Sugar and the County School System

Tonight's post is brought to you courtesy of sugar and the county school system.

Um..what's that you say?  Come again?

Yes, sugar and the county school system.

I've sat here at the keys for fifteen minutes, willing myself into writing something pithy and useful and instead I just feel like crying and writing about why.

If you know me at all, then the thought of me crying is not alarming, because I do it with unusual frequency.  The novelty wore off of my tears in, oh, 1973 or so.  Even I am bored with it.

With the exception of a few teenage crocodile tears, though, every single one is an escapee from the aquifer in my heart.  I feel hurt way too easily, worry way too much...I'm just generally an over-the-top kind of gal.

Lately, I've been shedding a river of tears over the deterioration of my husband's health.  A type II diabetic, the Mister lived in denial for decades, consuming all forms of sugar in breads, pastas, sodas, fruit, desserts, cookies...and, well, as just plain white sugar.

Beginning May of 2012, we both took control of our health by losing weight, increasing exercise, eliminating all processed foods and gluten from our pantry.  We looked and felt amazing!!

But diabetes is a sneaky son of a bitch, because it doesn't have gears for "reverse" or even "park".  It can only drive forward, and your span of control is limited to the accelerator.

So I blame some of these damn tears on sugar and the self-perceived indestructability that gives teenagers and addicts and alcoholics and diabetics and fatties and dopers and QVC shoppers and me the permission to cling to "well, that (insert negative consequence here) will never happen to me" as though it is a fact.

***********************************
And speaking of consequences...

The Boy is my firstborn, my only son, my raison d'etre (at least until his little sister came along.)  I love him more than I can possibly describe, and I am pretty descriptive when I want to be.

He is smart and funny and handsome and getting taller by the minute - and he has been a handful since his first day of pre-K.  I lost count of teacher's conferences back in fourth grade.  Sometimes a class clown, sometimes an angry and defiant miscreant, sometimes violent...but always ALWAYS my kid.  My baby boy.

Middle school has been a roller coaster at best, and as we crept steadily towards the end of this school year, his referrals to the principal's office noticeably decreased, and the offenses were less and less significant.  My kid CRAVES attention (don't know where he gets that), and he is slowly learning that there are good ways and bad ways of getting it.

Friday, May 25th was the last day of eighth grade for my young man.  On Thursday, May 24th, the entire 8th grade had a picnic at a local community park.  Gorgeous sunny blue-sky day, happy kids, all was going well ...and then he tried to address the knot in his shoelaces.  With the little scissors in his Swiss army knife.  You know, the little red Victorinox pocket knife that every boy in the western hemisphere possesses (as well as some girls), yet the overwhelming majority of them have the good sense not to bring it to a class picnic.

Alas, my young man was not so wise or crafty, and he suffered the great misfortune of being caught with what most of us would consider a multi-purpose utility tool but most school systems consider a dangerous weapon.

(In case you are curious, the "acceptable" length limit for a pocket knifeblade from the school perspective is 2 and 1/2 inches.  Victorinox blades are 2 and 3/4 inches.)

Fast-forward to this afternoon, where the Boy and I sat for 90 minutes in the school system's disciplinary hearing regarding his weapons possession charges.  Yes, really.  Weapons possession.  We were presented with two options:  one, accept the school system's offer of a judicial "tribunal" where we could bring legal representation and dispute the facts of the matter, or two, waive all rights to said tribunal, just suck it up and accept the consequences as predetermined by the school system.

We went with option two, and the Boy is now slated to begin 9th grade this fall at our county's alternative school for chronic offenders with behavior/drug/weapons violations.  I haven't stopped crying since I sat down in that godforsaken meeting.  It sucks, it just sucks.  I'm not articulate enough to find a better word than that.

The good news is that, assuming there are no other infractions between now and then, he will be welcome to enter the traditional high school setting with his friends beginning in January 2014.  We are only talking about a semester here.

Also, we do have another choice that we will pray about and talk through - which is to withdraw him from the school system altogether and homeschool him.  Again, we might just do that for a semester and then re-enroll him in January. 

Too many pros and cons to all of this and not enough neurons to process it right now.

Plus I'm dehydrated.

My Mom

Linda Anne McRae Morton had many defining identities - loving mom, avid reader, faithful Christian, diligent employee, good friend...and paranoid schizophrenic. 

I've wanted to write about her for many years, but anger, shame, fear and sadness have always frozen my fingers.  Not sure why this Mother's Day is any different than the last 49 of them, but somehow it is.

