Tom is setting up his website and I’m going to help him with the creativity part of it since I’m more artistic in that sense. He’s hoping to have his next app out this weekend but there are no guarantees.

I chatted live with Tammy yesterday (until I had to pee) because she hates to type or leave voice messages via phone, Facebook, whatever.

Anyway, it wasn’t good news at all. In a post to my group, she said her health was failing and her kidneys weren’t functioning well. The first thing that came to mind was that strong nagging feeling I’ve had these last 4-5 years about something bad happening to her when she’s 62. I just never knew what or how bad it would be. I don’t get to pick and choose what I sense or dream. If I could, I’d be picking winning lottery numbers for sure.

Since I’m not always by my phone, we played a little phone tag and then finally got to talk, and I’m not sure what to think. Before we spoke, I gave myself a quick crash course on kidney disease. Yeah, who needs medical school when you’ve got the internet these days? What I did learn was that there are stages of kidney disease, 4 being the worst and the point where they put you on dialysis.

I also found a chart that lists the life expectancy by age, gender and GFR. According to a woman her age, you have between 3-18 years. I’m hoping that they will turn things around and that even if she doesn’t exactly make it well past 80, she still has many more years ahead. I read they don’t put you on dialysis until you’ve lost 85% of your kidney function.

I don’t know what to think. She says the doctor says she’s “done,” and she has taken the house off the market but still plans to eventually move. When she said this, it gave me hope that this could be turned around. She really wants to live in the mountains, unlike me who’s had enough of the damn mountains. I want to be in a tropical climate and on flat ground after being inland since 1992 and in mountainous terrain since 2004. The mountains in the West are a lot bigger than in the East, though.

As I said, I don’t know what to think. I just don’t know. I just know that unfortunately, when I have such a vibe, I’m never wrong. That doesn’t mean she’ll be checking out of Hotel Earth anytime soon, though. :) So hopefully the worst this will be is just a serious inconvenience. People with the most horrible prognoses have turned out to beat some pretty amazing odds, so we’ll see.

She has been known to be quite a hypochondriac and I can’t always tell if she’s really in serious trouble or she just feels like she is. God knows I sure thought I was going to die a few times in the past. But there is a big difference between feeling like you’re going to die and actually having one foot in the grave.

It isn’t just her kidneys, though. She has other problems, but she says her heart and arteries are doing well and her sarcoidosis is stable.

Not at all surprisingly, she lectured me about not taking statins, LOL. I knew the medical assistant in her would, and I will consider it sooner or later. She says not to wait too long because of the way heart disease runs wild in the family. My doctor just listened to my heart yesterday and says it sounded good, so I don’t think there’s any imminent danger. I’m much more worried about her right now. I wish I knew more about the situation and what she could expect from it, but I don’t think even she can have any idea of that until they try this special medication. I’m not sure if it’s new or experimental but it isn’t something you can just run to the pharmacist and get. It has to be delivered to you.

Appreciate the fact that she didn’t get into the girls but she might have had we talked longer.

Aly’s dumped her Twitter account again, ironically enough, after I dumped mine. Although she more than likely changed handles trying to lose me than anything else. I should know soon enough. As soon as she and Molly tweet to each other.

Pretty sure Molly looked in on me this morning, which was within 15 minutes of her tweeting about the usual obsessions.

I was discussing with Tom whether or not it would be worth attacking someone who simply threatened us versus actually striking us first. In the past, I would have said that I would only act if I were forced into a fight, but these days I think I would definitely go after anyone who attacked me for sure. I know actions speak louder than words and that threats don’t mean shit without the actions to back them up, but I think that in that case, not doing anything would send the wrong message and actually get myself taken advantage of even more and maybe worse. Plus, with my temper being worse in some ways than in the past, I don’t think I could hold back if I wanted to. So yes, I would definitely pounce. I may get my ass beat but at least the message that would be sent would be that no, I’m not going to just stand there and take it unless you’re safely tucked away somewhere out of reach making your threats by phone/internet or something like that.

I think we went about trying to soundproof the bedroom all wrong. I think we should’ve gotten plain basic king-size foam toppers and hit as much wall space as possible, including the ceiling to dampen the rumbling of planes. They’ve been HORRIBLE. Yesterday it wasn’t just early morning and evening. It was all fucking day long. The foam would look ridiculous, but at least I could sleep better and not have to go about my routine to so much vehicle noise on the ground or in the sky. Soft surfaces absorb sound much better than hard.

Tammy says with the exception of a guy that leaves to work and returns on a motorcycle, it’s still quiet there. Now that I’ve seen that state map and know that you can’t have loud exhausts there in cars and trucks and that landscaping is different there, I can see where it would be more peaceful, if not literally “quiet.” Almost any place has to be better than this place. The second noisiest place I ever lived (the NHA) was comatose compared to this for fuck’s sake.