15 November 2005

Lights going on

Well, I forgot to mention that the nurse taking care of my grandma in the ER was a former student of mine. She may have taken Statistics from me the very first time I taught it, or else very soon after. As far as how Grandma's doing, she had a transfusion this morning, since she was anemic (given all the blood tests they've run on her recently, it's no wonder). A bit of oddness there, and I don't know enough to evaluate the situation. They had tried to do the transfusion last night, and she reacted to it so they stopped. It was a plasma transfusion, and I was under the impression that plasma was neutral, that it didn't matter what blood-type the donor was, because all the markers got cleared out when they gathered plasma. Apparently not. That wasn't the weird part. My grandma is O-negative. They claimed that this meant they should give her AB-postive plasma. She reacted. They stopped. This morning they gave her O-positive plasma instead, and primed her with benadryl and something else to forestall a reaction. This transfuion took. Now...why would they have given her AB+ in the first place? Fine, if O-neg is rare, then I can see them using O+ instead, but AB? I have no clue.

Anyway, they gave her anesthetic for something, presumably while they were draining her lungs, so she mostly slept through her first dialysis session. But my mom said her breathing was better tonight, and that's good since that's what got her back in the hospital in the first place. They told her she might get to go home tomorrow...and she was skeptical. So am I. Last time she was told several times she would get to go home "tomorrow" and none of them panned out. But hopefully the dialysis will make it so her lungs don't fill up with water again (I'm not sure exactly how that works, though). Oh, my mom said Grandma was still sleepy tonight when she went over. The one time I was put under anesthetic, it took about a month before I felt like myself again, and it wasn't even a "major" operation in terms of cutting and damage. It was a scleral buckle to hold a detached retina in place. I did not like the aftereffects of the anesthetic, though it was preferable to being awake while they cut into my eye.

Oh yes. My title. First, the moon was absolutely gorgeous tonight. It had a full double halo behind the thing clouds. Awesome. And when I got home, there were two planets close by, practically framing it on either side (the clouds were moving so erratically that at first I thought one must be a plane, but then I realized it was staying fixed relative to the moon). But before I went to teach my evening class, there was a strange light in the sky. Eventually I figured out that someone was shining a spotlight up into the sky and moving it around in somewhat erratic circles. At first, I just saw something glowy moving around the clouds, and disappearing in the blank spaces between the clouds. It was temporarily a UFO (it was flying and I didn't know what it was) until I figured out it had to be a ground-based light. Bloody strange-looking, though. I have no idea why someone was moving a spotlight in circles. *shrugs*

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