My memories are just that - MY memories - and I don't pretend that they are 100% reflective of objective truths.  They are my images and perceptions from life as her elder daughter, and they comprise a wealth of excuses for living a broken and angry life.  It is only as I get older that I have begun to tease out the facts from the fiction, and I still don't think I've got it completely right.  But here is what it is today.

**********

In her youth, Linda was absolutely gorgeous.  A petite blonde with a huge bust and a tiny waist, Linda hailed from rural east Tennessee and moved to Knoxville with her divorced mother during junior high.  She attended Tyson Junior, West High School and then the University of Tennessee, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree.  Smart, beautiful and funny as hell - basically the total package, despite being from the "other side of the tracks".

Along with her looks, I suspect it was the absence of pedigree which drew my blue-blood father to her.  Always the rebel, he dashed off to Blount County with her on a cold night in January 1963, where they were secretly married by the local justice of the peace.  I imagine my paternal grandparents must have been distraught over their son's willful pursuit of his own desires - he has never been one to follow someone else's script.

I also imagine a lot of suspicion around the elopement;  why the hush and rush?  Was there a bun in the oven?  Well, eventually, yes...but since I didn't arrive until November of '63, I wasn't the reason for hurry.  I think they were both just sneaky and horny and not particularly susceptible to good sense.  (eww, it is weird to write about them being, you know, ...eww, I can't write it again.)

My sister arrived in 1966, and our perfect family settled into a perfectly beautiful white house with perfect iron trellises on a large and perfect corner lot in the bluest-blood neighborhood in Knoxville.

I'm told by relatives and friends that my mom did some pretty bizarre things as a young mother.  I don't know anything about any of that - all I know is that my mom and dad were beautiful together.  They went to parties and Nine o' Clock Cotillion and to the Old Time Fiddler's Convention in Union Grove, NC and to church every single Sunday morning, where she taught children's Sunday School.

I know that she smelled like Jungle Gardenia perfume and he smelled like leather, and they both smelled like Marlboro Reds.

I know that she had a piano and a mink stole, and he had a Harley and a banjo.

And I know that sometimes they were very happy.

**********

Then in the late 60s, things changed - a lot.  Here is where it gets very fuzzy for me, so apologies to those who possess more facts than I...but my mother's first suicide attempt was in 1968 or '69.  A true beehive aficionado, my mother frequented a popular chi-chi hair salon where various illicit pills were available if you knew the right person to ask.  I think she was miserable and growing sicker by the day...having had my own forays in to self-medication, I understand why she did what she did in pursuit of relief.  But I can't say I understand why ending her life seemed like a reasonable solution to the shrieking in her head.

I pause here.  Did she have auditory or visual hallucinations, the hallmark symptoms of schizophrenia?  I don't think so, at least not then, but I know for certain they came later.  But back then, her illness was manifested in a thousand unreasonable fictions turned into fact by her disease.

This attempted overdose prompted the first of her institutionalizations.  Again I am fuzzy on dates and durations - I know that she spent time at two of the South's finest psychiatric institutions - Duke Psychiatric Hospital and Vanderbilt's Parthenon Pavilion.  I remember flying to Raleigh/Durham with Daddy and my little sister in a very small plane, when my ears felt like they would explode and I cried from the pressure.  We had Easter baskets with Mommy in a hotel next to the hospital - they let her out to come visit us for an afternoon.

I know she had electric shock therapy on multiple occasions.  It wasn't until 2001, when I saw Russell Crowe's "A Beautiful Mind" that I understood the violence of EST.  There is some bitter irony in the term "shock" therapy, for I remain shocked that this was a widely-accepted therapeutic intervention for an array of psychiatric diagnoses.  After EST, she was prone to seizures - therefore, the epilepsy medication Dilantin was added to her psychopharmacologic cocktail of Thorazine and Elavil.

All of my life, she had migraines, though they seemed to worsen in her mid-30s.  As my parents' marriage failed, she took to her bed more and more often, full of pain and pills and fury. 

**********

By 1974, she was a divorced mother of two girls, ages 11 and 8. Oh, how she loved us!  She forced herself into functionality, obtaining a clerical certificate from Draughon's Business College and accepting a job her mother arranged for her in the county clerk's office.  She went to work nearly every day, except when depression and migraines forced her under the covers and under her little bag of anesthetics.

