Technology fail

Not happy.

I had mentioned that the memory stick on my camera has stopped working, so I can only store 7 pictures on my camera at a time. Well, not only have I not fixed this issue yet, but I have a brand-new, much more serious technology issue. My external hard drive has stopped functioning. This is where I store all of my pictures, videos, and music. And it won't communicate with my computer or my work computer. I just brought it in to Geek Squad, praying that it was just a bad cord...nope. So now I'm sending it off to data recovery, which will cost somewhere between $250-$1600.

Technology fail. And personal fail, too. I had been getting concerned about what would happen if that thing ever crashed and looking into ways of backing that very valuable data up (disks, memory sticks, another external hard drive, or internet back up), but before I could act on any of these ideas, it was too late. So even though my "bad cord" prayer failed me, I'm now desperately praying that they are able to recover the data (otherwise ALL of my kid pictures, save what I've uploaded to this blog, are gone forever), and that it doesn't cost $1600. On the one hand, my pictures of my kids are absolutely invaluable to me, so I will pay it whatever it costs and then, of course, make sure I never have this problem again. On the other hand...boy, do I ever not have $1600 laying around right now. Cry.

While I'm sharing about things that make me unhappy, I should share my long overdue Cori coughing update. In short...she's still coughing. We're now at 6 months of coughing, kids.

Medical treatment fail.

At our July appointment at Children's Hospital, we had another x-ray (nothing in the lungs) and an upper GI (no evidence of reflux, which doesn't rule it out...just doesn't prove it) and met with Dr. Pryor, the pediatric pulmonary specialist. The diagnosis was that it's most likely reflux and/or asthma, which is what we had already been told by our pediatrician, but that we should treat with the same medicines we'd already tried for 3 months. Three months of Xantec 2x a day and using the nebulizer to administer Albuterol 3x a day.

Have I mentioned how much Cori hates the nebulizer? Nothing like clamping a face mask to a crying baby for 15 minutes 3 times a day.

Fast forward a month. The cough is not any better. In fact, for the first 2 weeks after starting treatment, the cough was much worse. This may or may not have anything to do with the medicine, but it happened nonetheless. I finally got to the point where I just wasn't willing to continue with the nebulizer and stopped all treatment. I finally called Children's Hospital to tell them this on Wednesday, and they felt like it was time to change to some stronger medicines. So now Cori is taking Prilosec once a day instead of Xantec, and is using the nebulizer to administer Pulmacort 2x a day (no Albuterol at the moment, though we may end up doing both since one is for opening the airways and the other is to treat inflammation). The Pulmocort nebulizes faster (7-8 minutes instead of 15), but comes with a risk of developing thrush, and since we still breastfeed, that's a risk for her and me. We're on day 4, and the cough is definitely worse than it was 5 days ago...but I'll give it a month. And we'll see.

On a different subject, I've clearly fallen behind on my "3 blog entries a month" goal (remember August? Clearly I didn't...). However, my company has decided to close next week with all employees taking an unpaid week to try to balance our budget for the year, and I've been looking forward to taking care of many small tasks that are tough to accomplish with kids around, such as organizing my filing cabinet or getting my hair cut. Ironically backing up and organizing my computer files was going to be on my to-do list...anyway...because I update my blog so infrequently, it has turned into a super long list of essential updates rather than just being able to share a funny story here or a cute picture or video there. Therefore, since I still have tons of updates to share (vising Uncle Paul, new volleyball season, and - big one - our house being officially on the market!) and a bit of time on my hands this next week, my goal is to do a blog a day for this entire week. So check back daily, friends and family, and feel free to hold me accountable if you don't hear anything new until November.

And because I've been so focused on failure with this blog, I'd like to end with a win. Until tomorrow.