SWINE FLU

Beware. . . The Caughran family and all our visitors during Colin's Hospital stay may have been exposed to the Swine Flu. According to the Houston Chronicle, the first US death from the swine flu happened in Houston at Texas Children's Hospital. The child was from Mexico and had been visiting Brownsville when he/she got sick and was transferred to TCH on 4/14 (while we were still in the same hospital). Now it is very unlikely that just being in the same building could lead to our infection, but it gets worse. . .

Since baby Colin had a fever for an unknown reason, the ID doctors (Infectious Disease Doctors) were involved in his case. Now I am not an expert on types of doctors, but I assume it is the ID doctors that would be involved on a swine flu case. . .

Da Boy

Baby Colin has spent his first weekend back home from the Hospital and he has made a few new milestones.

First some general updates. He has quickly acclimated to home life again. He is back on his schedule, eating well and sleeping well. He had to suffer through three days of oral antibiotics. I use the term suffer because the medicine smelt like something an animal would produce if it ate only cherries. He still is fever-free.

Now to the milestones.

First: After having zero interest with sippy cups and not drinking anything on his own (he thinks he is special and shouldn't have to learn to drink on his own) he just all of a sudden took the sippy cup with both hands and started to down it. (I think the turning point was when I explained to him that in College you drink a lot, and the ladies will not like him if he has to have his mom feed him beer.)

Second: He is able to walk behind his walker. Prior to the surgery, he would just pull the walker on himself because he was too unstable, but last night he was able to walk behind it for a considerable distance and if he fell or sat down, he was able to stand back up without pulling it on himself. Not that this is that exciting, but we were worried that the surgery would set him back in walking, but it looks like he is picking up right from where he left off.

What is up with the Library?

I don't want to get into my take on the government and how it spends (wastes) our tax dollars, but the library in Houston upsets me. A few weeks back I was riding the bus a lot and wanted something to read. I found a book online that looked interesting and wanted to buy it. Lisa said it was too expensive and I should try to find it at the library. Well she called the Harris County public library and they didn't have it. They failed at their only purpose of existence. I assumed it was normal that the harris County public library didnt have it because it is an obscure book. I did find that the Rice library had it (a private library).

Since I am no longer a Rice student, I couldnt check it out, but my friend Will is and he got it for me. After 4 months of not returning it and getting hounded by him to return the book because he was tired of renewing the book, I decided that it was good enough to buy to keep as reference. So I go online and find a used one in Indiana for 50% off. I pull the trigger and wait the 10 days for it to arrive.

Well I get the book from Indiana and find out it is a used Library book . . . from the Harris County public Library.

Why is Houston's public library system selling their books? Why do I have to pay money to some random seller in Indiana to get my local public library book and cant just check it out?

Just another example of a public institution that fails to do its job.

Biggest Loser

Lisa and I are big fans of the biggest loser on NBC. We pretty much watch it religiously. Actually more than religiously since we miss church, but never miss the show (thanks tivo). Well Constellation's Houston office does a biggest loser competition every year to help people get back into shape for spring. Being a fan of the show and being a little portlier than last year, I signed up. My boss rigged the teams to add Burns and I to his team because he thought he could force us to lose weight. Our team "Realized Losses" was ready to take on the competition for 75 days.

Fast forward 68 days . . . Leading up to the second to last weigh in, I was in second place for the guys, but I asked the Admin in charge of the weights to roll my weight (use my old weighin weight), so the first place guy didnt know how close I was to him. (I was within 1%, but he thought he had a more than 4% lead). The night before the weighin everyone does crazy stuff to try to lose weight. (For example one guy lost 14 lbs in the last two days by fasting, not drinking water and going to the Sauna. His total weight loss was only 15 lbs overall including the 14.) My goal was for the 1st place guy to take it easy the final night since he thought he had it in the bag.

At the final weighin I had dropped about 7 lbs of water weight for a total of 27 lbs and won by over 1.5%. Everyone was surprised since I "came out of no-where" to win. the organizer even came by to make sure I hadnt done anything drastic in the last week to drop a bunch of wieght.

I was the Male biggest loser with 13% weight loss. Now you may ask "Colin, after torturing yourself for 75 days, what did you get as a prize?" Well this unfortunately was a team competition and my team failed me miserably. My boss (who as you remember rigged the teams for Burns and I to be on his team) only lost .8 lbs for the competition. To make things worse, he cut 5 lbs in the last day to actually record the .8 lb loss instead of a 4 lb gain. Clearly he didnt understand the concept of the game since he said the weight gain was muscle. Instead of getting $250 bucks, I lost my entry fee ($50) and got a Constellation branded duffle bag as the individual winner on the last day I was a Constellation employee (the next day we became Macquarie Employees).

By the end of the day, I had gained the 7 lbs of water back, but I have only gained 1 lb (excluding the water weight) since the competition ended.

btw, Tara on the show is a beast. She has won 11 or 12 of the 16 physical competitions on the show.

*picture care of NBC

Forgot about the blog

Derek reminded me that we have a blog and that we should be keeping it updated. Well our life has been turned upside down as of late with baby Colin's surgery. Lisa has continued to blog, but she has been blogging on a different site that Texas Children's hospital provides.

Check it out!

You can use that link to get daily updates on BC's progress. At this point he has been in the hospital for about 12-13 days.

I added a picture of him so that you can see that he is doing well. He has to stay in the hospital for more time to treat a fever that may or may not have been caused by Meningitis. They can't do a spinal tap to confirm it.

Well many other events have happened over the past few weeks that I will blog about over the coming days. One of the more exciting ones is that my neighbor finally became an adult and left his teenage years . . .