She let us have Captain Crunch for dinner and bought us all manner of books and music - a voracious reader herself, she easily put the bookstore tab before the phone bill.  Yet the lights stayed on, and the fridge stayed full, and our threesome moved through time.

There are dozens of sad vignettes I could share at this juncture in the story, but to what end?  All of us who've been through or near divorce can tell stories of agony and destruction - ours were just seasoned with the special extremes reserved for the mentally ill.  I will leave it at that.


Lest you think it was all tragic and dark, let me assure you that we had all kinds of fun.  Her acerbic wit, sharpened by heartbreak, created an atmosphere of intellectual hilarity.  We wrote stories for each other, brutal and funny stories about a hapless unloved orphan named Mok who was raised by nuns and suffered from bad luck and insults.  Lord, how I wish I'd kept a Mok story.  You really can't make this stuff up.

**********

As my sister and I grew into teenagers, Mom's illness became more evident in her lack of hygiene and in our living conditions.  Always suckers for a stray, our house became home to several cats and dogs - I can't remember maximum count at the moment but suffice to say that what we didn't spend on Cokes, cigarettes, prescriptions and books, we spent on pet food and vet bills.

Teenagers are, by definition, lazy as all get-out, and since nobody else seemed particularly interested in housecleaning, neither was I.  The cats peed down the air vents and the dogs ate the furniture and things generally went to hell in a handbasket.

But still we had fun - we watched movies and worked jigsaws and ate Funyuns; we read books, lots of books, and I listened to records in my room with headphones for hours on end.

And she loved us fiercely - always fearful that we would leave her.  So we swore we never would.

**********

I was terrible to her on many occasions, too many to count or recount here.  I was mad at her for being sick, for not being like other mothers...sometimes I doubted whether she was really sick at all, maybe just mean and lazy.  But I knew in my heart that she didn't want to be the way she was - she just didn't know how to be any other way.

And so I found my own relief in drugs and drinking and boys.  And books - always books.

**********

Fast forward to 1981 - I graduated high school and entered UT.  Despite a hundred assurances to the
contrary, I left my mother and sister out of cowardice and self-preservation and moved into an apartment a few miles away with my stepsister.  I have this particular memory cross-filed under "shame" as well as "accomplishment".  It took the next twelve years of self-degradation before I could begin healing the wounds I'd wrought in her life and mine.

**********

Fast forwarding again, as this post is meant to be about her, not me.  She became beautiful to me again, the day I gave her the first of her four grandchildren.  She arm-wrestled our pastor, barely giving him enough time for the "amen" after blessing my newborn son a few hours after his birth.  It was then I realized that all she really wanted was to love and be loved - ceaselessly and intensely and without rules or conditions.  What better recipient for such affection than a grandbaby?

Now in her early 60s, her physical and mental health deteriorating, she looked forward to Saturday visits with her grandchildren with the anticipation of a small child in the weeks before Christmas.  Saturdays at Grammy's were awesome - my son and his cousin would make piles out of the couch cushions, then add every pillow in the house until there was a big cushy mountain in the middle of the living room, perfect for jumping into and yelling at the top of their lungs.  She would clap her hands and laugh and yell right along with them.

**********

In the fall of 2006, Mom developed a fever and horrible cough which turned into pneumonia.  X-rays found lung cancer, and radiation therapy was initiated.  But by the turn of the New Year, there wasn't any point in that, and in mid-January we moved her to St. Mary's Residential Hospice, which is staffed by angels.

She could no longer take her psych meds, and so in her final weeks, her illness was in full flora.  There were episodes of screaming and tears, visions of long-dead relatives in the corners of the room, and a torturously long moment of lucidity where she repeatedly begged me to help her.  I can't write this without decades of shame cramping my hands.

And on February 2, 2007,  with my sister holding her left hand and me holding her right, she exhaled for the last time and left all that sickness behind her.

**********

Mother's Day.  There aren't any cards that can capture how I feel about Mother's Day - how I loved and loathed and miss my mother.

Today I'm a mother.  But that's another story.

Don't Holler 'Til You're Hit

Knoxville Pediatric Associates, circa 1970.

The offices of Knoxville Pediatric Associates are situated at the west end of the Fort Sanders neighborhood - home to college students and falafel restaurants and a diverse array of people. Each exam room backs up to a row of small rental homes most frequently occupied by graduate students, and on this particular occasion, our view is of a little white house with a rose trellis.

