Musings from My Hospital Bed - part five

. . . OF five.

Let's bury this dead horse already! Not that the saga isn't continuing  . . . still. But my inspiration around writing about it is somewhat waning and I'm sure you're totally tried of hearing me snivel over it!


Suffice to say, the "rapid dilution" plan worked, as you've no doubt guessed by now. Else how would I be sitting here writing this? After which, how would you be sitting there reading it? Right? Right.

During the course of the night and well into the next day, I offered up so much blood that I began to wonder whether the lab had more of it than I did. We all watched as my sodium level jumped around, finally settling at around 127. Which was acceptable based on where it'd come from. 

Tuesday the nursing staff changed and I was watched over by the lovely, caring team of Tracy and Nikki. Here they are here: 

Fred popped back into my room a few times just to check on me. I heard a couple comments about myself from outside the door. Something about not being your typical ICU patient since, instead of lying there watching T.V., I'd again rearranged the room so that I could sit at the desk and work on my laptap. 


Dr. SP came in a couple times for more "serious" conversations, at one point offering a mildly disguised warning of steering clear of too much on-line reading about my symptoms and such, lest I start thinking I have everything I find. 

I thought . . . wait a minute. You haven't really given me a lot to go on here. Why wouldn't I want to do a little checking on my own? He introduced me to his daughter who is interning there and he told me that sometimes, people just get SIADH for no apparent reason. That was a tad reassuring. 


The Rons came back and spent some more time with me, fooling around with stuff they could find: 

And we all added our own little missive to the board Nikki had penned so neatly for me earlier that day:

Tuesday night I slept sort of okay. But for the few times I had to shuffle out of bed, tilt my heart monitor such that I could drag my leads over to the tiny bathroom and feed them under the door which let me close it to pee in private. The leads were about ten inches shy of allowing me to sit up straight so I sorta had to lean to the left to get-er-done.  

In the wee hours of the morning as I unfurled my leads from the bathroom door and waddle back to bed, I happened to glance up at the monitor. My heart rate was 84! From the excursion of going to the bathroom?! C'mon. What had I become in those short seven days? Some kind of weenie?! I've always had a very low heart rate and this was alarming, to say the least. 

The rest of the morning I spent in meditation, trying to relax my errant aorta, which, for some reason, caused some other doo-dad to go off and sent the night nurse in to check on me. 

"Nope, just trying to get a little OM time," I'd say and she'd leave me alone.

My mind went someplace pretty dark that morning. I suddenly got it into my head that I'd done what I never wanted to do: I'd allowed myself to be a guinea pig for modern medicine. And, by doing so, possibly locked myself into a life of doctors, hospitals, tests and illness. Those of you who know me, know that I do not like doctors. And hospitals. And tests. And especially illness.  

So, at some point that morning, I finally broke down and started to cry. Something I didn't stop doing for the rest of the day. When I cried in front of Ron he told me to stop. 

"There's salt in those tears and you need all of that you can get!" 

I laughed, stop leaking for a while and looked forward to discharge (more than a little!) It was a wonderful feeling! The lovely nurse insisted on taking me out in a wheelchair and then waiting while Ron brought the car around. 

"Are you kidding me!" I said, "I'm walking out of here." And I did: 

After that we went to Walmart for a couple prescriptions then on to LOWES for a few needed items. Going home to the house on the mountain was like being folded up in a soft, warm blanket. I breathed in the air, played with my dogs and then decided to take that much needed shower. 

Now here's a thing . . . I had not been naked in front of a mirror in a week. It was somewhat of a shock to see how much weight I'd dropped just lounging around doing nothing! I got to thinking how my visit very well could have been just an expensive trip to a fat farm . . . not that anyone wants to lose weight that way. But GOSH! 

And when I looked into my face I had to start crying all over again: eyes sunken into my face, and when I tried to smile, well . . . it just looked plain creepy!

That night made up for it though. I slept for nine hours straight and woke without tears, absent the creepy smile and sporting a whole new outlook on things. I was free! Finally! And I had two glorious days to enjoy my two weeks vacation. We spent them slowly and really (REALLY) enjoyed the little time we had left at our lovely mountain home.

And FINALLY: 

Saturday morning we packed up for home, taking our usual two days to drive: 

So ended my glorious Hospital Vacation. It's certainly an episode in my life that I'll never forget! 

