derien | as if the world didn't have enough distractons

My Uncle, Don Jimcito, just phoned. Again, actually; he called too late yesterday morning and I was out signing up for the class. Probably missed me by just a few minutes. Anyhow.

Apparently my Mom has had a very minor heart event, an "ischemia" she says (because today, at his urging, she has looped the rest of us on the news), which means oxygen was cut off to the muscles but her doctor doesn't think it went on so long as to actually kill any muscles (which would be an infarction, if there was muscle death). She only told Don Jimcito because she needed a copy of her birth certificate in order to get hooked up with Medicaid so they can do a little exploration to see how blocked her arteries are. And he is sort of in the area - he's in Maine at the moment and said it was no problem to go to Rochester (NH) because he was going to Portsmouth (NH) today anyway.

However, she also mentioned in her email looping us that her doctor has had her on six different medications to lower her blood pressure since March 21st because she was having so much shortness of breath and leg cramps. And her blood pressure is great at the moment... but this still happened. Hm.

It's all just a bit distressing with her being so far away. Obviously, things are not bad enough yet that I should be flying to Korea, but if she was closer I'd want to be involved.

Don Jimcito says he has a phone setup that allows him to call Korea for free, so he'll coordinate times and talk with her direct to try to figure out just how things really are, and whether she's being The Brave Little Soldier, as he calls it. It's so hard to tell, sometimes, what's really going on with her because she'll put up that front. In this case I'm tempted to take things at face value.

Anywho. Studying is going well so far. Or it was, before he called. I just wanted to get this off my chest and now I think I'll be able to go back and concentrate. Eor is starting me out slow - he set me up with a book from about ~~1943~~ (ETA: It's actually from 1919*) which has exercises in it to get me working more smoothly with numbers before I start on the Statistics book, and I need it. Wow am I ever slow on addition. Simple addition. It's like numbers themselves intimidate me. There are 54 problems on the page and the instruction is to do them over until you can do them all in four minutes. So far I average about 18 problems in four minutes. Erm. "If we're going to do this, there's one thing that has to be made absolutely clear. I'm stupid when it comes to numbers."

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*I'm convinced that modern math books are fluffed up in order to make money. This is a perfectly servicable book for teaching kids from K through 12 (addition/subtraction/multiplication and algebra and geometry) and you can nearly fit it in your pocket.