I am six years old, and I have strep throat.  It's official;  Dr. Willingham just left the room a few moments ago to go instruct Nurse Toni to draw up a penicillin injection.  He gives my father a baleful look on his way out the door.

I am famous at Knoxville Pediatric Associates, even at this tender age, for my surprisingly violent self-defense techniques.  Not only have I mastered high-velocity flailing, but I have also perfected a shriek that will peel wallpaper.

My father feels sorrier for the nurse who is going to be the stick-er, than he does for me as the stick-ee.  This makes me all kinds of mad.  And when I get mad, I cry.  (some things never change.)

We sit there after the doctor leaves, just my dad and me.  I start pleading with him to tell them to skip the shot, that I'm actually just fine, it's probably just a cold but thanks anyway. Please, Daddy?  Please?

PLEASEDADDYPLEASEDADDYPLEASEPLEASEPLEASE DON'T MAKE ME GET A SHOT!!!!!

Dad tries to soothe me, and gives me this priceless pearl of advice - "settle down, baby.  Don't holler til you're hit."

Dad has little tolerance for histrionics on a good day, but to be saddled with a sick and screaming 6 year old girl was certainly not on list of favorite things to do.  He stood up, sighed, and walked over to the window, his back to me.

"Wait...what's that?" says my dad.  He is all of a sudden very keenly interested in something going on outside the window.

I don't care what is going on outside the window, because someone is coming to impale my backside with a spear any moment now.  Cue up more caterwauling.

Dad giggles. "Oh....my....gosh....oh...um...you are not going to believe this..."

Now, I'm trying my level best not to care what is going on out there, but he isn't making it easy.  Whatever it is that is so fascinating has really got his attention.

"Well, would'ya look at that?!"  says he.

"WHAT, Daddy, what is it?  What are you looking at?"  My tears are drying and I am becoming more intrigued with the view myself.

"Oh gosh, baby, I'm sorry...never mind.  It's nothing important.  Probably nothing you need to be looking at anyway."

"What IS it, Daddy?"  Now I am enthralled with the notion of looking out the window.  It is too high up the wall for me to look out on my own - not without being on my very tippy-toes or being lifted up by my dad.

"Well, um, I don't know, baby, if you should be seeing this.  It's not really something little kids ought to see."

Little kids?  What little kids?  I am six-almost-seven, for pete's sake! 

"DADDY.  I want to look out the window!"

With a sly half-grin, he says, "well, OK, but don't say I didn't warn you," then he stoops over to lift me up so that I can peer out the window.

Where I see nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  The quaint little white house with the rose trellis, but whoop-dee-doo, what's so thrilling about that?  I say as much to my dad.

"What...you mean she's not there now?  Why, she was just there a minute ago!"

"Who, Daddy?  Who was there?"

"Well, the naked lady, of course.  There was a naked lady right there through that big window, taking a shower."

WHAT??  A NAKED LADY??  WHERE ?!?!?  At age 6, gender is less relevant than the overall notion of seeing somebody with no clothes on, so of course, I am now focused on keeping an eye out for the naked lady.  Where'd she go?  Was she young or old?  Fat or skinny?  Pretty or ugly?

The door creaks open softly, barely noticed, and in creeps Nurse Toni with her 22-gauge needle.  I know she is there, and I know why, but dammit woman, we've got to find the naked lady!  The shot will have to wait!

As I crane my neck to keep looking for the naked lady, Nurse Toni gently eases down the left side of my shorts and does the deed.  And heck yes, it hurts, it hurts something awful!

"OW! OWOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOOWAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!!!"  Now the tears are back. "You sneaked up on me, that's CHEATING, OW OW OW  wwwwaaaah!!"

Dad pats me on the head and says, "OK, baby girl, holler away."  So I sniffle and accept my grape Dum-Dum sucker and off we go.

Don't holler 'til you're hit.  What wonderful advice.

How often it is that I still flail and shriek in fear of future pain.  Maybe not physically, but still in my heart I am flailing and dithering and all kinds of afraid of what lies ahead - especially if I suspect it's going to hurt.

We've all been hurt;  most of us can think of at least one or two extremely painful events in our own lives.  It is natural to want to avoid that feeling.  Yet it is pointless - even harmful - to anticipate and worry and live in fear of what may (or may not!) lie ahead.

Plus, I may get to see some pretty interesting stuff if I am looking at today instead of worrying about tomorrow.  It's true - I'm probably going to get hit again sometime down the road, and some of those events are just the natural course of life.