Things are still happening now that I'm home and my local doctors are working with me to see if they are side effects or somehow related to what put me there in the first place. Or (heaven forbid) something altogether new!

But, remembering my earlier disclaimer - how I've grown uninspired over writing about it and YOU'VE certainly grown tired of hearing it - I'm ending the continuing saga here.  

Thanks for listening everyone! Have a wonderful, healthy, joyful life! I'm going off to work on that same thing myself. Wish me luck. 

Linda  

Musings from my Hospital Bed - part four

The Mamas and the Papas were famous for a few songs. One of them went “a little” like this:


”Monday Monday, so good to me.
Monday, Monday, it was all I hoped it would be.
Oh Monday morning, Monday morning couldn’t guarantee.
That Monday evening, 
the hospital 
would not kill me.”


You can check it out here if you want.





You might notice the tiny change in lyrics I made. In truth, kill might be a little strong. It was more like, neurologically alter. But that would sort of mess with the tempo of the song and . . . well, I’ve already TALKED ABOUT THAT!


Back to my Monday. While it started out good, it went horrible awry around 6:00 pm-ish. Remember how they’d hooked me into the red pill? The one that had been dripping into my arm since noon. Well, 6ish is when the really nice nurse with the cute hair and the cute clothes came roaring into my room (where I’d been finally able to catch a bit of sleep), woke me up and unplugged the Conivaptin.


“We’re cutting this off!” she said with a smile.


“Why?” I asked with a frown.


“Because you’re at 133!” And she left.


Now I’m not really good at math but I counted on my fingers really fast and figured out that the difference between 133 and 116 is a tad beyond the safe escalation rate. What freaked me out the most was the case study I’d read earlier on-line about a woman whose sodium had been escalated 7 points in a 4 hour period. Ten days later, she was back in the hospital with little of her former self left.


Needless to say, news of my impending “death” came as a bit of a shock. 


Not one to take bad news alone, I called my husband who, along with my son, were on their way for a visit anyway.


“I think they just killed me,” I said (expletive omitted).


They were there when Dr. Salt Pounder (bless his tenacious little heart) came in for the second time, saying things like “uncharted territories” and “wasn’t suppose to do that” He defended his orders to the nurses, even showed his hand-written notes to my husband. How a 2 hour blood draw was ordered . . . and missed. My first draw had been 4 hours after the drip started and then it took another 1 1/2 hours to get the results back.


Hence the need for panic. 


I have to tell you that, when the doctor is a little freaked out, it’s not very reassuring for the patient. Dr. SP went away to devise a plan, leaving the three of us to laugh at the absurdity of it (me) or cry at the severity of it (okay, me again). The Ron Squared held up pretty good and were completely supportive while we waited for a plan.


And a plan there was! I was admitted to ICU for two nights and a treatment of rapid dilution.


My first nurse was wonderful. Here he is, Nurse Fred whom I came to adore over the next couple days as he took wonderful, gentle care of me.

Our first experience together was of him asking me to change out of my lovely clothes (damn it . . I sort of liked being dressed!) and dawn the sexy gown again. So I took my gown, my re-installed drip line, my skinny pole on wheels and myself into the tiny bathroom and tried to maneuver my way out of my tank top. It went over my head just fine. After that though, it just hung there, limp from my drip line. Then there was the gown - I couldn’t put my arm through the arm hole because of the drip line so I had to unsnap the shoulder and then try to re-snap it with one hand. Which wasn’t working at all.


Fred knocked. “Is everything okay in there?”


“Well I’m having a little bit of trouble.”


Fred’s seen worse, I’m sure and he saved me right away, got me plugged into the heart monitor (annoying thing that hated the way I’d keep rolling over and unplugging a line). And then we all begun what I like to call the pincushion effect. I had blood drawn every hour for the first 6 hours and then every 2 hours, reduced down to 4 hours by the time I was released. I had one young phlebotomist who told me that he just had to come up and see me.

“When I saw the order come through, I thought, who is this poor woman.”


Meanwhile, in an attempt to dilute my wildly askew sodium, clear water dripped into me at a very rapid rate.


Settling into the next leg of the journey all I could think was how this was where I wanted to be:

While this was where I really was:

More to follow. 

Oh, yes. It does continue. 

