Few simple days, there are none such

Snowy had her surgery on Thursday. We were up extremely early and were at the hospital as required by 7 am. She was nervous, not really ‘getting’ what was going on and afraid somehow that something bad was happening. Going to the hospital doesn’t = “good”.

We waited, even once she was back in the pre-op area, because that is what you have to do. Waiting is not a good thing for an Alzheimer’s patient, with whom time pays such mean tricks. But we were making it through.

However, even as she was being wheeled away, the surgeon told us that there were not-good things showing up in her blood tests, and had us come over to an area where he could talk to us. He said that her platelets were extremely low, her white blood count was extremely low, and her liver function tests were high. He urged us to take advantage of having her at the hospital and letting him admit her overnight so he could pull a team together to test and study her situation so we could know what the cause was and what was going on with her. Chick and I stared at each other and then both nodded our agreement, even as we couldn’t breathe from this sucker-punch to the guts. We are tired of those.

She came through the arm surgery very well. Our insistence throughout of her not having general anesthesia, having to throw some stomping feet into the mix even after the surgeon had agreed but the hospital paperwork still included that (and I refused to sign), was actually adhered to. The anesthesiologists were practically swearing on a stack of Bibles that they would NOT administer a general. So Snowy’s surgery was handled with a local and she had no problems with it. She has about 9 stitches and is cancer FREE. THAT was very exciting for her to hear (several times; she cried with joy every time; her father died terribly over a several year period in the 50’s from cancer and that experience is deeply imprinted).

Now came the 2nd part - the hospital stay, the tests, the analysis, the probable diagnosis of what the blood count showed. Of these, the doctors, the tests were fine. The doctors were actually pretty wonderful. The surgeon had summoned quite a team: a hematology oncologist, an infectious disease specialist, a gastroenterologist, an internist, a high class group that we would have had a difficult time getting in to see, much less on a same day request. And they each checked her out, asking detailed questions, and she was sent first for an ultrasound and then a CT scan.

By this time, Snowy had not eaten since @3 pm on Wednesday, “eaten” meaning a Boost +. By the time the CT test was complete it was late Thursday night. We had been told not to give her her medications before the surgery. It was early afternoon Thursday before she got her room. We had started pressing for her to have her medications asap after we were told we could not give her her meds (that we had brought with us at hospital request). We pushed and pushed because she takes the meds — and on a schedule — for a reason.

We  had finally decided that Chick should go home and rest, take a nap, gather up things, walk the dog, and come back and spend the night with Snowy, while I watched out for her the rest of the day, took the car in for extremely necessary repairs at the scheduled early hour appointment time on Friday and then came in, and we’d all go home.

However, it was a very unglamorous, uncomfortable room Snowy was finally wheeled to. We found out later that that floor/wing had just been re-opened a few days before, and the staffing at the outset was light. I had sent Chick home while Snowy and I were still waiting and waiting and waiting in the post-op recovery area for a room, and she was to do all those things, but after she came back for several more hours I insisted that she NOT be the one staying overnight in that room; it was just too spartan especially for her with the baby.

So while she was home during the afternoon (during which she got little rest as she was having to take care of other things), Snow finally got her first part of her morning pills, around 2 pm. And it was already too late for her — she had a break with reality, between one breath and the next, while she and I were still in the post-op area. The story was that the post-op nurses couldn’t get her the meds because she was being admitted to the hospital. The floor nurse had to give her her meds. We told everyone we could see that it was crucial that Snowy get her meds asap.

We got sympathetic looks and nods. We got help in other ways, like for her shivering (she is ALWAYS cold unless she’s wrapped like a Christmas present) she was covered with a “bear hugger”, a disposable blanket with plastic ‘bubble tubes’ that were  hooked up to a $3,000 “hair dryer” type tube that blew warm air into the bubbles and warmed her (and the area, and the people) around her) right up. The nurses were nice and kind. When she finally got so warmed up (I was pouring, raining, deluging sweat) that even she had had enough, she started pushing it off of her and I started helping. I told her I could find the off-button on the machine (there it was, a big green button), and she had slipped across the edge into unmedicated.

