I’m going to start this post with a quick, one line statement for those of you who may have caught wind of some of the events of the last few days through my various other social networking tools.
Alex is fine and he is coming home from the hospital today.
For those of you who aren’t in the loop as of yet, that should give you a pretty good indicator of how my week was.
Last weekend I completed moved our intranet at work from an old, seriously outdated server to a shiny new one with updated and/or different versions of all of the major software used to support it. The machine the intranet was on was a Windows 2000 box with ColdFusion 5, MySQL 3, and Visnetic Website as the web server software. The new machine is a Windows 2003 box with ColdFusion 8, MySQL 5, and Internet Information Service 6 as the web server software. The move itself went fairly well (despite the fact that I originally moved the wrong database files over…but I corrected that on Sunday night).
Monday, however, the shit hit the fan.
As I referenced in my post earlier this week – there simply is no way to test for every eventuality when doing a move of this kind. I spent the majority of my time working this week correcting errors that simply did not exist on the old server. On top of that, one of the biggest changes that happened in this changeover involved moving away from using employee Social Security Numbers as a UUID field and going to a generic 10 digit code. Many employees did not get crossed over properly and I had to go back and run conversion routines two additional times to get everyone in line (and I still have one more block of them I need to straighten out).
So work pretty much sucked. The only bright spot in the whole week was that I finally found out what my annual increase was. It was on my paycheck that I received on Friday, along with all the retroactive pay I was due dating back to the first of the year.
It was a very nice check.
On the homefront, however, it was significantly worse. Alex got a stomach virus on Monday night, and it kicked his ass. I have never, ever seen him get this sick. He didn’t eat for several days and spent most of the time in bed. So much so that, on Wednesday, I gave in to his tearful begging of me not to check his blood sugar or give him a shot. This turned out to be a very stupid thing to do. Wednesday night Krys, Jareth and I came down with the bug and I spent most of the day on Thursday sleeping. Alex, feeling better that day but seriously dehydrated, got into the gatorade that I had purchased and drank the majority of a 32 ounce bottle.
No insulin + Sickness throwing off his body chemistry + 32 ounces of sugar water = Very bad things for a diabetic.
I went in to check on him at 3:15 on Thursday and he was breathing heavy and seriously incoherent. He couldn’t move without it hurting and he was barely able to stay conscious. I checked his blood sugar, and the meter came back as “HI.” This means over 500. I gave him a shot with extra insulin and checked his blood sugar again at 3:40. Still HI. Gave him another 10 units of insulin and checked it again at 4:30. Still HI. Waited until 5:00 and checked again. Still HI. Gave him another shot and called his Mother. At this point panic was starting to set in, as I had to be at the theater by 7 for the evening performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and it was looking like he was going to need to go to the hospital. I left him in the reluctant care of Krystalle (who, due to not being related to him, cannot authorize medical care in case of an emergency…a situation that I need to have remedied post-haste). Jody finally got Alex to go to the bathroom and test to see if he had any ketones in his blood, and it came back that there was a moderate level of them. She called his doctor, and while he was not panicked he did say that Alex needed to go to the hospital. We were going to wait and do it when I got home that night, but Alex could not even stand up to take a shower on his own. When I called Jody to tell her that (I was at the theater at this point) she made up her mind to take him then and there and rushed him down to All Children’s Hospital.
Long story short, Alex had entered a state of ketoacidosis. This is a potentially fatal condition that can happen to diabetics who don’t get insulin. In Alex’s case it was bad, but not nearly as bad as it could have been. I got to the hospital around 11:00 and stayed there with him overnight. Finally went home around 4 yesterday afternoon after his Mother got back and his blood sugars were back to normal levels (he had to be put on an Insulin IV to get his body back in line). He called me at 8:30 this morning to tell me he was coming home.
Krystalle and I finally feel like we can eat again today, and I got a decent night sleep last night (the first I’ve had since Tuesday). I ate some soup this morning that Paul gave me last night and am drinking coffee again (the caffeine withdrawal symptoms weren’t helping things either). All in all, this is has been one of the crappiest weeks I’ve had in a long time. I’m going to be chewing on the guilt of what happened with Alex for a long time. I should have insisted that he check his blood sugar on Wednesday and he should have had a shot. Everything is ok now, but I’m seriously shaken over the situation. I can tell you this much – he’s going to get seriously annoyed with how anal I’m going to be about this stuff going forward.
So yeah, that was my week. Sorry if I’ve been out of the loop for the last few days. If I missed anything important out there let me know.