Musings from my Hospital Bed - part three

Did I mention how hard it was to sleep in that place? You get these little plastic boots that wrap around your legs from ankle to thigh and velcro on (tightly if you’re lucky). They plug into a thingie that’s hooked to the back of your bed. The thingie blows air into pads, first massaging the right leg and then the left, deflating one leg as it moves to the next. It’s actually a very good thing - designed to avoid blood clots as you lazy around in your hospital bed. It’s very methodical and dedicated to its task. You tend to lay there, awake from the noise down the halls seeping into your room through the thin walls, and you time the progress of the thingie . . . fifteen seconds on leg one -  rest a bit - fifteen seconds on leg two - rest. Etc, etc...


The thingie has a little brain too. It knows when you’ve been unplugged from it for too long. It starts complaining and won’t shut up. At first I called the nurse.


“I took too long to pee and now my thingie won’t shut up.” 


Then I learned that you only have to turn your thingie off before you unplug your legs. Only then are you free to shuffle around the cabin in your plastic boots. 




But that’s not all. There’s a very popular patient in the room on the other side of the wall. Of course, it’s the wall by the head of your bed. This person is so popular that his/her visitors never want to leave. They love their popular patient and they stay late. And they talk loudly. And they laugh often. And they never go away. And you never sleep.


However, sometimes you get so tired, you think that you’ll be able to push through all that and finally catch some much needed shut eye. And you’re anxious to get back to that great fantasy you’ve been reading. So you velcro up your boots, plug them into your thingie, you lean way over to turn your thingie on. You make sure you can reach the strap that shuts the light on and off. You push the button that raises or lowers your bed into a comfortable position. You pull your table over onto your lap where your book awaits. Then you realize that your glasses are on the table . . . way the heck over there where you cannot possibly reach then. Uff! . . . Maybe you should just forget about trying to read yourself to sleep. But you really like the book and want to fall asleep in that “fantastical place” rather than the one you’re really in.


Sure you could call the nurse to come fetch your glasses. But who wants to be one of those kinds of patients? So you push the button that lowers your bed, you roll the desk off your lap, lean over to unplug your legs. You’re pretty sure you can get to the table and back before the thingie knows your gone so you leave it switched on. You manage to snag your glasses, plug yourself back in, pull the table back over your lap and crank your bed back up into a comfortable position. You read for about five minutes and then realize that . . . yep, you have to pee again.


And that says nothing about trying to manipulate the mobile pole that you’ve been attached to for days via an IV drip.


Anyway, that was how Saturday and Sunday night’s “sleep” went. Pretty non-existent. And when the Rons came that morning for a visit, I learned that they’d done about the same thing (absent the thingie and the pole that is). They were still with me when the doctor came for his morning visit. He told us the Conivaptan stuff would be there at noon and that’s when they’d plug me back into the Matrix and feed me the red pill.


“Okay,” I told him, “But I have one little requirement first.”


He gave me a suspicious eyeball. “What’s that?” he asked.


“Let me out of here for a little while.”


See, the hospital regulation is that patients are not allowed off the floor of their confinement. I had come to the mountains to taste the sweet, clear air and I’d not had the pleasure of its touch for four days. I was not about to take no for an answer.


But the doctor agreed! So, with my sweatshirt on to cover up my IV drip line -- lest I get stopped by security for escaping -- I wandered the grounds for a blessed 45 minutes! It was amazing how weak I felt. But it was wonderful.

When my 45 minutes were up, the Ron Squared delivered me back to my room and they left, planning to come back in the evening once the drip had been dripping for a while. The doctor gave orders to start drawing blood every two hours to check the progress of my errant sodium.


And that . . . was the end . . . of sanity for a while.


There'll be another leg of this epic journey. I’m not sure what I’ll call it. Maybe "When life gives you lemons" Or "Hey! . . . that wasn’t supposed to happen!" Or maybe even "Linda’s body does it’s own thing . . . again" 

Musings from my Hospital Bed - part two

Also known as . . . My Vicarious Vacation. 


I forgot to mention that my Brother and Sister in Law came down from Pittsburgh for the weekend. They almost didn’t make it. When they learned about my hospital vacation, they considered staying home instead. But I’m glad they stuck to the game plan and came. It gave everyone something else to do besides worry about me.