She hissed at me and snarled at me (a moment before she had been blowing me kisses and blinking “I love you” back at me. Now, suddenly full-throated, she called out, “Nurse, Nurse!!!!” And when they came running, she spit out, “SHE” (head gesture towards me) “is trying to take care of me! Make  her stop!” They looked at me humorously and a bit sympathetically. I told them she wanted the ‘hair dryer’ off, but she didn’t want me to do it. As they reached down and pushed the green button, telling me that’s all I needed to do, Snowy sniped again, “Talk to ME! Don’t talk to HER! I don’t know her and she’s trying to do things!” She continued on in this vein throughout the remainder of the stay in that area, about another hour.

Finally there was a room and we were shipped upstairs, and again I was begging for her medication. Tut-tuts and yeah-okays were dispensed instead. Snowy was sneering at me and telling the nurse she needed to watch out for me because I was trying to escape out the window (among other things she ’shared’). The nurse looked at me sympathetically. I said, she will feel this disconnected from reality until she gets her medication. I got nods and then left alone.

Around 2 the nurse reappeared with the first  half of her morning medication and was able to get Snowy to take it. By the time the other half appeared about a half hour later, Snowy was easing away from her agitation. When Chick found us in the room a bit later, having cut her rest time short, Snowy was almost back to us. She was not allowed to eat anything or drink anything because as the team of doctors began popping in and interviewing her, and us because Snowy doesn’t remember answers to questions about her health, they decided she needed to be sent for an ultrasound.

I went down with her and sat in the quiet little room with her as the tech put the same gel on her belly and pulled out the same type ‘wand’ as the ob’s tech had used on Chick the day before to look in on the baby. This time she was scoping Snowy’s abdomen and the remaining organs there for any signs of abnormalities. She was a very nice, skilled, and informed tech, and, after I was initially quiet and then asked a few non-intrusive questions as to what I was seeing, she began to show me what didn’t look up to snuff in the moving light/dark shapes on the screen in front of us– enlarged spleen, enlarged common ducts on the liver, etc. Snowy had fallen asleep at last (she hadn’t slept any the entire day) in the peaceful, quiet, dim room.

We got back to the room which Chick had been tidying into more bearable shape and started inquiring about getting food for Snowy. Once again we were told she couldn’t have any yet because one of the team of doctors had decided she should have a CT scan and they were trying to get that scheduled. The nurse came in with about a pint of a liquid and said that Snowy needed to drink it down, that it would take about 45 minutes or so to manage that, and then 2 hours later she would go for the scan since it took that long for the ingredients to make it where they were supposed to go to show up on the test. Chick immediately went to work with Snowy, who responds swiftly to ‘authority orders’ (”doctor says do this”), and within 10 minutes or less she had the whole pint chugged. The nurse was astounded, but said, well, that may help her to feel less hungry as she’ll be filled up.

As we headed down to the scan 2  hours later, the nurse said (since we were then too late to order a meal from “room service”) that they could always scare up a sandwich later. I told the tech that I needed to be ‘in’ with Snowy as she would get upset if she couldn’t see someone she knew, and she hung a lead apron on me when she realized I meant that I needed to be NEXT to Snowy, and not in the monitor room with her. Snowy was more fearful with this test. She’d had a long incomprehensible day in hugely strange circumstances, and she begged me not to leave her. I held her hands, helping her to hold them over her head out of the way of the scan, talking to her the whole time. The test was very swift and Snowy was almost surprised that it was over before she could give in to her fear. We were wheeled back upstairs (she got to go in a wheelchair to this one), and she wanted to go to sleep.

Chick pointed out the blood in the iv needle, she pointed it out firmly and the nurse realized she was expected to do something about it. So as Snowy began to doze, the nurse tried several unsuccessful tricks to get the blood, which had clotted, out. She took the needle out and said she would come back and redo it. She reappeared after Chick had left and as Snowy slept, she spent over half an hour trying to reinsert a needle. She warned me that there would be a big bruise the next day since she had blown a couple of Snowy’s blood vessels trying to get it in. She went off and brought back another of the floor nurses who spent another @20 minutes before she finally got the needle in a vein in Snowy’s hand. They hooked her back up to the IV and antibiotics.

From the time we got to the room, and especially after the delay in getting the morning pills until the afternoon and her not getting her ‘night’ pills (which she usually took between 4 and 5:30 each ‘night’ before she went to bed) until deep into the evening, we pushed about her getting her morning pills as early as possible. We were told she would get them between 8 and 9 am. I repeatedly repeated, “That’s too late, she needs them earlier.” I was told, “tell the night nurse”. And I did, repeatedly.