I think I will skip the hollering, at least today.  Don't want to miss anything.

Highbrow Eyebrows

I was in my thirties before someone confronted me about my eyebrows. 

Beginning in middle school, when my darker-haired friends began their quest for tidy eyebrows, I was relieved by the fact I had thin, mousy dark blond hair that didn't seem to accelerate growth in adolescence. 

I tried to pluck my eyebrows in high school, but it hurt like crazy and seemed stupid to me.  Pulling hairs out of my face, one or two at a time?  And ending up with little irritated red spots where the hairs used to be?  No thanks.

In my twenties, I was in denial about a whole lot of things - the least of which was my eyebrows.

And so, in my early 30s and during an unsurprisingly brief foray into cosmetic sales, a well-meaning colleague said, "you have GOT to do something about those eyebrows."

I hadn't contemplated the attractiveness or lack thereof in anyone else's eyebrows, so I assumed nobody paid attention to mine either.  I did once work with a man who had scary bushy eyebrows that were so long, I suspect they were braid-able.  He also had disconcertingly noticeable ear hairs that curled outward from his ear canal and lobes.  Now THAT was appalling;  my little stray eyebrows were Pop Warner tryouts in comparison to his Super Bowl.

So, in furtherance of my budding career in the makeup industry, I bought some tweezers and went to town.  Did I mention about the little red spots?  The stray wild mousy blond hairs were far less distracting, in my humble opinion.

(I lasted all of 90 days in the cosmetics biz - apparently you have to be a sociopath and compulsive liar.  I couldn't bring myself to sell expensive face cream to little old ladies who were probably living off cat food so they could splurge on beauty products.)

Anyhow, it wasn't until I made it into my 40s that I discovered the relative ease and freedom of having one's eyebrows waxed. 

The first time was terrible.  I hadn't known what to expect, and neither did the little Vietnamese lady who dabbed hot wax on my brow bone, patted it gently, then forcefully ripped it off.

I literally shrieked "OW!!!" right in her face;  she returned the favor with a surprised gasp perfumed with fish sauce.

"You want other eye?" she asked cautiously. 

Well, what now?  I couldn't very well go out of there with mismatched eyebrows.  After all, ever since I'd learned that people (especially catty women) apparently DO pay attention to the eyebrows of others, I had a tidy-eyebrow reputation to protect.  So she did the other eye - I secretly think she pulled even harder that time, but I wasn't about to let on that it hurt. 

She smiled sweetly and said, "bikini too?"

Um, no.  No thanks.  For you people out there that do subject yourselves to such torture, I'm humbled by your courage.

Pray It Like You Mean It

I believe in the power of prayer.

I also believe that the Creator listens to my prayers.

And I suspect He often finds them amusing.

****

In all honesty, the number of times I've truly gotten quiet enough to settle into a prayerful and reverent state of mind are remarkably few.  Now, don't get me wrong, I pray every day - sometimes several times a day, and sometimes several DOZEN times a day.

But there have been a few special pit stops on my faith journey thus far that were more, um...communal.  More intimate.  Quiet and deep time, where I can hear far more than I say.

I'm not able to get that way too often.  More often, my prayers go something like this:

Heavenly Father, I worship You and thank You for this day (my nose itches).  I am grateful for all that You (what's that there on the floor near my foot?) have provided for my family and me (did I run the dishwasher?)  Please help our friend ____, who is battling cancer and is in need of Your comfort and care (bet I already have melanoma myself).  We ask for Your protection and care for our troops (man I hope my kid never joins the military, that's gotta suck) and we thank You for the saving grace we find in Your son, Jesus Christ (you know, Amazing Grace has always been one of my favorite hymns).  For it is in His name we pray, Amen.

I suspect that my prayers sometimes wander because I am praying without intent.  In other words, I am praying because that's what I'm supposed to do - that's what Christians do, right?  We pray!  We worship how great God is and we pray for sick friends and we give thanks for all of our blessings and our salvation and we check the box indicating YES, I have indeed said my prayers.  Now on to the next item on the to-do list.

Not much intimacy in that, huh.

I mentioned in an earlier post this week that I am really busy at work right now, and it is harder than usual to shut off my mental firehose long enough to enter a posture of contemplative prayer.  I can't hear anything other than me, me, me, ME, ME, MEMEMEMEME MEEEEEEE and it makes me nutty (ok, nuttier).

