Flutterby™! : Argh

So my comment urging you to write medical advance directives and make sure that you've left instructions for the disposition of your body was not hypothetical: Cynthia died yesterday. Cynthia was the woman whom Charlene has been helping with fundraising and emotional support and everything while they tried to arrange a liver transplant. After many ups and downs and elevator trips on the MELD score, she got her transplant, but by that point everything else was failing.

This morning we take the mom from our Family Connection family to oral surgery. There are some extreme anxiety issues which mean we end up in yet another facility on the other side of San Francisco, but Charlene and L. go into the room, I'm hanging out in the waiting room, I do the crossword puzzle (Crossword fail: there was no "e" on the "blond" answer for "Marilyn Monroe or Madonna", there should have been), and then someone comes out and says "are you with the two people in there? Someone's passed out", and I'm all like "What the hell? Who's the medical professional here?"

But it was fine. My first question was "where's the closest Kaiser?", but then I paused and asked "do you have a blood pressure cuff?" (Actually, I probably said "sphygmomanometer" but then they looked at me funny and I made a arm cuff like gesture), and they had a fancy machine. We hooked Charlene up, got blood pressure and blood oxygen and heart rate, and her vitals were all stable, pulse was a little low but hers runs down there normally, speech was fine, peripheral vision was fine, just a bump on the head (which, she tells me, hurts a lot).

And then at the Petaluma T&TAC meeting this evening the audio was out and we had all sorts of wacky potential legal issues from that, but we went ahead and ticked a couple of things off the agenda.