"He coughs up blood?" "Yes, but...not like he used to."

(bonus points to the first person to recognize the title reference)

Ohhhhhkay then. So far today has been both disgusting and boring.

So this morning I wandered into Timprov's room and said, "Hey, guess what? I sold another story to Nature!" And he said, "I appear to be spitting up blood!" And I said, "I like my news better!"

Timprov tried the ice water gargle, and it was doing nothing to even touch the blood, so we rousted markgritter out of bed and drove down to the ER. Long story short, Timprov needed his tonsilectomy recauterized, so they did that, and now we are home. This involved four hours of him sitting in the hospital spitting blood every 20-30 seconds (and me sitting with him; we sent Mark home to work) until they could get the OR and an ENT to do the surgery, then about an hour of him being in surgery and recovery, and then another hour of waiting for the antibiotics to show up so we could take him home.

I am not going into detail about the four hours because the detail would be really unpleasant and not serve any point. But seriously, he was just miserable, and there was nothing I could do about it, and there was nothing anybody else could do about it either.

In more minor not-fun stuff, I have also not had my workout for the day, and as a consequence of that and my surroundings have had rather little food. Timprov is not quite back to square one, but it's a pretty big annoying setback. He has crashed out in front of a DVD and is hanging in there all right, as well as can be expected under the circumstances. And Ista, of course, is worried; she doesn't realize that this will mean a trip to Pumphouse Creamery for her this evening to get a resupply of banana ice cream, honey ice cream, and anything else that calls out, "Good for sickies!" to Mark and me. (Pumphouse Creamery is very nice to pups.)

The discharge nurse started telling us a story about a girl she'd encountered who had to have her tonsils recauterized twice; she realized belatedly that this was perhaps less than cheerful under the circumstances. (But she emphasized--belatedly--that this was the only case she had every heard of for such a thing.) So for greater good cheer: tell us good foods that aren't edgy or crispy. Or tell us where to find a good recipe for miso soup.

Oh, and the story is called "Quality Control."