Then began a very, very, very long night during which I did not sleep except for about a 10 minute doze between 2:20 and 2:30 am. I saw every stupid thing that was available on the limited channels of the room tv that night and the next morning. I had to stay awake because every time Snowy’s hand wasn’t bent in a certain curled down way, the iv dispenser alarm went off bleating about an ‘obstruction downline”. It would give one warning beep that it was going to do that, and if the hand wasn’t curled just the right way within a few seconds, it would go into full-out alarm (which was ignored by the nurses and any other staff) that could only be quieted by pressing a certain spot on the machine several times. After the second time I summoned the nurse for this, she “taught” me how to do this and then didn’t come back to help again.

So each time Snowy’s little hand uncurled just a little or moved to scratch her leg or was tucked under her chin as she slept, there’d be one warning beep and if I could not find her left and under the covers fast enough and figure out which position to curl it in fast enough, then the alarm would kick in, Snowy would rouse up and start trying to climb over the rails of the bed to ‘answer the telephone’ or to cry out about the scary noise… Many times I was successful in finding and curling her hand, indeed most of the night I was able to just hold her hand and keep it bent at the necessary angle. Or if she pulled away to sleep a bit differently, I would roll up part of the 7 blankets that were covering her to form the same shape.

But the times I would blink in weariness and lost her hand under the covers and couldn’t find it in time to beat the alarm, I had to hurriedly press the footrest of the plastic “recliner” chair I was sitting in down fast enough and run around the end of the bed to the other side in the tiny room and mash the secret ‘code’ onto the blasted machine and then try to run back around and find her hand and get it bent before the warning and then alarm went off again and I had to repeat the sequence even more quickly. I don’t know how many times the warning went off and I was able to beat the ‘clock’ and how many times I lost and had to run around the bed. I was so tired I quickly lost the ability to even think about counting. One time I went around the bed so fast and I slipped on something, fell, and cracked the back of my head. I cried out. Snowy cried out (she always roused to some extent when the alarm went off, so she was able to tell that something had happened to me). No one ever came to see what had happened.

The other reason I had to stay awake on guard was that periodically Snowy would need to go to the bathroom and there was nothing that was going to stop her. She was working off of body signals, not mind signals. The day nurse had put up the side rails AND the leg rails on Snowy’s bed when she had had her reality break earlier in the day as an attempt to keep Snowy in the bed when she was determined to climb out and get the hell out of Dodge. So when Snowy, in the night, had to go to the bathroom she begain by throwing her legs over the rails and trying to shimmy over — mostly sleepwalking. I would have to disentangle from the plastic chair, run around the bed and try to get hold of her, putting the rail down, holding her up, supporting her as she headed for the bathroom, and pull the iv machine along so she didn’t pull the tubing out of her hand (which meant it had to be moved in several stages as the attachments were too short to give her much of a tether), help her into the room, unfold the gown before she sat on it, ease her WAY down onto the incredibly low commode, wait for  her, help her back up, flush, move the machine in increments back into place so she didn’t fall over it, get  her seated on the side of the bed, roll her legs up into the bed, then try to pull her back into the center of the bed and not so low into the bed that even her short legs had to be bent to fit, and then deal with the !@#$%&**!! machine’s alarm as I tried to get her hand positioned well enough that I could make it back around the side of the bed and hold it again.

What would have happened to Snowy if I wasn’t there? She didn’t have the ability to ring the button for the nurse, that ability was gone years ago. What would have happened to her?

It was a long night.

I told the night nurse several times that Snowy needed to get her meds as soon as possible, and not later than 7:30. She said, hmm. Well, they’re scheduled for between 8 and 9. I said, that’s too late. She said, well, you’ll have to ask the day nurse to see if they can get it any sooner. Around 7:30 she stuck her head in and said, well, I’m getting ready to leave and wanted to be sure you didn’t need anything. I said, we need her meds now. She said, call and them ‘them’, the shift is changing.

I called the station desk and told them — need meds now. I was told, “we’ll tell the nurse.” At 8, still not having seen anyone, I walked, barefooted, down to the desk and told the person sitting there, in front of several other people, we need meds NOW. I was told that the nurse would be told.

