Grandad's Heart Attack

Well, he had one, on Monday. Came in from sitting in the garden, very pale, and said he thought he should see a doctor. Doctor couldn't see us for hours, and Grandad had pains across his arms and looked like he was going to pass out, so we called an ambulance. The First Responder got here within five minutes and the ambulance was only about five minutes after that. They gave him oxygen and took ECGs as he was sat down, then put him in the back of the ambulance to take even more. They said it looked like he was having a heart attack; I went with him in the ambulance at full speed with lights and siren - now *that* was a scary ride, I kept thinking the vehicle was going to roll over the speed it was cornering :-//

The A&E department confirmed that something was definitely not right and admitted him straight away to the coronary care unit, where he's been ever since. Although he feels quite a bit better now, the results of the blood tests they took came back today to confirm that it had definitely been a heart attack as opposed to just angina.

So, he'll be in hospital on bed rest for a few more days before they allow him to get up and about. We're hoping he'll be home by the weekend, but we'll have to see. We're visiting him lots. Emily was quite frightened by the necessity to call the ambulance on Monday and the flurry of activity that ensued, but she's been a star with him in hospital, and is very taken with his bedside TV/games console, rofl! She made Grandad a lovely card on Monday evening when she got back from visiting him, and we took it to him this morning straight from Emily's tap exam. The other two men in his room have asked her to make cards for them too, lol!

So, it's been an activity filled few days, as it were, and we'll be fitting in twice daily visits to the hospital for the next few days at least. On a happier note, Emily passed her karate grading on Sunday morning with the second highest marks out of everyone, including the much older kids who were going for higher belt levels. She's a very chuffed orange belt now :-))

This morning's tap exam went OK. We're proud of Emily for seeing it through - given the horrible time she's had there recently it would have been easy and understandable for her to back away from doing the exam, but she wanted to meet the challenge and she certainly did. She says she made a few mistakes, but from what I could hear from the waiting room, so did everybody else. Teacher said to her after the exam "I hope your dance went better than it did last Friday, Emily!" How charming.

At yoga this afternoon, Emilys teacher asked me if I'd help out in the lessons. Ummmmmmm, okkkaaay. *Shock* I'll have to get police-checked in order to be covered by her insurance, but she's going to bring me the forms for that next week.

Sunday we spent ALL DAY trying to fix Emily's computer. The sound card was dead and it was refusing to recognise the newly introduced sound card. So muggins here had the bright idea of trying to reinstall windows xp in the hope of uncorrupting whatever was corrupted. Boy was that a bad idea. Got caught in the apparently quite famous "34 minutes to go" freeze up during the installation process. At that point, it's too late to abandon the installation the operating system is half on, half of - so whenever you restart the PC the only option you're given is to try to complete the installation - at which point it freezes again. Tried numerous solutions found in technical forums, involving all sorts of weird and wonderful things like .inf files and BIOS settings - all alien to me, but we followed the instructions to the letter several times over and still nothing. Nana and Gramps stepped into the breach and have rather wonderfully bought Emily a new PC and equipment to salvage the hard drive from the old one. Thank you!!!!!!! We could no doubt have spent another twelve weeks of our lives trying to fix the damn thing, or paid a computer guy to come fix, but we don't have the time and last time we called a PC guy to come fix something it cost us almost as much as a new PC would have done in any case.

So. Still not much school work happening at this end, and we're still struggling to keep on top of the business among all the chaos. And I've still got people emailing me demanding to know why the item they paid for on Sunday still hasn't arrived. It's Tuesday. Hello??? How come we're so patient with everyone who sends *us* stuff?

Oh, and Happy Beltane to those who celebrate it. We had a whole load of lovely festival stuff planned for today, but what with tap exam, yoga and hospital it just wasn't going to happen. We're out most of tomorrow too, but we'll probably try and have a very late Beltane day later in the week!