What can I say?

I went home to visit my parents and my daughter who is there for the summer break a couple weeks ago - nice flight, horrible layovers. It was a wonderful visit and I got to see one of my best friends - going all the way to 5th grade.

2 days after I got home, my mother ended up in the hospital. Mom has COPD and congestive heart failure. So any illness hits her hard...this is what they found when they got her to the hospital:

Severe pneumonia in both lungs
Heart enzymes were elevated
EKG showed chronic changes to heart
Anemic
Low Blood Pressure
Blood Oxygen level was 65 (should be 95-100)
Dehydrated
Changes to kidney functions
Urinary infection (they think from the dehydration)

She finally came home from the hospital yesterday - and she sounds much better than she did. She gave us a really big scare and we all know this may be the beginning of a lot of scares. As the Dr. told me - a lot depends on how she does over the next few weeks. I wanted to try and arrange to go up there and work remotely for a few months just to be there to help with things.

So I talked to my boss and she talked to her boss and he turned her down. I didn’t get a reason – but needless to say I’m more than a little upset – I’ve completely revamped the way billing is done here by moving all the processes into sharepoint speeding the process up measurably – am currently working the integration of our latest acquisition and moving their processes in to our system – and also utilized my purchasing / IT knowledge for the upgrade of the departments computers. All of this in 6 months and for crap money. What I’m supposed to be happy for – is that they will let me take an unpaid leave AFTER I train a temp to do my job of course. UNPAID! So they would rather pay a temp to do the job than set a precedence or whatever the reasoning. What can you say though about a company that makes their money from outsourcing...?

So needless to say I am weighing my options – as quickly as possible.

Iowa visit and my mom...

I went home to Iowa to visit for a couple of days last week. I really wanted to see my parents (it's been over a year since I've seen them) and as a bonus my daughter was there from college.

It was a great visit even though it was short - I was able to see one of my eternal best friends, we go back as far as elementary school. But I could tell my mom wasn't feeling well. Mom has COPD and is on oxygen 24/7, a couple days into the visit we discovered that she wasn't getting much airflow from the machine - they changed out something and she was feeling better.

HOWEVER - yesterday they put her in the hospital...pneumonia in both lungs, along with a host of other ailments. How did I find out this news? I found out because my sister saw an update on my daughter's FaceBook page... FACEBOOK!!!

How do you explain that if you live 1200 miles away you feel helpless enough without things like this? And I don't buy the "we didn't want to worry you" argument...it's not fair and not right.

Sigh...I can't yell at her - she's sick...