And around 8:15 my mother lost reality again, and began snarling at me and hissing. When the nurse finally showed up at a little before 9 and I said, you missed it. You missed the window in which  she must get her meds. She replied, I have between 8 and 9, I have an hour window to get the medications to my patients, and I started at the other side of the hall and I’m working my way around, and I have 10 more minutes to get her her meds. I said, NO, I told them she had to have them by 7:30. She said, I didn’t get that note, the night nurse didn’t mark that down, no one told me, and I just started on the other side of the hall and I…

STOP, I said. She has got to have her medicine NOW. She stared a bit and then tried to brightly speak to Snowy, and backed up a bit when Snowy was snarling and hissing back. She went out of the room and finally showed back up with meds. “Does she have water? Where’s her pitcher?” She has no pitcher,  no one brought her anything. She disappeared again from the room and eventually turned back up with a pitcher. “What about a glass or cup?” Does she have one?” NO, no one brought her anything since the pint of isotopes last night. She disappeared again and eventually returned with a plastic cup.

She took her time trying to pop the pills out of their plastic wrap (she had to go get a tiny medicine cup). She dumped them all in their and then offered them to Snowy to gulp down. Snowy wouldn’t open her teeth. She tried the overly bright gooey approach again and tried to ‘pour’ the little pills between Snowy’s clinched teeth. She got them into her lips and then tried to pour the overly full cup of water in her mouth, too. I grabbed the glass as it was pushed away, and looked and saw that the pills were at the bottom of the cup. Snowy hissed at me and the nurse laughed, “She doesn’t like you much, does she.” I shot her a look and told her the pills were in the glass. “Can you get them out?” she asked. I stuck my hand down in the glass, spilling a bit of water as I snagged the pills.

The nurse stood back to see what I would do with them. I tried prying open Snowy’s teeth. Her clinch was far stronger than my fingers. The nurse marveled, “You are so brave!” She got another look, I think she got one from both me AND Snowy. I tried some of the techniques I knew from trying to get a bit in a horse’s mouth, but they don’t really work since there is no gap between the incisors and the molars. I found an area that gave me a bit of leverage and I pushed the pills in. Snowy quickly clamped down on my fingers, biting me fiercely in a way that still hurts today. The nurse gasped and stepped back. One of the pills  was still between her gum and lip and I got it and struggled again to get it in Snowy’s mouth. Eventually I was successful, and also got some water in, too, to wash them down.

Snowy began proclaiming she was ready to get out of there and wanted her clothes so she could walk out. The nurse cooed at her that she needed to stay in bed until the doctor came and said she could leave. “Well, where he is then?” Snowy barked. She hissed and snarled, and the nurse slipped away, leaving it to me to get Snowy back in the bed and staying there.

I was told first (by an LPN) that Snowy still couldn’t have anything to eat because her notes said that. The new day nurse had checked (while she was dillydallying about the meds) and said she could eat, and then told me how to call and order it for her (what would Snowy have done if she was on her own???) by dialing the coded number and giving them satisfactory identification and then telling them what food. I did that, and was told, “45 minutes.”

By this time I had talked with Chick a few times as she worked hard to get everything set at home, the various animal tribes cared for, and headed off to the auto repair shop where she convinced the folks to work on the car even sooner and faster than they’d planned. She knew what a time I was having getting any help for or with Snowy. She arrived, with drive-through breakfast in hand, and cheer and personality and stalled Snowy’s rage. Snowy had refused to allow me to feed her the ordered breakfast, which had finally arrived. She let the nurse give her a few bites when she wandered back by. She refused again to allow me to help even though the nurse had cloyingly asked her to “let Shu help me out by helping you, Miss Snowy.” However, by then Snowy was so hungry that she began to feed herself, something she is usually unable to do.

She was outraged at the situation, about Snowy’s meds and the way I was treated, and she went down the hall to find out what was going on. She reared up to her full 6′ and delivered a protest about the way Snowy had been treated and that I had been treated, and she wanted to know what was going on and when we would be able to leave. She got no answers but shook some bats from the belfry.

[May I just say here, for the record, that I was enormously proud of Chick. For eons it has always been my family role to be the buttkicker of those who claim authority, the one who faced down mediocrity and lit a fire under folks to 'kick it up a notch'. This time I was so worn out and exhausted-- by sleep deprivation, by frustration, by cracking my head open, by TEARS -- I couldn't climb up on my white horse and shake my fist at the furies. But Chick without hesitation took on the Fierce Protector Role and surpassed anything I could do... and I am so proud.]