So John and Peg drove down Friday and stayed till Monday morning. They stopped in to say howdy when they got there then the four of them went out for dinner. Waynesville has this great little restaurant called The Sagebrush Steakhouse and we always make it there at least once. Saturday, while I was hanging out, happy to be unhooked from salt water, they went rafting down the fresh kind! It had been our plan all along. Of course, normally I would have been with them but, well . . . you know.


Now, my son (the newly hatched Eagle scout) has been rafting a lot. He even went on some Level Fives in Colorado with the Scouts a while back. He always has fun but I think he enjoys going with family the most. They all stayed in the boat, had a blast (in spite of a wayward oar handle that no one will fess up to and an ensuing nasty bruise or two). And when Ron brought me my Talapia dinner that night, he also brought these:

Sunday rolled around and, since I had NOTHING to do, I wandered around the hospital, taking more pictures:  Not sure what the cage was all about!

And I elbowed my way into the boat, setting everything RIGHT! 

Sunday was also the day Dr. Salt Pounder (bless his tenacious little heart) told us they’d finally got the results back from the test they had to send out. I had somehow developed a thing called SIADH (not to be confused with the other kind of ADH). Given that I had all kinds of spare time on my hands, I’d already done a little bit of internet reading about it. Enough to know that it’s a hormonal imbalance that makes the body think it doesn’t need all that nasty old sodium so it all gets flushed down the toilet (literally). So THAT’S what my body had been doing with it! Pretty cool that they found something wrong with me though. It explained why my sodium level wouldn’t stick in spite of all the doctor’s efforts.

With good news came bad. The hospital pharmacy did not have the medicine used to treat SIADH. It would be available the following day and had to be administered via drip (oh, Yay! the skinny pole attachment again.) And it had to be dripped over a 24 hour period (oh Yay! I’ll be here till Tuesday).

In spite of all that, I felt pretty good the rest of the day until I really started reading more about SIADH. I learned that it’s a SYMPTOM disorder usually brought on by things that are even more nasty than itself. Like brain tumors, liver or kidney failure, lung cancer, heart disease. But I didn’t have any of those things! So what the heck was up with that?

It would become yet another in a series of serious conversations with my doctor . . . 

Serious conversations are all we had after the next turn of “interesting” events.

  

Musings from my Hospital Bed - part one

Long about Friday I started feeling better. In spite of the downward trajectory of my errant sodium. Sure, there were some discomforts that never eased off until I got back to our mountain cabin five days later. Like the constant buzzing in my head. And the fact that I couldn’t sleep on my left side for the jabbing pain in my upper chest cavity. Not a clue what that was all about!

But compared to Wednesday’s blinding headache and suspected bleeding gut - those things that brought me here - well, Friday came in feeling pretty strong. Comparatively speaking, that is - in reality I was actually sicker, with a new sodium count of 111, four points lower than when I’d checked myself in.

If truth be known, I was clueless about the importance of salt until I was forced to educate myself. Up until then, I pretty much took my sodium for granted. In fact, like a lot of us, I assumed it was sorta bad. I assumed it was responsible for all that nasty bloating in the past. I assumed that, what little salt I did need, was busy doing its job while I was off doing mine.

So yeah . . . I had lots of time to think about my salt while I was "lounging around" in the hospital. I got to thinking how our bodies are a huge percent water and, one way of looking at it is that it’s salt water. We need our levels to be in something called mEq/l . . . 135 to 145 of these. According to Wikipedia, anything lower than 125 mEq/l is considered “sever” hyponatremia. To have a sodium level of 111 and still be standing - well that was baffling to the staff and doctors who saw me. I was an anomaly and I suspect that later I was elevated to a different status . . . I'd become a challenge.

Here’s something else to keep in mind about sodium - once it dips, it’s important to bring it back up s l o w l y. Safe is a maximum of 10 to 12 points within a 24 hour period. That little bit of info will come in handy as you follow the rest of this story. Any faster and it’s like salting a slug - all the fluid rushes to the concentration of salt and the poor thing shrivels up into a potato chip. Just not a very tasty one. Unlike a slug though, when the concentration is in the brain cells, you end up drowning them which results in a surprising plethora of neurological issues.

