Like the title says, “Blarg.” I feel like I’ve been dragged sideways through an old-fashioned keyhole, then shaken out and tossed over the back of a chair like a pair of unwashed Levi’s. Which is my colorful way of saying that the past week has been unusually rough. I’m utterly drained, in just about every way you can think of: physically, intellectually, emotionally. Soon to be financially, too, thanks to that tax situation I mentioned a while back.

So what’s been going on that’s so terrible? Well, for one thing, there have been a couple of items in the news this week that have hit me like a solid fist to the belly; they’ll be getting their own blog entries when I get the chance to write them up. I’ve also had to contend with my semi-annual journey into the Black Hole of Depression; it hits every year around this time, probably as a result of the gloomy, final sputters of winter, as well as the usual annual reminders of things I prefer to keep to myself. Let’s just say that every so often, I notice I’m a long, long way from being the man I used to believe I was, and the life I used to think I was destined to live. I can’t help but imagine my 21-year-old self would be incredibly disappointed in my 39-year-old self, and that really gets me down.

The big problems this week, however, have been health-related. The Girlfriend and I have both been sicker than dogs, and, in her case, things got bad enough to require a trip to the emergency room.

First, a little necessary back story on Anne’s condition: she’s been fighting some kind of bronchial infection for close to two months now. She has seen her doctor and been following the doc’s advice, but the damn stuff just won’t go away. She’ll improve over the space of several days or a week, then all of a sudden it surges back and she wakes up in the middle of the night seized by a vicious coughing fit. One round of antibiotics seemed to put the bug on the run, so — again following her doctor’s instructions — she did not immediately begin the second round, but instead waited to see if the symptoms returned. When they did, she took one pill from the new batch of antibiotics and spent the rest of the weekend puking. That was a couple of weeks ago.

Now we’re up to last weekend, the one where I happily spent the Saturday afternoon listening to Bonnie Raitt while I was doing housework. Anne’s lung crud was flaring up again, so, on Sunday morning, she decided to try the second round of antibiotics again. Both of us figured the previous side-effects must’ve been simply a coincidence.

We were wrong. Something about this second batch of antibiotics does not agree with her.

Within a couple hours of taking the pill, she was worshipping the porcelain altar again… and again… and again. None of the home remedies I had on hand at my place were even slowing the vomiting, let alone stopping it, so I ran down to the corner Walgreen’s for something with a larger caliber. When I got back, she was in the bathroom for the sixth time by my count, and now complaining about being dizzy as well. I started worrying that she was dehydrating, so, silly as it may seem to go to the ER for an upset stomach, I put her in the car and headed for the hospital.

I don’t regret the decision — based on how much fluid they pumped into her, she really was dehydrated — but we nevertheless opened ourselves up for a hell of an ordeal. First, there was the wait to get into a room (she threw up a couple more times during that). Then, once we landed a room, there was another wait until someone finally looked at her (more barfing). Then another wait for an IV and some medication (which, when it finally came, fixed her stomach in about five minutes). We waited for blood tests, then for a chest x-ray and more tests after the ER doc became concerned about Anne’s low blood-oxygen levels (the fact that she’s had a lung infection for six weeks, which we each mentioned half a dozen times, never quite seemed to sink in with anybody). All in all, we were at the hospital for roughly ten hours. Thank god we had a private room with a TV, although I have to admit, it was pretty weird to watch a M*A*S*H marathon in an actual hospital.

Killing most of a Sunday in the emergency room would’ve been tiring enough, but as it happens, I was sick, too, feverish and coughing (Anne’s nurse remarked, as he was unhooking her IV line to let us leave, that he expected to see me back in a couple of days). Which meant that by the time we got home at around 1 AM Monday morning, I knew there was no way either of us were going to make it to work the next day. I sent an email to my corporate overlords and The GF and I spent the day holding hands on my couch, coughing in synchronicity and watching DVDs.

I stayed home on Tuesday as well, sleeping through most of the day and thus guaranteeing that when nighttime came, I’d be absolutely unable to close my eyes. When Wednesday morning finally arrived, I staggered bleary-eyed into work… and there confronted some ridiculousness that just added to my malaise. Seems that my bug wasn’t Anne’s bug, it was something that had swept my office — roughly half the cube farm had been out sick on Monday, and a sarcastic comment from one of my coworkers sent our easily excitable HR director calling the CDC for information on tuberculosis, convinced she had an outbreak on her hands. (She actually called me at home on Monday and inquired about my symptoms, leading me to wonder if she thought I was trying to fake a sick day.)

I’m mostly over my crud now — just a steadily improving cough and some sniffles at this point — but Anne continues at the same general level she’s been at for two months. She’s frustrated, angry even, and I can’t blame her.

I’m frustrated, too, for different reasons… I have a lot of topics to blog about, and yet more neglected projects around my house, and the clock is running. It’s always running, always slipping away from me, and that feeds the Black Hole like a stream of hydrogen particles flowing downward from a neighboring star. Yeah, I know, my metaphors are impossibly geeky. What can I say? I’m a geek.

Still, I guess the week hasn’t been entirely bad. Anne and I successfully ordered tickets for the first of two Rick Springfield concerts this year that are going to be within convenient driving distance. (This first one will be in southern Utah, at an outdoor amphitheater we’ve never visited, at the end of April, a nice time to head for red-rock country; the second show will be in September, at the old reliable in Wendover, Nevada.)

And just yesterday, I stumbled across the news that all of Dave Stevens’ wonderful Rocketeer stories — which I’ve written about before, most extensively when Stevens died — are going to be collected into a single, comprehensive volume to be called The Complete Rocketeer. The Rocketeer had a tortured history that spanned multiple publishers (you can read about that in exhaustive detail here; it’s quite a story, if you’re interested in this sort of thing), and even though there were only ever a handful of standalone issues in addition to a few chapters printed in the backs of other comic titles, the entire story has never before appeared in the same collection. (Two previous collections — by different publishers, naturally, and now long out of print — each covered only about half the material.) All of the material is going to be recolored by an artist who was handpicked by Stevens himself before his death — you can read about that here — and The Complete Rocketeer will be available in both a standard hardcover and a deluxe edition that includes additional, previously unpublished artwork. I can’t wait; put me down for one of those deluxe versions, will you?

Incidentally, as long as we’re talking about The Rocketeer, when is Disney finally going to do right by the charming 1990 film adaptation and put out a DVD version worth owning? Come on, guys, you’ve released frickin’ Newsies in anamorphic widescreen, so why does Cliff Secord get a lousy unenhanced letterbox job that looks only incrementally better than my old pan-n-scan VHS cassette?