“Check with your infectious disease department before using these procedures.”
That was the first thing I read on the instructions. I was thinking, “Maybe I shouldn’t be using these procedures after all… I may be wrong, but I don’t think I even have an infectious disease department!”
I’ll back up a bit. We were about to try a new OT thing with Isabella. It’s one of those circular inflated cushions that you sit on. The idea is that it does some sensory magic with kids when they give it a sit.
One thing the doc said just before we left was that the office would need to periodically take blood samples from Isabella to check that, I don’t know, it was still red or something. I had been warming up to the idea of the medication, then this hammer blow. Many of you out there would probably have experienced the same feeling that I did upon hearing that.
Getting ready for my high school reunion got me thinking about how to describe what I do. I had wanted to say simply that I’m retired because I’m independently wealthy. But that’s not technically or even layman-ly true. (Come to think of it, I don’t really know what the “independent” part of “independently wealthy” means -- I’d guess you could still buy a boatload of unnecessary miscellany even with some “dependent” cash.)
All this time we’ve been “not otherwise specified”.
What’s Isabella’s diagnosis? Is it specified?
Not really.
So it’s not specified?
Well… not otherwise specified.
So, her diagnosis was a specific specified diagnosis, though not “otherwise specified.” Got it?
DJ Master Guru (Kevin) showed me how to add images to my blogs a month or more back, but I’ve been too, er, busy (aka lazy). Recently, though, in a frantic fit of laziness and creative self-promotion, I decided to make an entire blog of image links to my other blogs.
MATT EDITORIAL COMMENT: In the past, I had tons of ideas of things to write about or do. I quickly learned that my power of idea generation was much stronger than my power of idea retention, and soon I began to write things down as soon as I thought of them. Now, my power of … er… whatever you call the power of hoarding lots of little scraps of paper holding literature or invention or blog ideas in drawers and folders and a wallet… my power of “that” is much greater than my power of actually acting upon those ideas. Well, baby steps, as Bob would say.
(Continuation from part 2 ).
We both fell asleep, though I awoke several times due to the strange design of the tricked-out pull-out futon, a genius design which caused the top third of the bed to be a few inches higher than the rest of the bed. Luckily, Isabella slept through the night.
As I mentioned, Isabella was referred to a sleep center for an overnight sleep study.
The plan was this: Isabella and I would spend the night while a team of sleep specialists from around the world recorded every neural impulse from Isabella and fed them into a supercomputer which would crunch the data and spit out a cure, preferably in the form of a sugar-coated one-time-use pill. Or something like that.
Here’s how it went down.
Remember again how I discussed inheriting things from your parents – bad things? (It keeps coming back to this, doesn’t it?) One example might be excessive daytime sleepiness. I can fall asleep anywhere at any time – that’s why Carrie drives on long trips (don’t tell my life insurance company… we renewing our term right now!).
