{"id":195,"date":"2005-11-05T19:36:34","date_gmt":"2005-11-05T23:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2005\/11\/05\/i-just-cant-win\/"},"modified":"2005-11-05T19:36:34","modified_gmt":"2005-11-05T23:36:34","slug":"i-just-cant-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2005\/11\/05\/i-just-cant-win\/","title":{"rendered":"I Just Can&#8217;t Win"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a3370'><\/a><\/p>\n<p><P>It&#8217;s now Saturday night and I&#8217;m still on the Cape. I arrived Thursday afternoon around 5:45PM. My friend, Karyn (Vexed in the City blog) picked me up at the Hyannis Intermodal Transportation Center (what a joke..it&#8217;s a bus\/scenic train ride station). We went directly to Cape Cod Hospital to see my Mom.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>At first, I was shocked. Aside from giving birth to two children my mother has never been in a hospital for medical reasons in her life. Ever. At 74 years old, that&#8217;s pretty impressive. I guess she&#8217;s much stronger than we all thought (most people her age would have broken bones in a fall that bad).<\/P><br \/>\n<P>OOOPS &#8211; I got distracted. Anyway, I walked in to see her sitting up preparing to eat dinner. Her back was to the door, her hair was suffering from 5 days of bed-head, she was in a hospital gown and she had oxygen tubes sticking out of her nose. It frightened me&#8230;you shouldn&#8217;t have to see a parent like that.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>Still, she lit up when she saw me and Karyn and was able to maintain a conversation, smile and eat her dinner. Shortly after, my father walked in. We all sat and chatted for a while before Karyn headed out&#8230;then my father and I went home after stopping off at a Centerville restaurant for dinner.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>The next day my father and I ran some errands before heading to the hospital in hopes of picking Mom up. The plan was that she would have one more CAT-scan and then be released. We weren&#8217;t so lucky. At 6PM she was told that she needed to stay one more night because the surgeon\/doctor wanted to do one more CAT-scan. Unfortunately, the doctor had gone home and never left an explanation as to why my Mom needed to stay. That just caused my mother and father&nbsp;(and me, to a lesser extent) to get paranoid that something showed up in that day&#8217;s CAT-scan.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>The stress caused my Mom&#8217;s head ache and sick stomache to get worse.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>This morning, my father and I were preparing to visit her at the hospital when my Mom called to say that she&#8217;s being released! YAY. We hopped in the car, drove to the hospital (with Dusty, of course) and picked her up. She was wheeled out in a wheelchair and once in the car she said she wanted to go to Osterville to get her hair done. That&#8217;s a good sign.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>With her hair washed and cut, we brought her home, had some lunch, watched some TV, napped and played some Rummy.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>And this is where we get to the title of today&#8217;s blog entry. Despite being on oodles of pain killers, despite having spent nearly two weeks in the hospital, despite feeling sick to her stomache and having a head ache&#8230;my mother kicked my ass at Rummy.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>This is getting obscene. First Jason keeps winning, and now my temporarily disabled and heavily sedated mother whoops my ass. <\/P><br \/>\n<P>Perhaps I need to switch games? Perhaps I should start cheating.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>Well, I&#8217;m still hoping to make the Gay Boston Bloggers dim sum event tomorrow morning. I&#8217;ll just have a longer commute. If I play my cards right (no pun intended), I can arrive at South Station at 11:10&#8230;just 10 minutes later than the blogger function&#8217;s start time in nearby Chinatown.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>Wish me luck! Based on this past year and based on my game playing lately, I&#8217;ll need all the luck I can get.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s now Saturday night and I&#8217;m still on the Cape. I arrived Thursday afternoon around 5:45PM. My friend, Karyn (Vexed in the City blog) picked me up at the Hyannis Intermodal Transportation Center (what a joke..it&#8217;s a bus\/scenic train ride station). We went directly to Cape Cod Hospital to see my Mom. At first, I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}