After there was no appearance from the nurse, she went out and found her. The nurse proclaimed to know nothing and could not agree that Snowy’s evening meds, if we were still there, would be delivered at the time Chick said she must have them. Only the doctor could overrule the pharmacist. Chick insisted that she call the doctor and get the situation worked out. She waited a half hour when the nurse had not appeared to tell us ‘what’ or even ‘boo’, and then she went out and tracked her down again. (The nurse was studiously staying away from us.). The nurse had not made any attempt to call the doctor. We waited a while longer and then checked again. Nope. More time passed and I went down to the desk to inquire what the doctor had said. The assistant called back into a secluded room behind her to ask the nurse, who said she was getting information together to call - all this more than an hour after Chick’s request.

We continued to wait. Finally around 12 Snowy began to doze. We were so relieved as it usually takes a nap or a doze or sleep for her to reset from her mental states — a lost in time journey, a rage (which we haven’t seen too many of since her meds had finally been tweaked to her individual needs both as to amount, kind, and schedule), an upset… sometimes it was a great time that turned to a lost time after a sleep. But usually it is a sleep that is a bridge for her.

Then we had a visit not from the nurse but from the assistant floor nursing supervisor who commented that she  had seen Chick when she made her ‘appearance’ at the desk earlier, and ’sensed’ that Chick was  a little frustrated, and wondered if she could help us. She had carefully pushed the door closed. She very soon had an earful of everything — the lack of care for Snowy, the impossible situation with the iv machine, the delay of the meds that had resulted in reality breaks for Snowy, the laughing at me and the leaving to me the nursing, me falling and cracking my head, no one coming to see, etc. etc etc etc etc. The supervisor began making excuses, “floor’s just been open 2 days, meds can only be given 12 hours apart, no one told the nurse to give Snowy her meds before between 8-9, etc. etc. etc.” She really riled Chick when she said that the schedule of giving Snowy her meds when she was at home made her “brittle” when she was put into a hospital situation and had to fend there. Chick let her know that the type-amount-scheduling of Snowy’s meds had been worked out under the direction of her doctor over a 3-year period, being tweaked (believe I said that above) to what worked for Snowy with great care during this period. There were many words poured out by the supervisor, who really just wanted us to feel placated and thus hush, before she finally oozed out the door.

And we still didn’t have any answers about what was going on with Snowy, the reason we  had been checked into this situation. We were dealing with 3 different situations with being there - the cancer in her arm (that was now gone), the troubling blood results, the Alzheimer’s. And the overriding condition was and is the Alzheimer’s, yet we were the only ones who seemed cognizant of that. We were in almost every encounter initially ‘resented’ for speaking for Snowy — and the person (usually a nurse) had to then figure out for herself that Snowy couldn’t speak for herself. She doesn’t KNOW, she doesn’t REMEMBER (she’s already forgotten that she had surgery and that she was in the hospital - when Chick helped her with the bathroom and her pills this morning and she saw the cutout sock that Chick had put on her arm to protect the bandages (something the surgeon in 2003 had suggested and which had worked), she noted that it was a sock and wondered where the shoe for her arm was…). They then tended to ignore the Alzheimer’s, begrudgingly accepting information from Chick or me, but then not including the extra awareness (or attention or care) in the nursing or tending.

Suddenly the internist appeared in the room, called indeed by the nurse to make a ruling on the medication-giving. He immediately told her that Snowy’s meds were to be given to her on the schedule that we, her caregivers advised. He said, ‘they OBVIOUSLY know what is supposed to be done to care for this sweet lady, why would I know more than they do about this? Do what they say!’

He then gave us a brief analysis of the test results — really, not much more than I had gotten from the ultrasound - enlarged spleen, enlarged liver ducts, still consulting amidst the doc-team. And then he left after listening seriously to our wishes to get Snowy home and back into her routine.

While we high-fived each other at having the doctor (who has the name of a very famous boxer) deliver the KO punch in the snarl with the nurses/supervisor, the GI doc, whom Chick knew from a year ago and a potential health crisis of her own which he cleared quickly, calmly, and effectively, reappeared. He is our favorite of the doc-team, and he was in possession of the information we had been waiting to find out, what was up with the blood clues and the tests.

