HOW long?

Good lord, I've managed to not post anything in a full week?!  How did I manage that??  Geez, where are we......I could have SWORN I posted some things since then, but if I did, where in hell did I post them at?  Hmm.

Ok, since Thursday...let's see if I can manage a quick recap of some highlights.  I got my hair done.  Yay for a great stylist who's making this grow-out process a little easier on me!

Last Saturday, we actually left the children for quite a long time and went down to Dixon, about an hour and a half, and saw my old stomping partners, the guys from Silvertone & their lead singer, that Chris Isaak guy.  

Great show, even if it apparently does take a village to get me in! Huge thanks to Pauline for putting it all together.  Having absolutely zero idea what the venue was going to be like, how crowded it would be, etc, I was very afraid of just buying tickets and showing up and finding out I had to stand for a really long time or something--something, anything that my bod just physically couldn't take-- so I begged for some help.  

As it turned out, what I needed was for the entire staff of the Dixon May Fair to attend a training seminar...we're going from entrance to box office to venue box office and everyone just sends us somewhere else with some variation on "we don't have a guest list," "what do you mean a 'band guest list'?" and utterly baffled looks.  Of course, all the traipsing around trying to do this is, ironically, exactly the kind of physical exertion I had been trying to avoid in the first place, and the whole "I'm on the list" protocol is very foreign to Lloyd.  

He's not used to the waiting, the 

confusion and the rent-a-thug security who peg you as some desperate groupie in the first 5 seconds and therefore treat you like crap from that point after.

Just in the nick of time though, I recognized Sheryl, CI's manager and was able to grab her and bother her to bother our friendly neighborhood tour manager.  Way too much bother! I hated having to bug everyone incessantly, but thanks to everyone's hard work, we got in, we saw a great show, and Lloyd had fun, which was the goal.

Sunday, I recovered from Saturday...

Most of the last week I got to be sick and feel crappy as hell and sleep a lot trying to get well.  I had another one of those weird incidents where I ran hugely high fevers for a couple days, while feeling dizzy, having double or triple vision, if I could focus at all, and generally feeling horrible.  And then, over time, it went away.  

No idea what is going on with that, but it's about the third time it's happened.  I called Andy, Lorrie called me back, and we had long conversations trying to figure it out.  We're working on it.

I've also had some really monsterous bouts of neuropathy to work through, and all the usual suspects in terms of my side effects and daily bs.

My quest to see a neurologist has been a tad derailed, but luckily, I don't need one quite so much right now.  I seem to have gotten past most of the weirdo neuro symptoms and MAY even be able to KNIT for extended periods!  I guess that's a great thing, because the neurologist can't fit me in until the end of August.  August!  As weirdly transient as my symptoms are, there's no way to know if I'd even need a neurologist in August.

Who knows.  I'm tired of having weird things wrong.  So far today I feel pretty crappy, just generally flu-y.  I'm pretty convinced I have a sinus infection at the end of all of this, so I'm just taking it easy, or at least trying to.  Right now I'm having a mental war between laying still and reading magazines and baking hyper-nutri-fied oatmeal cookie bars.  I don't get much food in me, so I figured that might help get my protein and iron levels up, those being the highest priority.  Andy read my labs from March and was quite unhappy with me...... VERY unhappy.  He sent me off for more labs, and I hit a personal milestone-- NINE tubes of blood.  NINE!   

The only other significant report is Oz.  He's actually doing pretty well right now, which kind of confused us, so we took him back to the vet to have his blook levels rechecked, and find out what we should be looking for in terms of making sure he wasn't suffering at all.  

Of course, his kidney enzymes were still very elevated, but nowhere near as badly as before.  His BUN level before was 202; this time it's 59.  Normal is 15-34.  Creatine before was 9.9; now is 7.8, normal is 0.8-2.3.  So, while he is still not going to make it through this in the end, he seems to have decided to stick around a lot longer than I expected.  The sq hydration that we're doing, the tuna and wet cat food, everything else, seems to be doing him some serious good, and he's up and around, using the scratching post, acting pretty damned good.  He lost more weight, so he's like a skeleton with fur, but he's doing ok, which means I'm doing ok.  As long as he's not in any pain or discomfort, like losing control of his bodily functions, then we're good.

I think I've covered everything...and I'm tired of writing, so I quit.  Man, that teaches me to not miss an entire week of updating this thing!!!!!!!  

I hope everyone is enjoying this gorgeous, gorgeous weekend.