But being at 111 that Friday wasn’t cool either. Not cool at all. I should have been in seriously bad shape - 110 and below and you’re in danger of things like seizures, comas and other bad stuff like . . . death. But not me, oh no. I was feeling pretty good on Friday. Then, on Saturday, when my salt jumped all the way up to 116, I got to feeling really, really good. In fact Saturday the doctor got a little worried about the jump from 111 to 116 and took me off the heavier drip and onto salt tabs.

So I’m finally free of my companion bag of salt water. The one that dripped into my pincushioned arm for the past three days. I get to tape a plastic bag around my I/V stick and take a nice, hot, wonderful shower! 

I’m up and clean and dressed and walking the halls, free to start laughing at how fun it’d been to tote my companion pole along with me like a skinny shadow on wheels - wires tangled, tripping over this one or that one, left hand wrapped around trying to keep my naked bottom behind its sexy little gowned curtain.

And free to start complaining. Like . . . why am I still here? If all we’re going to do is take sodium tablets, lasix, magnesium and other sundry pills, can’t I do that from the lovely porch of my mountain home? I promise, promise, promise that I’ll come back every morning for my daily blood letting. I pinkie swear!

But no, my doctor, whom I shall lovingly refer to as Doctor Salt Pounder (bless his tenacious little heart), could not, in his professional opinion, outpatient me while I was sill considered sever. This is where I started singing that song: 

"Welcome to the hospital Carolina. It’s a lovely place, such a lovely place."

"There's plenty of room at the hospital Carolina.

"You can check out any time you'd like.  

But you can NEVER LEAVE!

Captive as I was, I set up my hospital room as a workstation and tried to get some writing done. 

My super wonderful husband (whose vacation I was ruining), took to bringing me dinner to help compensate for the food the hospital was giving me (sort of hard to feed a pescatarian on their menu). So dinner on Saturday was rosemary/garlic grilled Talapia, wild brown rice and hand hewn fudge from a local Cherokee chocolatier for dessert!

And my continuing saga . . . well, it continues! You'll just have to stay tuned to find out what happens next. 

When a gift just keeps on giving

So, you may already know that I had an anniversary recently. It was a biggie too. Twenty years! Who would'a thunk it, huh? It came on a Wednesday, a typical Wednesday where my husband went off to work in the wee hours of the morning, giving me a kiss goodbye before heading off in the dark. It was later when I got up to make breakfast for me and the boy when I discovered this:

Typical of our tradition, I did not open it. We always (always) wait until we're together to open gifts, cards and such. However . . . she said with a cunning little grin . . .  tradition did not prohibit my lifting and shaking the thing! But oh my gosh . . . what the heck did he buy me?! A case of bricks? A personalized stepping stone?

Ronnie lifted it too and between the two of us, we figured it weighed some ten to fifteen pounds.

Needless to say, I heaved it up and down a number of times throughout the day trying to guess what was in it. And only when hubby and I had gone out to a nice celebratory dinner and returned home, did I open it.

And it wasn't a brick at all but this:

What an awesome gift! Reminiscent of our ten year anniversary when we'd taken an Alaskan cruise, returning with stories and memories, a lot of great art work, a ton of pictures! And a case of canned Sockeye Salmon that had lasted many, many months.

I expect this case to do the same.

However, I did dig into it the other day.

It looked something like this:

And on my salad it looked just like this:

And it tasted a lot like this:

Yep . . .that's about it.

THANKS HONEY! I LOVE IT!

The eyes have it . . .

I ran across this nifty little tool on my laptop. It's called a snipping tool and you can take little cuts from any image that crosses your screen, morph it with whatever morphing app you have and then do other stuff with it. Or you can just leave it native to how it was snipped. 

Since I've been spending a ton of time lately in the BIC position (butt in chair), I got to watching for images and then snipping out their eyes. It sounds a little morbid putting it that way. You'll have to just trust me though . . . no images were harmed in the creation of this post!  

A close friend I grew up with. I ran across a candid picture that his dad had taken one day when we  were all at the races together. 

Holly in our Skype session.. such fun!

Holly's self portrait.

This is Piper, my Boston. She's wearing a beanie cap complete with propeller and everything. It was really just a sticker I stuck to her head. But she wore it well.  

This is my other Boston, Sampson, when he was just a puppy. It was that one blue eye that drew us in!

Sampson has an evil side to him!

Here's Sampson in Holly's watercolor family portrait. 

And here are Ronnie and Ron in the same watercolor! 

