Well, this week has certainly been… "interesting."
My second son came down with a fever last Thursday. When he had a sore throat, we took him to his doctor, who checked for strep, but didn't find anything. When he broke out in a rash over the weekend, we went to the doctor again, who diagnosed it as a rash that sometimes occurs when the fever breaks — indeed, his temperature had dropped that day. By Monday, though, he was still feverish (his temperature kept randomly spiking), and he had barely eaten or drunk anything since the fever first hit, so I called a friend to assist me in giving him a priesthood blessing. On Tuesday morning, he started having severe stomach pains, and my wife took him to the doctor. She then called me at work to say, "Can you meet us at the Children's Hospital ER?"
We spent most of the day in the ER. They did X-rays and a CAT scan to check for appendicitis and any other internal injuries that might have required surgery, but everything came up negative. Eventually they decided to check him into a regular hospital room, but at some point before admission they changed their minds and checked him into the ICU instead so they could monitor him more closely.
I spent the night at the hospital with him there, and the next morning my wife came to switch places with me while I went back to work. His blood pressure was dropping, so they decided to operate to install a more direct blood pressure monitor. In the meantime, we decided to get him a Nintendo DSi to try and help him get through his stay. After the operation, the DSi lifted his spirits, but only temporarily. He had such difficulty coming out of the anesthesia that he couldn't even hold the stylus.
Later in the day, they ended up putting him in an incubator with a breathing tube and another IV, so they could administer antibiotics, blood pressure medication, nutrients, and sedatives (they say it's common to have to keep kids sedated, since being hooked up to all those tubes is very traumatic; considering how high-strung my son is, I don't doubt they're needed here).
That's pretty much were he is as of now — in the incubator, sedated, on medication, closely monitored. They're pretty sure it's a bacterial infection, but they don't have an exact diagnosis yet. His fever keeps spiking from time to time, but they do a culture every time and find no new growths. At least they're able to gradually reduce his blood pressure medication as that stabilizes.
In other news, I was supposed to help out an old friend tonight with some computer problems. I called to ask if we could reschedule, since I'll probably be in the hospital tonight. He of course said that would be fine. Then he asked if I had heard about a mutual friend of ours. "…What about him?" I asked. He said he was having some personal problems, and that I could google it. I thought that was kind of odd, since I didn't expect to see someone's personal problems on Google. I didn't think I knew anyone who would garner wide internet recognition. Yet when I googled his name, there came up several stories about him being investigated by the SEC, pictures of his home and "assets being seized", etc.
Not only was it a shock to hear this about him personally, but it was also a little unnerving to realize how close I was to the situation. I do some freelance computer work, and I wrote for him an account management program which basically automated some of the tasks he was doing in spreadsheets. As I'm reading these news stories, they mention account statements sent to clients with bad information, and I realize that it's my program that generated these very statements.
I don't expect any harm will come my way. The allegations against my friend have nothing to do with my program directly — my code only took the information he fed it, made calculations based on his specifications, and showed the results; and the allegations are solely based on factors outside of that. I never even received any money for my services — being too much of a perfectionist, I guess, I didn't want to bill him until I felt the product was "finished", and it seemed there was always just one more thing I didn't feel was quite right. So far, no one has contacted me to make any requests for information, but if they do, I can always provide the entire source code for the application and demonstrate that it only works to track the values it's told, not to independently audit or track investments.
It's a good thing I don't smoke, drink, or do drugs, because if I did, this would be the wrong week to try to quit.
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