oxygen is good

The picture [imagine a picture of pipes and pumbing parts -because I can't get it to upload] goes with this blog because it is all about my mother and looking for the most recent picture I could only find this. This is the kind of picture my husband takes for his own inscrutable reasons. It represents my mother because at moments it seems like her life has come down to broken plumbing. I guess I don't have any very recent grandma photos because, well, she's not real photogenic these days. A few less inches, a few less teeth, the bad eye. Old age isn't pretty. I told her two mights ago I was afraid when I went to bed she might not still "be there" in the morning. She said (honestly), "Oh honey, I'll still be here in the morning. I just may not be moving." Nice mom.
Still I asked a nurse type friend to come and have a listen to the lungs. Not so good. The technical term was "Rice Crispies". Still not so bad so I waited overnight -she was still moving next day but it had been a bad night plumbing attachment wise. Thank God for head colds. Fortunately it was my neighbor's turn to drive the kids into school so my other half took over lunch making , book bag packing duties and I did damage control... and then I took my mom in pursuit of medical care.
Her oxygen seemed not so bad at the urgent care place so they left us to wait our turn. Which gave it time to drop into the straight-to the-ER-after-2hours-here-watching-bad-cooking-shows range. At the ER, other than the receptionist asking my mom a question while her mouth was still full from the breakfast bar we'd shared on the way and then when my mom merely nodded saying, "Oh how cute, she's chewing away on her gum," in what I assume was her (the receptionist's) special voice for talking to imbeciles, other than that everyone was very nice and very impressed that an almost 94 year old could look so good and be so ... not an imbecile when it turned out both lungs were pretty full of fluid.
So it was a day almost as long as that sentence and perfectly tooped off by the old people in the booth behind us at the Mexican restaurant we took our exhausted 6 year old and ravenous 27 year old (with the crutches in case you were needing more pitifulness here) for a late dinner asking the waiter (the old people did, back from the beginning of this sentence) to ask us to ask the 6 year old to stop swinging his feet. OK, they said "kicking" but in fact he really was just swinging his feet but the booth had a board across the bottom so they did hit it. I ran out of the restaurant and cried in the van. For the last 4 days my mom has cried at everything. I thought it was moodiness. Or pain. Turns out it was having to fight so hard to breath. She stopped crying when they put the oxygen on. I'm going toget some. Or maybe just shorten my sentences and take breath everynow and then.