So that was a bit of fun. Stay tuned for future posts featuring other body parts, taken harmlessly from friends, family and critters who happen to wander across my screen.

Ketchup!

Yes, please . . . with a dab of mustard and a little relish.

No, not the noun . . . the verb! As in trying to resolve a couple hundred e-mails, a few dozen loads of laundry, a fridge that echoes when it's opened. And 14.5 pounds of unopened mail that our neighbor was nice enough to collect for us. Not to mention the lawn—it looks a little like that scene from the second Jurassic Park movie where the raptors chewed up another couple explorers  . . . “Don’t go into the long grass!”

And then there’s the whole body thing. It’s somehow: a) acclimated itself to the mountain air and feels sluggish and non-responsive in Houston’s oppressive heat. And, b) thickened a bit thanks to all that vacation food and inactivity. So attention is required there too. Time to get back on that exercise program. Time to get the stomach used to three meals a day instead of one long, continuous one.

So that’s the thing about long vacations away from so called “reality.” Away from technology and all that goes along with it. Even after two days back, I’m still a little frenzied, rushing from this to that, trying to dig out. Trying hard to rediscover my “groove.” It’s slow and a tad painful but I’m getting there. I promise to post photos as soon as I get time to upload them! In the meantime, back to the laundry and the mail and oh... did I actually forget to eat@!? Yay!

Memoirs in Second Person

It’s Monday, Labor Day and the rest of the vacationers are nowhere in sight. Sleeping in, perhaps. Hungover, no doubt. You’d be sleeping in too if not for the alarm on your cell phone, set to roust you out early enough to get a head start on the rest of them.

There seems to be only one other person awake besides you, a woman standing between the heavy stilts that support her beach rental. Indeed, the only homes this close to the water that managed to survive Ike are the stilted ones, set at least eight feet high. This is the kind you rented and it’s what the woman rented whose now outside, calling her dog. The two cars parked under her rental look packed, poised and ready to put an end to the long weekend. She calls the dog. From this distance, it sounds like the name is Lobo or Hobo and when you finally see the object of her attention you think how fitting the latter name would be. A tiny, white fluff scurries from around the nearest house and then stands about a hundred yards away, ears perked, tail wagging. Even from the distance of three houses and two floors up, you see the dog’s expression. And when the woman repeats her summons, Hobo bounds toward her, bouncing his way through the bushes to run circles around her legs. She carries her coffee cup back upstairs with tiny Hobo tight at her heels.

There are a few cars already vying for position on the beach. There’s even an early bird fisherman wading hip deep in the surf, his pole slanting downward as he tries catching the silvery carp you saw flashing across the water last evening. You smile as you recall the one, how it took six hops up into the air before abandoning its earthbound dream. You remember how you laughed, wondering what could prompt such abandoned glee in the life of a fish.

You hear the neighbors stirring, filtering out onto the deck for some quiet conversation before their gaggle of children wake up. You’ve already decided that they are a strange group. Not by the fact that they have a herd of small children between the handful of women you’ve seen. But by the fact that there are no men; at least not any frequent ones. You remember seeing men only three times the entire weekend: once to fill the ice chest on the deck when they first arrived, another to cook on the grill downstairs and a third to empty the ice chest on Sunday night. But even during these chance sightings, none of the women were present. You recall seeing the children on the beach, romping through the surf while the women guarded from the shore. But even then, the men were nowhere in sight. From your place of silent observation you’ve concluded that, aside from the obvious coupling required to produce the gaggle of children, there is no gender interaction in the adjoining beach house and you wonder whether it’s some kind of cult.

You’re grateful for the fact that one of the women has yet to join this morning’s gathering – the one with the laugh so ridiculous you actually wonder whether she’s been pretending all weekend. It’s sort of a hee-haw guffaw that makes you laugh every time you hear it. But not for the same reasons. You think of tomorrow, of all the things waiting for you back home. And you’re torn between a desire to stay here, sitting alone on the deck watching the sea move in and out, the pelicans swooping low over the surf as you listen to the cadence of the gulls chattering in the distance, or to go back home, return to your “normal” existence, leaving this weekend as some perfect memory.

As it turns out, nothing is perfect - at least not forever. You hear the neighbor join the others on the porch and her goofy laugh drives you inside. Time now to shake the last of the sand out of your clothes, pack up your own two dogs, your husband and your son and head on back to life.