He advised that from all the tests and analysis that Snowy most likely has something called primary bilieary cirrhosis of the liver (this has NOTHING to do with alcohol, and Snowy is a near teetotaler anyway). It is a condition that has developed over time, exacerbated, I’m sure, by the removal of her gall bladder decades ago. It appears to be an auto-immune problem. It is something with few symptoms and if something went wrong because of it, it would be a devastating situation. Of the 2 things that were suggested as being ’something to do’, both dealt with trying to head off hypertension of blood vessels in the liver area that could create a rupture of the blood vessels. One was medication, and for  her it would be a small, small amount to avoid side effects. The other would be using a scope to go inside her and ‘banding’ the threatened blood vessels with little “rubber bands”. He thought at her age there was a strong chance that she would not be faced with consequences of the situation. So we agreed to start with the tiny does of medicine and see how that went. We made arrangements to follow up with him in his office and he will follow and watch Snowy for this ailment. He is also going to check me out when I said that when Snowy and I had had blood work done for our primary doc and she had told us we both had higher than normal liver function test results, I’ve  had my gallbladder out (about a decade ago), and I deal with an auto-immune disease. He said that the tendency to this ailment could be hereditary, so we’ll see what things mean for me, too.

And then, as he stood there, the nurse appeared and declared us free. That Dr. (the boxer) had dischared Snowy. We barely had her dressed before the aide showed up with the wheelchair to roll us out of there. Chick sprinted off to bring the newly repaired (thank GOD) white car to the front of the hospital to pick us up, and then we were arriving, almost unbelievably, back home. Chick got us settled in the den, called and made all the doctors’ appointments, took care of the dog, before she shot off again to get all the prescriptions for Snowy filled, groceries bought for the weekend, NOMS for my tribe (completely out), and returned to continue her VERY special brand of caregiving for both of us. She could teach — even could just demonstrate — what it means to be a real caregiver to a lot of people, but above all to those who abdicated doing that for us on this adventure.

Snowy stayed up for awhile, but finally she was ready for bed (having already forgotten the hospital). I got her changed into her nightgown, which Chick had warmed for her by putting it in the dryer to tumble to that exquisite temperature that feels like a hug to Snowy, got her pills in her, snuggled her up in the bed, warmed by a towel that had come out of the dryer to lie between the sheets while the nightie was put on (again by Chick). We said her prayers, including being HOME as something to be thankful for, and then Chick and I sat down, looked at each other, and breathed again in great relief.

Chick had done so much that her ankles had swelled terribly, one of her few pregnancy issues, so she finally got to sit and put her feet up while we tried to unwind from everything that had happened, most of it so unexpectedly when we had left home at 6:30 the previous morning, expecting to be home by noon that same day.

And at 7:55 pm, as we watched Chick’s beloved Miles O’Brien on CNN countdown the liftoff of the Space Shuttle, I had to see if I could see it from the front yard, I so wanted something to lift me UP from the exhaustion and tears I had from the hospital visit. As I put the Notorious D.O.G. on a leash (of course he wasn’t wanting to be left behind again), and we raced to our little patch of front yard, I was disappointed by the haze of clouds above. But I pulled him away from the undercanopy of the oak tree and got where I could stare avidly at the SSE-tern sky, and suddenly and almost unbelievably I saw it! The Shuttle and its rockets were as vividly there in “my” night sky looking almost like I had sparklers in my hand. I whooped and wheee’d even as I heard some of the neighbors down the way cheering and clapping their hands. As a child my view of spacecraft (I even saw Sputnik)(yes, I’m that old) was as a star moving across the night. Other times what we had seen since we’ve been here has been obscured for the most part by clouds to just a smidge of what I saw last night (uh, Friday night - I’ve been writing THIS all night long!). It was glorious.

At the sound of my whooping, Chick had gotten up as quickly as she was able and hobbled out to see, but just that fast the Shuttle was well above our sight. We stared upward for awhile, willing another glimpse, but finally just breathed in the crisp air and smiled at the stars we could see and went back inside. Ah, it was wonderful to be home.

AND…. Alabama won its ballgame. Snowy is going to be so thrilled when she wakes in a few hours and we can tell her. We’ll watch the taped game without fear knowing the outcome. She’ll grin and chirp, ROLL TIDE, at which Charlie dog will roll over and then leap up into the air in hopes of a treat when he hears that.

Ah, it is about 4:48 am, Sunday morning. What a long few days this has been. I promised I would wait up for Snowy to get up to go to the bathroom and help her, but she hasn’t gotten up yet.