This has not been a great week

Spaceghost can't seem to make up its mind whether to be super-low-down causing me aches in rather uncomfortable places, or all-stretched-out making it hard to breathe. Combined with the weather, this makes for a rather uncomfortable Sarah.

But I can deal with that.

What I'm finding harder to deal with is the fact that my father is currently in hospital with septicemia.

On wednesday afternoon, at nearly 4pm, I was getting ready to leave the house to go pick up critterbug from pre-school, when the phone rang. Since I had to leave the house in less than 10min and was only halfway dressed, I ignored the phone, and checked the answer machine just before I left. I heard something along the lines of this:

*VERY QUIET VOICE* mumble mumble mumble dad, mumble mumble mumble north shore private hospital mumble bone infection mumble mumble mumble

I turned up the volume as high as I could on the machine, but my father gets a bit incoherent when he's sick, and that was all I could make out.

Figuring there was nothing I could do to sort out the message, I left the house, and continued on my way to pick up my son. I texted my sister when I got to the bus stop, since calling dad would have resulted in more incoherence. She didn't have much more information. He was unwell, presumably some sort of infection, but they couldn't find it. They suspected he had an abcess of some sort, and were going to do a scan to figure out what it was. The were trying to put him on antibiotics, but couldn't get an IV in because his veins kept on collapsing. And of course, he thought he was dying. My father is a bit of a hypochondriac, and always thinks he's going to die whenever he has an operation, but this time he actually sounded very very sick.

Yesterday she had more info for me. They suspected septicemia, and he still thought he was dying. My father has rheumatoid arthritis, and therefor a compromised immune system. He doesn't get sick very often, since his body his constantly fighting everything including itself, but when he DOES get sick, he gets SICK. And in much the same way that AIDS sufferers tend to die from some random other infection that they can't fight because of the AIDS, apparently RA sufferers tend to die from mass infection. He's had a few scares in the past 10 years: an incompetent doctor who gave him 10x recommended dose of Methotrexate, making him extra-ordinarily sick, and thereby cutting it out of his treatment regime since he developed some sort of allergy and couldn't take it any more; an abcess on his spine which spread infection elsewhere (his elbow looked like someone had put a tennis ball under the skin, and felt like over-ripe fruit), and when trying to remove said abcess, the doctors managed to break his neck, though thankfully the spinal cord was undamaged. And now this.

Today I got a text from him. "seems clear i have septiccemia improving now hopefully home mid next week with aintibiotic drip pump sewn into me. will know more after scan monday."

I'm praying that he'll be OK, that he'll get over this the same way he's gotten over everything else. But I'm scared. Septicemia is not something to be taken lightly.