Hug your kids, tell your loved ones you love them: I'm a famous slug-a-bed who prefers to sleep in on weekends, but I woke up at 5:30 Saturday morning feeling something was very bad; I'm a mediocre driver who prefers to avoid strange roads and city traffic, but on Sunday I was driving downtown Boston at night in a snowstorm. My big sister (she's 46) put in a normal day teaching school in Keene, N.H. on Thursday but felt she was getting the flu and stayed home Friday, thought she was getting a bit better and came downstairs to watch the Olympics Friday night; Saturday morning she was helicoptered from the Keene hospital to Boston's Brigham & Women's Hospital, though the doctors didn't expect her to survive the trip or any next hour once there. A pneumonia infection had ripped her apart, filled her lungs, shut down her kidneys, slashed her blood pressure (they had to give her not the usual one or two but four drugs to get the latter above 80; a total of nine computerized infusion IV things plus air pipes and shunts and machines, screens, and keyboards stacked to the ceiling).
My mom came up from (the first week of a month's vacation in) Sarasota and I met her on Sunday at Bradley Airport and drove us to Boston, where we clung to Lisa's husband and the two awesome young women I call my nieces and dozed in chairs and were told there was no hope, but went through rollercoaster signs of life and setbacks anyway — the medical team arguing she was so horrifically sick and bloated with fluids and toxins that only dialysis might buy a day, the nephrology team arguing it would kill her, friends and pastors (and other stricken families) crowding the ICU waiting room, finally starting a sort of delicate-cycle continual dialysis late Monday night (not that we knew by then what day it was). I have never been so proud and shaken to see anyone fight so hard, so deep in the valley of the shadow; I have never seen such an all-star, nonstop, dozens-strong team of nurses and physicians trying to defy the odds. I haven't cried since my dad died four years ago; I don't stupidly say that men must never cry but I hate it, I'm 43 and sound like a high-pitched squeaky toy.
Yesterday evening, we heard that Lisa is close to stable, that they now believe she will live — not leave the ICU let alone the hospital for a long time and never be just as she was, will face setbacks and a dreadfully long road ahead, anything from losing fingertips and toes to more severe handicaps like needing dialysis (she already had severely painful rheumatoid arthritis, the escalating medicine for which probably kayoed her immune system to allow this infection), but the antibiotics are gaining traction and the swelling's going down and the Brigham & Women's team can't conceal their pride and we'll keep talking to her as they try to reduce the sedation and waken her sometime next week.
So life goes on — and death goes on; this sudden, simultaneous sorrow has kept me from being here enough and caring enough for my wife and her side of the family, as her much-loved Cousin Margaret, or simply our great friend Peggy, suffered a brain hemorrhage last week and died, age 60, the other day. I'm way behind at work, I can only post an IOU to the appreciated (the few, the proud) readers/friends of this trivial journal, and thank you.
9:17:14 AM 
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