i hate today

It's raining. It was hard to get to mom's place this morning because apparently in New York, when it rains all cabs go off duty and your brain goes all fuzzball about which way is downtown. But we got there, armed with our trusty half gallon of lemonade, about the only thing she wants to drink these days. Called the doctor, only to learn that we were supposed to be there for blood work. Sarah has her Sloan-Kettering card, though, so she messengers it. It's raining. The messenger takes a long time. After waiting awhile in the lobby of her building, we go upstairs to rest a minute. Finally, it comes. We go. She gets blood drawn. I spill coffee all over the lab. We start to head for home. Oona's hat falls off. Mom leans down to get it. I'm thinking, "don't do that! I'll do that!" but don't act fast enough and she FALLS DOWN on the rainy sidewalk. There's no one to call, come get us, she fell down! We have to get a cab in rainy Manhattan. This took awhile but we eventually succeeded, thanks in part to having a baby out there in the rain.

We were home for only a little while when Maureen, her doctor's nurse, called to tell us that the blood work came back showing that Mom is severely dehydrated and has low sodium levels (translation: not enough eating and drinking, too much throwing up) and she might want us to go in for fluids. Mom takes this as a challenge, drinking three glasses of water and eating more than she has in the past two days. Maureen calls back: we have to go in. The doctor agrees that those levels combined with the fall are just too much. Mom is devastated, a little, but agrees and we get ready to go.

So, to make a long story shorter: she's there now, having had one bag of fluids and getting one and a half more. She might stay the night. They did another CT scan of her head though, concerned about the wobbliness and falling, and it came back fine again.