I went to our Wednesday night Bible study at church this evening - true to form, I was late, and everyone was praying quietly when I walked in.  I scurried to an empty table, found a seat, and bowed my head.  And tried to pray.  Then tried some more.  The more I tried to pray, the harder it was to stop thinking about other things.

So - I stopped trying.

As if that wasn't bad enough, about that time, our pastor invited everyone to pray corporately - to pray together, aloud.  Aloud!  That used to be one of my other prayer barriers too...I might pray, but I sure as heck wouldn't do it where you could hear me.

Well, now what?  I contemplated leaving - after all, everyone's eyes had been closed since I arrived, so they wouldn't even know I'd been there and bailed.  But I came for Bible study, and if I had to sit through people praying out loud, well then, that's just what I had to do.

At the tables all around me, I heard whispers, then more audible prayers.  People were taking turns, offering prayers for one another, for our church, for our country....for our world.  There was a steady hum throughout the room - the sincere and soft sounds of devoted Christ-followers speaking with and listening to the Holy Spirit among us.

Now for my friends who are scoffers, I know exactly how wacky this sounds, but I'm telling you the truth - there was a Presence there with us, in that big open sanctuary.  A divine Presence of peace and unfathomably singular power.  His presence.  No kidding.

In the absence of trying to pray "well", I stumbled into another one of those intimate moments where He did all the talking and I sat quietly empty in a good way.  Empty of stress, empty of my own head noise - empty of anything else but love for Him and His people.
 

Want Some Cheese With Your Whine?

I am busy at work these days.

REALLY busy.

Not that I was watching Oprah and eating bon bons before, but my job changed at the beginning of the year and I am a whole new kind of BUSY.

-- The kind of busy where you keep a running to-do list on the side of your desk that makes you wince in the evening when you realize that, not only did you not tackle a single doggone thing on the list, but you added four more things for tomorrow that are way more important than anything on today's list.

-- The kind of busy where you eat lunch at your desk every single day, and usually not until around 3, and only then because you are on a conference call and can chew your food while the phone is muted.  You learn quickly not to bring an apple or nuts, because odds are good that someone will ask you a critically important question while your mouth is full.  Stick with something soft and silent, like cottage cheese or yogurt.  Quieter and probably safer, too.

-- So busy that you keep postponing going to the bathroom until it is WAY TOO LATE TO WALK WITH ANY DIGNITY.

-- Too busy to have a friendly chat with a co-worker about what their kid did in the talent show last Saturday without looking at the clock every 18 seconds and telepathically communicating that they need to wrap it up before things get rude and you have to ruin your friendship.

-- The kind of busy where you are in meetings nonstop from 8 a.m. all the way to 7 p.m. (taking into account aforementioned lunch and bathroom breaks), and in each meeting, you were fool enough to take responsibility for something that has to be done before the end of the day because you want everyone to marvel at your "can-do!" attitude.

-- So busy that, while concentrating deeply during note-taking on conference calls, you put your left elbow on your desk and rest your head in your left palm while you write with the right hand.  Your left hand is in your hair for the better part of the day.  You strongly resemble The Joker by the end of the day, plus your ear is hot.

I'm really busy.

But don't get me wrong -- I am grateful to be busy.  May I never take umbrage with having Joker hair or quiet lunches, because I am thankful for my job as well as the opportunities it presents to my family and me.  I do work for some really great people, and guess what -- they have Joker hair, too.

And anyway, I can't stand Oprah.

Happy News from the Fifth Floor

Tickled to report that the Mister is much much MUCH better today and is probably going to be headed home later this afternoon;  if not today, then tomorrow morning for sure.

After adjusting his medications, giving him a blood transfusion and several bags of IV fluids, and doing an echocardiogram, the cardiologist and nephrologist are satisfied that he is out of the woods and ready to return to the wild. 

His blood pressure is good and his blood sugar is good; and since having the blood transfusion overnight, his hemoglobin count is also good.  He's still a tad anemic, so they're giving him an iron injection and then putting him on additional iron supplements at home.  The nephrologist expressed a little concern that he might be dizzy or tired after being upright, and if that was the case, then they might want to keep him one more night.

Therefore, the Mister promptly put on his shorts and Nikes and we did two laps around the fifth floor - resulting in zero dizziness (and if he's tired, he ain't saying so).

Looks like he's dodging the stolen-oscopy too, at least for today, so no insult being added to injury.

Unless we hear something to the contrary, I expect to take him home this afternoon or evening.  Thank you for the prayers and support!