We want to go home!
2 weeks in the hospital now, and we want to go home. Christie says she misses Ryan (her younger brother), she misses the kitties and dogs, and she wants to go home. We want to go home, too. This hospital is 65 miles away from home so it isn’t even possible to go back and forth from home to here and back again. The truck is illegal as can be, without current inspection or insurance (mandatory here in Texas), and in Dallas, if you don’t have insurance on your vehicle and get stopped, the cops impound your vehicle. (Great… when you don’t have any money for insurance, how are you supposed to be able to get your car out of impound??!?)
Not only that, but the truck is a 1987 Ford F-150 and uses WAY too much gas. A trip back and forth costs $20 in gas alone, and we just don’t have the resources to afford it.
Things are getting better in some ways, worse in others. Our landlord (who, as you may remember, is my husband’s father) is demanding $500 by the end of the month. Our rent is supposed to be $300; what we’re doing is making the house payments for him because he can’t afford to keep up the mortgage any longer. We just paid him $500 on the 1st of this month, delaying getting Christie to the hospital and endangering her life because he HAD to have the money that day or, he said, the house would go into foreclosure. He is threatening our home… and, like the ass he always is, is doing so at the worst possible time.
Ryan called yesterday and said there was a letter from the electric company that came in last week but he was thinking that it might be important. So I asked him to open it, and it was a termination notice for $78, which has to be received by next Monday, the 20th. I’ve tried to call the electric company but can’t get through for some reason. I’ll continue to try and tomorrow will try to get in touch with Cancer Care Services in Ft. Worth to see if they can help. It’s a small bill… maybe they can.
And I can’t seem to get verification of whether our tax return was accepted. I e-filed via the IRS website but never got a confirmation e-mail, and have gotten conflicting messages from their site. I’ve tried to call and every time I have to sit on hold forever, waiting for an agent, something happens and I have to hang up. Tonight, finally, I have a few minutes to call… but their phone system is overloaded - of course, it’s 4/15! - and they are asking people to call back on or after 4/16. UGH!
To make matters even more frustrating, Christie started running a fever last night. Dr. V says it’s a neutropenic fever, but we can’t take her back outside because, her nurse today said, “She got that fever AFTER you took her outside yesterday and we don’t want her back outside because of that.” WTF?!??? I don’t think the outdoors gave her a fever. Christie is pretty upset over that because she loves being outside and REALLY wants to go. The longer they keep her in this room, the more depressed she gets.
She did start eating again - HURRAH! - but now she needs to drink more. They started her on IV fluids last night because she’s dehydrated. Always something different, always some fly in the ointment. *sigh* She wants to go home so much… being holed up in here only makes things worse for her in so many ways. It doesn’t help that she’s frustrated and upset, and being a tad difficult because of that. It’s a vicious cycle but I don’t know how to break it. 
C.R. and I have doctor appointments on the 17th. We need to get our Border Collie, Amie, out of the Humane Society’s shelter/hospital. (She was hit by a car on the 31st of March and had a leg amputated.) We need to get home and see Ryan and our other pets. This is insane, being so far from home, and it’s costing an arm and a leg, considering that C.R. and I have to eat, too.
So frustrating… Not Christie’s fault by any means, but frustrating nonetheless. I’m thankful that she’s here, and that they saved her life… more than I can ever say! But still, it’s hard. Like the floor I sometimes sleep on here. *wry chuckle* Let’s just say these rooms don’t have the best accomodations for family. There’s a window seat that can be used as a short, rather hard and uncomfy bed. C.R. gets that 9 times out of 10 because he has serious back problems. There are two rigid, high-backed chairs that I sometimes put together, seat to seat, and sprawl across to sleep. And there’s the floor. OUCH!
Oh, how we want to go home…
Tags: anaplastic large cell lymphoma, cancer, teenager, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Zale-Lipshy Hospital
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 6:51 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
7:05 PM on April 15th, 2009
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