The rest of my life

Besides not running last week, a whole lot of other stuff was going on in my life.
I spent all week worried sick about my grandpa. My grandfather is 81 years old and naturally in declining health, although he is as sharp as ever (just two weeks ago I received a typical email from him - a clever, amusing, charming, and well-written page-long letter full of good scientific information. He's a retired engineer with his doctorate from Yale and hasn't lost his luster). A ureter anomaly has left him prone to urinary tract infections, and he was taken to the ED last week with a severe one (it had been treated unsuccessfully with oral antibiotics at home). To my horror I learned that he was admitted in septic shock. He was put on a ventilator and dialysis, as he was in renal, vascular, and respiratory failure by that time. Given the severity of the illness and his age, I started saying my goodbyes to him. This was pretty tough for us, as we lost a dear friend to sepsis just last year. I couldn't believe I was facing it again.
I kept my phone by me that night, expecting him to pass when his heart rate dropped in the early morning hours, but instead I was surprised to learn that he had been taken off his pressers (to increase blood pressure) over the night. His BP maintained 100/60 on its own. To everyone's complete shock, the next evening he pulled his vent out (he was lightly sedated on propofol).
So astonishingly my grandfather recovered from sepsis. The survival rate of severe sepsis is only 50 or 60% in any case, but in a man of his age with underlying health conditions, survival is rare. However, he is not out of the woods yet. While in vascular failure he suffered a massive heart attack, and examination revealed that he had arterial blockage. He underwent triple bypass just yesterday, and we're kind of holding our breath for his recovery. That's a lot of intervention right after a near-death illness.

Besides that, my job has had some unexpected twists and turns. Despite the fact that I run the best pharmacy in the city (What? I do. It's amazing. Takes pharmacy to a whole new level), I've had a whole lot of turnover. My part time pharmacist quit to open his own pharmacy (I'm happy for him, but it was a little under-handed: he scooped up a lot of inside information on our company while he worked for me, knowing he was opening his own place), and I had to hire a new one; I hired an additional tech, who left to work for another company after just three weeks; now I'm in the process of hiring yet another new tech. Unfortunately these changes coincided with the planned launch of two new initiatives I've had to pull back on due to lack of staffing, so I'm a little behind on my self-imposed schedule. It doesn't look like I can catch up anytime soon, either: I have a business trip in June that will take me out of the office, and I will also be training the staff at 20 - YES I SAID TWENTY - new HIV stores in my market. That's no big deal if you are a trainer for a living, but I still have a pharmacy to manage!

So, it looks like I'll be getting into some busy weeks coming up.
There is actually more to the hiring new pharmacy employees story. Much more. So, I'll get back to you on that later when I think you could use a little more boredom.
Happy hump day!