The news from here

Kathleen has taken lovely photos, and I thank her for sharing. Ah, to be in New York in summer. With air conditioning.
Here in Denver it's 100 degrees in the shade; I spend most of my time trying to figure out how to escape it. Denver's great photo-ready feature is, of course, the mountains, which are hardly visible this time of year for the haze (Denver is in a valley, which makes us prone to ozone warnings and dirty air and such when it's hot). So for me, photos will probably have to wait until September, unless you want to see photos of my buzz cut. More on that later.

So, my near-death experience. Kathleen exaggerates. During my stay in North Carolina, I got sick. I suppose I had been sick for a while -- a few days before my symptoms began, my brother-in-law took my temperature on a lark (he's that kind of person) and it was 101. "I feel fine," I said when he looked at me askance. And I did. So I probably had been walking around with a fever for some time.
A few days later, when the fever was past 104, I no longer felt fine. My blood pressure couldn't regulate itself, pains began to settle in various areas of my body and made it difficult to move, and finally I broke out into a full-body rash. Needless to say, when the fever began I left North Carolina and high-tailed it back to my mother-in-law's house in Tennessee, where most of my kids were, because I didn't want to pass anything on to my mom with her compromised immune system. A bored-sounding doctor at the emergency room in Knoxville said I might have a systemic infection of some sort, and he prescribed antibiotics that I couldn't take while nursing. Stubborn old me said, "Let's wait it out another day," hoping it was a virus and I wouldn't need the medicine. I needed the medicine, and until the antibiotics kicked in I was drifting in and out of consciousness. My daughters made get-well cards and put them all over me. One of them gave me a foot rub, which I slept through but thanked her for later, and kept checking my temperature. My poor children. How scared they must have been.
I am much better now, and I am pleased to say that the antibiotics did the trick, so it probably was an infection. I am worried that everything I read indicates it could have been an autoimmune response to the infection (which probably occurred in the first place because my stress levels the past few months have been off the scale). I am seeing my doctor next week to try to get to the bottom of it.
And that's the end of that.

The one who REALLY had a near-death experience was my mother. She contracted pneumonia and was rushed to the hospital not long before I was sitting in the ER in Knoxville. I remember sitting there, thinking of me in the hospital and my mom in the hospital, thinking, "This is one of the top five worst days I've ever had." While I was barely conscious and scaring my children, my dad called and I'm pretty sure he said they didn't think my mother would make it. I don't remember much of the conversation, but when my husband called later I told him to call my father because there was news of some sort and it wasn't good. My husband drove in two days later, and together with the kids we went back to North Carolina for another week.
The next night, I sat in the hospital with my mother (since I figured I wasn't contagious) as she slept, barely breathing, pale and limp, and I thought every good and positive and healing thought I could. I prayed to every god I could think of, hoping one of them might be listening, and wished for her to make it back home. "She's not ready," I thought, "and I'm not ready for her to go. She wants to fight. Give her a chance to do it."
And the next day, she started eating again. She sat up and talked to visitors. She began to be able to breathe without her face mask. And two days later, her doctor was expressing his shock at how quickly she had bounced back. "Frankly, I didn't think this would be the case," he said.
I am not saying that prayer, or the power of positive thinking, or any of it had anything to do with it. But I sure don't think it hurt.
She is now doing well, back home although still a little weak. We set up a room for her downstairs, with a hospital bed and all the accoutrements she needs to be comfortable, and with physical therapy she'll get strong enough to make it up and down stairs again (we hope). She is upbeat and ready, once again, to take cancer on. That's my mom.

So, the buzz cut. Because we love my mom, all of us -- right down to my 8- and 9-year-old daughters -- have shaved our heads down to fuzz. This was something for me, as my hair was until a few days ago touching the small of my back. I cried as my husband cut the ponytail off, and I wasn't expecting to. All the things that hair has been through. It's barely been cut for three and a half years. It's seen the birth of two children. It's also seen the horrific tragedy that befell one of my best friends, the suicide of another, a cross-country move, money woes, my grandfather's death, and now my mom's illness. So much energy, both good and bad, gone from me. Afterward I felt a little drained. But now all I can think is all the new things my next head of hair holds for me.