January 2008 - Posts
What a wild couple of days. Mom and Dad left the hospital in Wellington about noon on Wednesday and went home. They seemed to be doing pretty well, but still really sore. Thursday morning they woke up with some difficulty breathing and in quite a bit of pain.
(begin rant)
So, we called Sumner County 911 at about 7 AM Thursday morning and asked them to transport them to Caldwell instead of Wellington. They told Dad that they would. I called them back a few minutes later to verify that they were taking them to Caldwell (mostly because that is where their doctor is) and the dispatcher said that they were, and she would contact the ambulance driver and tell them as well. Everything should be good, right?
Well, the ambulance gets there (bearing Wellington Fire/EMS on the side) and we ask them if they are taking us to Caldwell. The ambulance driver says no, they can't take them to Caldwell, they have to take them to Wellington. This does not make any of us happy and we end up loading both of my parents into my truck and I take them to Caldwell, something which could have been done 30 minutes earlier.
This doesn't make any sense to me that the dispatcher would send Wellington and not Caldwell. Why not? According to Google Maps, it's 18.8 miles and 34 minutes to drive from the Wellington EMS station to my parents house, then 19.5 miles and 36 minutes back to the Wellington hospital. Granted the ambulance will drive faster than the normal estimate, so let's say that the total travel time is 60 minutes instead of 70. Now, to get from the Caldwell hospital to my parent's house and back, it is 11.8 miles and 23 minutes each way. If I make the same deduction from Caldwell's travel time that I did from Wellington's, that means it takes 40 minutes to respond and return. Now let's add in 15 minutes for on-site care and loading, so here is what we have.
Wellington - 75 minutes
Caldwell - 55 minutes
A full 20 minute difference between the total response times for the two agencies. Now, this was not a life and death situation, but what if it had been? Those 20 minutes could be crucial. And why did the dispatcher tell me they would do something, but the ambulance told me they wouldn't? It is confusing and made me pretty upset. I know that my parents live in a rural area, but it doesn't make sense for Wellington to respond that far south.
(end rant)
So, here is the current injury tally on them. Dad has three fractured ribs, a bruised liver, possible bruised kidney, powder burns, and bruises all over his stomach and sides from the seat belt. Mom has bruised lungs, two torn-up knees (not sure about the extent of the damage yet) and a lot of external bruising. They'll recover, but it's going to take some time. I don't know how injured the other guy was, and I don't even know who it was. I pray that he's OK.
In case anyone is interested, here are some pictures of the vehicles. My parent's car is the gold Grand Marquis, and the blue Ranger was the other participant in their early morning bumper car excursion. Click on the pictures to embiggen.
When I got to work this morning, I was pretty pumped up. I had a
couple things on my to-do list that I really wanted to get cracking on,
and some general maintenance items on our office that needed to get
done. The day started out pretty well.
About 9:30 AM, my cell
phone rings. The caller ID on it shows that it's my Mom's cell phone.
She was having surgery today on her knee to try and fix some cartilage
tears and look at a ligament tear, so I figured it was her calling to
tell me how everything went, though I remember thinking that it must
have been an awfully quick surgery.
I pick up the phone and say
"Ya Ho Lord Helmet!" (Spaceballs reference, old family joke). I wasn't
expecting my mom's sister's voice to be the one that answered. She blew
off my now completely unfunny greeting and said, "Clay, your mom and
dad were in a car accident this morning. They're at the hospital, but
they're OK."
It's amazing that in that blink of a second
between "car accident" and "OK", numerous scenarios run through your
mind. You gird yourself for the worst possible sentence that could
follow, then feel an enormous amount of relief when it doesn't.
I
hang around the office for a bit, telling my boss what happened and
making sure it's OK to take off (and he graciously allowed me to,
further cementing my claim that I have the best employer in the world),
and generally tying up loose ends. Finally, about 11:30, I take off.
Fast
forward to about 7PM and we finally completed the drive from home to
childhood home. I haven't been in that hospital in years, and they
haven't changed much about it. Mom and Dad are pretty beat up. Dad has
powder burns on his chest from the airbags, along with a fair bit of
bruising and some breathing difficulties. Mom has powder burns on her
face, quite a bit of bruising (she bruises easily, always has), and two
swollen knees which I'm going to guess will both require surgery now.
They are both 66, so it may take a little bit of time to recover.
They took on a Ford Ranger with their Mercury Grand Marquis in a
head-on collision. A picture of the car actually made the front page of
the morning paper, which is amazing to me. I don't have a picture yet,
but I'll get some tomorrow when I go out there to get their personal
stuff out of the car. The car is absolutely trashed.
So, here I
sit at Mom's computer, pondering how thin the thread between life and
death is. What was seemingly a normal day, me at my desk, my wife and
kids having school, and my parents going to a doctor's visit, turned
into a small family emergency. Had the other car been going a little
faster, or hit them on the side instead of head-on, maybe I would be
typing an obituary to my parents, sitting in their house, surrounded by
their belongings. God watched over them today, and I'm thankful. I
looked at the call history on my phone earlier and saw my parents'
names and wondered what would happen if that call from them was the
last one.
They are still in the hospital, but should hopefully come home tomorrow. Your prayers are appreciated.
(This is kind of geeky. Consider this fair warning.)
So, I get an email from my hosting provider (ReliableSite.net, which has been wonderful) saying that they are moving to a new server location and that I have to check a bunch of the settings and addresses on my sites to make sure they still function correctly with the new settings. So, I start doing that and everything looks fine, right up to the point where I need to change the IP address of where the database that runs this software is located.
For a bit of background, I moved to RS.net from another hosting provider back in August of last year. The old provider was, well, not providing very well. My sites would go down without reason, and their support would take forever to reply to support tickets. When I moved my sites to RS.net, I moved all the files that are actually stored on the server first, then pointed them back to the database on my old provider, just to make sure that everything was functioning correctly on the new host. My new database wasn't ready yet, so I figured I would leave it pointing to the old one until it was ready in order to reduce downtime.
So, we're back to the present day. I went to change the IP address of the database and realized I had never changed it from the old host. I was still using the database from my old host, who I might mention I haven't been paying since I closed my account with them. I've had odd database things come up now and then, but never really looked into them like I probably should have. Now I know why they were happening.
The biggest problem was that I was actually writing posts against my old database, and I had to find something to sync the new one back up. I couldn't really go to my old provider and say "hey, I'm not actually a customer anymore, but could you send me a backup of my database that I've been using?"
Anyway, it's all fixed now. Everything should be running on the right server. Hate it when stuff like that happens.
Thought I would change around the look on here a bit. I'll need to do some editing of the sidebar to get my widgets back in there, but I think this looks a little better.
Oh, and yes, I'm still around. I've been enjoying the time off from school, writing, and a couple of three day weeks at work too. I'm ready to get back into things though. Look for some new stuff this week.
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