Found out yesterday that Dad is undergoing congestive heart failure. So this explains his fuzziness, his pain, the edema, and his breathing problems. They've moved him over to the health center (the euphemism for the nursing home part of the retirement community he lives at) and are giving him oxygen, increasing the dosage of the water pill to try to get the water off him, and keeping a close eye on him. He wouldn't go at first; he was horrible beyond belief on Friday, to a point where I can't talk about it without dissolving into tears of frustration, as I did Friday night in front of a bunch of people.
But after I talked to the doctor he called me (and I was surprised, because he'd hung up on me all weekend when I tried to talk to him by phone -- he couldn't process anything, hear anything, so he just hung up) and seemed surprisingly good, so I explained why he needed to go there, or he could go to the hospital if he wanted to (which, at least, would mean medicare would pay for a lot of this) for treatment, but that they couldn't treat him in assisted living, and the water pills will make him much more likely to fall. He agreed that it was a good idea. He wants to go back to his apartment, but the head of nursing isn't so sure that will ever happen. We'll see. He can't seem to sit up straight or use his power chair without hitting everything, but if that improves, it might be possible. I'd like it to be possible, just because the health center will bleed us dry financially.
He's convinced he's going to live as old as his grandparents did (into their late 90s), but seeing him today, I have no idea how long he can go on. He looks every bit his 87 years, and then some. Until last fall, he didn't look or act like an 80+ year-old. Congestive heart failure is what killed my second mom and dad, Mr. and Mrs. O, so this is kind of a big deal to me.
In other news:
I'm starting to work on a Justified vid.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
killabeez edited these two songs for me and put them together so that I can make this sort of epic dark vision I have in my head; the big thing is that I can't find any info about a street date for the season 2 DVDs, and I don't know if I should get the discs from England instead. It'll mean I can't play them in my blu-ray player, but at least I could have good source for the vid, which will no doubt take me forever to clip since I am drowning in work.
Regarding my fuck you, you fucking fucks comment yesterday that a couple people asked me about: OK, here is my bitter rant, let me show you it. I watched the season finale of
( spoilers for True Blood and adult angry language warning )And even more fuckery from showrunners: I was really on the fence about Ringer, because I have my huge twin issues. I've almost never seen twins done right on TV (except for Fringe, god bless them), so I had a lot of trepidation, but it had SMG, whom I've liked since All My Children (seriously, Silver Kane? so delicious), and of course Ioan Gruffudd (be still my heart), so I figured I'd at least give it a shot. And then I read the fall preview stuff in EW and the showrunner said that one of the things that made it so great was that "twins are already creepy." And that just pissed me off SO MUCH. We're creepy to "normal" single-birth people. Fuck you, you son of a bitch.
Because it's not like we've had centuries of this already in lots of cultures around the world, where twins have been left out in the elements to die, or stabbed or strangled upon birth (usually the second twin out of the womb, which would have been me!), or ostracized from a community. Because, you know, we're creepy and mysterious. One of us must be from Satan, because it's not normal to have an egg split in two (and yes, I'm talking identical twins, because he was).
And then I watched the show and it was JUST. SO. BAD. Everyone told me it was, but I had no idea. SMG seemed like she was sleepwalking through the whole thing, Ioan is wasted, the dialog is crazy cheeseball, and that boat scene has to be the worst rear projection I have ever seen on film, hands down. I won't even get started on the whole idea that someone who loses her twin, even if they haven't been close for a while, isn't tortured by the loss because in the scheme of things, it has everything else wrong about twinhood, so why not that too? But it's so obvious that they're merely relying on the fact that twins are creepy and mysterious to sustain their story; the only time anyone ever seems to want to do twins is either to fulfill sex fantasies or to do the tired old evil twin storyline, which the showrunner was so completely enamored of. Because twins are creepy and mysterious and that automatically makes one of them EVIL. God. I just. What can you even say?
I wonder what you'd even call that -- single-birthist? What? Twins always have to represented as one being evil, or being sex fantasies. And hey, in this show, they get to be both! Yay? Needless to say, I'm not sticking with this, even for SMG and IG. I hope your show goes down in a big flaming hairball, Mr. Showrunner, you fucking fuck.
