. I start ingesting massive quantities of medication and snorting saline.
• Later that evening, Mer decides to check herself into the emergency room; she is told to go to the ER at Palo Alto since there she'll get attention faster. Once there, she is told to come back to Washington in Fremont. There, she is made to wait several hours, and after her pain subsides a bit, she decides to come back home and make an attempt in the morning if it gets worse. Just fucking great -- our healthcare system at work.
• A lull, both in Mer's pain and my allergies, allows us both to get to sleep.
• I wake up in the morning to find a note -- in typical fashion, Mer left the house at 4AM, drove herself to the emergency room and checked herself in.
• After many frantic calls to inlaws, an MRI test reveals she's got appendicitis. The kicker: they also spot a mass on her remaining ovary.
• My allergies haven't subsided; if anything, they've gotten a lot worse. The drugs don't seem to be doing anything and I'm a walking mass of sneezing, nasty wadded Kleenex, red eyes and random dripping all over the floor.
• Ah yes, and this doesn't seem to be one of LM's best days. He seems to be more interested in screaming and carrying on rather than eating, sleeping, playing, being read to, watching Sesame Street, etc.
• Mer goes under the knife at 11, or so she tells me. I'm going to try to get there around 10:30. I get a request for People Magazine, in addition to whatever guilty pop culture mags of choice are also around. Personally, I also need a lottery ticket, becuase our luck today simply has to change. The lottery: the school-funding tax on the desperate and those who're bad at math! Hoo-ee!
• At around 10:45 I stop in for the briefest visit in Mer's room, screaming toddler in tow and looking like some unshowered, unshaven beast from the ninth circle of Hell, dripping everywhere even now.
• Since the excitement of today's events means that LM has skipped one of his meals, I wheel him down to the hospital cafeteria to see what I can scrounge. LM violently pushes everything away -- fruit, cereal, pieces of bagel -- preferring instead to demand square cookies and crackers. He takes the piece of fruit cereal bar I offer him and mashes it up in his hand; he smears it into his seat and his hair. He takes the milk I offer him and dribbles it all down his front (Mer can feel free to laugh at me here, as I've enabled this particular bit of bad behavior at the outset, mainly because it was funny... not so funny now, eh Pops?).
• Back at home, the allergies signal they aren't done with me yet by a long shot. LM, mercifully, falls asleep in the car.
• While taking LM out of the car in the midst of a violent sneezing attack, I manage to lock my keys in the car. LM, meanwhile, is still fast asleep.
• Panic time. Or, a time to wonder whether any loving God would be this sadistic. Take your pick.
• Engineer brain takes over: I improvise a small nap area for LM out of the plastic climbing structure we'd inherited from P&A the day before. (Miraculously, he's still asleep.) I improvise car break-in tools from garden implements and manage to unlock the car door. The thrill of victory!
• The agony of defeat! LM wakes up as I transfer him from his Moses/ghetto outdoor sleeping arrangement to his crib. Wailing results.
• Call from Mer's doctor at the hospital: further analysis reveals that what she had wasn't appendicitis, but that one of her fibroids -- bastard balloons of death, they are -- had gotten twisted around on itself, causing the pain she was feeling as well as causing the appearance of a mass on her ovary. This twisted fibroid had also caught the tip of a uterine structure with it, and therefore the fibroid had to be cut out. While they were in there, they also took out her appendix. They did all this through her existing C-section incision. (I could be wrong about some of the finer details -- I'm still doing all this through the haze of allergies.) After spending the night there, she'll be back tomorrow.
• Although I'm relieved at this news, Born Under a Bad Sign begins playing in my head.
• Holy shit, do I ever need a goddamn vacation, to say nothing of what Mer'll need when she gets back. Well, that and a shower.
• Oh, and the allergies still haven't stopped.
• At 3PM, friends N&C arrive, after graciously having offered to babysit while I visit Mer in the hospital. After I do this -- where me and my lovely wife are both little more than sad, pathetic medicated sacks (she on morphine and me on a collection of things) -- she gives me her set of keys, I run off to do a quick errand at Safeway, and make my mind up to come home and offer to take N&C to dinner with LM in tow, if he'll stand it. A screaming LM signals his assent to this plan.
• This decision proves fateful, as dinner goes reasonably well. Pho is one of those foods that I could eat almost every day. However, a quick search of my sweatpants pocket (I'm such a stickler for formal wear at times like these) reveals that I've left Mer's set of keys somewhere.
• A frantic search of the restaurant, the bank where I got money for dinner, and all the steps in between in the parking lot reveals nothing. Am now dreaming up plans to get copies of all my keys made tomorrow morning. Suicide is now becoming a reasonable option. On the plus side, the 3rd Claritin I've taken today finally seems to have calmed things down. Yay me!
• We return to the house only to discover that I'd left Mer's keys there the entire time; I left them there to take N&C to dinner.
• N and I go back to the hospital so we can drive our 2 cars home.
• Upon return to our house, hugs and goodbyes are exchanged, Theo the wonderful chocolate lab is taken for a pee in the backyard, and LM is safely asleep in his crib after having crashed like Oceanic Flight 815.
• N&C return, wondering where N has left his cellphone. Much searching reveals that it fell out of his pants pocket in our Subaru.
• N&C leave once more; collapsing begins.

Needless to say, I'm taking the day off tomorrow. Mainly because Mer's release from the hospital is as yet indeterminate, but also because I need some rest and downtime or my head will explode.

Your dripping, sniffling, frazzled wreck of a bad blogger,

B