The dog food is Royal Cannin. I misspoke. The dog is 13 years old which is I think also towards the later range of expected lifespan for the breed. She did finally get up from her rug. She could hardly walk though so DH took her to her water dish. She tried to lap but couldn't, so he used a syringe and gave her several drinks. She snuggled right into his arms so now she is laying in his lap while he works. The vet practice is not open due to the ice. The emergency on call vet said she could see the dog tomorrow. I called another practice, and they are not open either. When I say that we have dangerous roads right now, I'm not exaggerating. We live rural and those are the only two vet practices within 20 miles. I hope doggie either passes quickly or perks more because if she gets into signs of pain, mil is going to have a really, really hard time with it, and she has serious problems keeping her blood pressure down due to kidney function. This is bad for both of them.

Thanks. I'll call her and have her watch for that.

She feeds her some sort of high end from the vet canned dog food because she has so few teeth left. We'll see if she holds on to tomorrow. The roads are so bad there is a four car pile up just a few miles from our house. MIL is 83 and shouldn't even walk to her car. I'm just not sure how to gauge if the dog is in pain or not.

The stem cell line is from aborted fetuses from back in the 60's. They have not used any new fetal tissues in decades, and if they needed them, have indicated that they can simply get stem cells from donated chord blood which is really getting to be a big thing in researching, no need to take tissues. No new abortive tissues necessary. Here is one of many articles on it. https://www.verywellhealth.com/do-vaccines-contain-aborted-fetal-tissue-260337

MIL just called and her ten year old king charles spaniel is unable to walk, not eating and drinking, but she isn't doing a lot of panting. She threw up yesterday but had no other symptoms of anything else being gone. She doesn't lift her head - currently laying on her side on her rug - but she does make eye contact with MIL when she pets her. She has been slowing down a lot lately and was a rescue from a puppy mill so she has never been in good health. We've had an ice storm here and the roads are really bad so I'm trying to suss this out before making a treacherous trip to her house and from there to the vet. What are the other signs of pain besides panting? Thanks to everyone who responds!

I had blood drawn last year and as part of the panel my titers were checked because I work with children so much, and we travel regularly to a vulnerable country. My titers were still good. DH needed a two shot series because his immunity waned. We were totally unwilling to risk it. Neither of us want measles in our 50's!

I got weighed down in First Man. The thing is, I wanted to love it and there were a ton of good things about it. But at some point the never ending litany of acronyms and numbers concerning every last one of the experimental aircraft he flew, caused it to bog down enough that I kind of lost it. Maybe someday I'll finish. But, I'm having a much nicer read with Gene Kranz autobiography. The first attempt I made a at "Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Braid" ended with me having too much college homework and practicing to do. I put it away about half way through, forgot about it, graduated, married, and had kids. I picked it up again when the kids were little and managed one more chapter. But then it was another five years before I finished it. I'm not generally like that, however, sometimes your brain simply needs to give up on something for a while or altogether. Life is short.

I need to do this.

We've recently had a bad situation in our family. My cousin, who was determined to find a baby her mother had given up for adoption several years before she herself was born, did the DNA thing with contact information. There is a lot to the story that I don't feel comfortable relating here, suffice it to say, the details are such that going and looking for this stranger was VERY VERY unwise. The consequence of which has been a family terrorized by an unstable, stalker who is in fact a biological relative, but would never known about them or where to find them if cousin had been willing to listen to reason. Strangers are just that. Strangers. DNA means nothing. Really. It isn't always unicorns and rainbows. So please everyone who is doing this to find blood relations or for genealogy, watch out. Think carefully before giving any identifying information, any contact information. OP, I don't blame you at all for refusing to give up information to this person. Who really knows what kind of human is on the other end?

I agree with this. The state itself is not a medically trained entity. They should not insert themselves between the doc and his/her patients. Oh, there will likely always be a doc here and there who can be paid off to say whatever, but they are few and far between. Most go into the profession to help, not kill, and not lie to the state and lose their medical licenses. So, yes, this is over-reach.

I think the three that astound me the most, people being against them, is tetanus, diptheria, and polio. Seriously. Tetanus is nearly always fatal in children. You can get it simply from pricking your finger on a rose or blackberry bush. It is a misnomer that one must cut oneself on something rusty. It lives in the soil. Therefore, the concept that "I'll just get my kid the anti toxin at the ER or Doc's office when they get cut" is nuts. Truly nuts. Do these people run to the ER every time their child has a scrape on their foot, pokes a finger on something outside? Really. Nope. They aren't going anywhere until that kid starts getting sick and by then it is too late. Tetanus deaths are making a comeback. It is a HIDEOUS death! HIDEOUS. And neonatal tetanus is fatal, fatal, fatal so unvaccinated mothers leave their unborn at great risk. Go google it Google infant tetanus. Newborns of unvaccinated mothers have no antibodies to inherit. Here's a link if you can stomach the photos and diagrams. If you are sensitive, you probably ought not look. https://www.google.com/search?q=neonatal+tetanus+pictures&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=RqHswRVXvuoA3M%3A%2CKVLn593M6Sv7UM%2C_&usg=AI4_-kTRXmb7dpZTzFCDPo_mbdkif06MQw&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiXt9GszaXgAhULoYMKHesqDLIQ9QEwAXoECAUQBg#imgrc=RqHswRVXvuoA3M: Diphtheria, my great uncle, Mitchell, died when he was five of diphtheria. It was an agonizing, traumatic, way to die, and all of his siblings were permanently traumatized by it because he died at home since the whole family was under quarantine back in the day. One my grandmother's strongest memories was of him begging, "Mama, mama, mama, I need air, I need air. Help me!" While he lay in a slow, horrifying several day descent into death, my great grandmother sat there sewing his burial suit. The only people in developed nations who experience the grip of diphtheria are the unvaccinated. Sure, we have supportive care now. Sure. But even with that the mortality rate is around 10%, and there are debilitating, lifelong respiratory problems associated with having survived it not to mention myocarditis, paralysis, and polyneuropathy. Polio - I guess "bring back the iron lung" is the mantra of those against that vaccine. I don't know what else to say. No cure, high mortality rate, debilitating to survivors, no cure. When the NIH says treatment is "bed rest, pain relievers, and portable ventilators" note the lack of anything else, then it seems to me one would be really NOT wanting their child to get polio. I watched dh's aunt drag a foot, leaning on a cane, in chronic, awful pain for decades due to polio as a child. No thanks. Polio is spread through contaminated water and food. Well contrary to the popular belief of deniers, guess what, we have plenty of that in the US these days so it wouldn't take much to get an epidemic started. And as for measles, it utterly wipes out your immune system. So there ya go. You didn't get the "toxins" from the vaccine, but if you get it, then in exchange for that perceived risk, you get to become prey for every other darn thing you ever had immunity to because it is so savage. So much for all of those chicken pox parties. No more immunity there. My mother had measles. She can attest to how sick she was for years afterward with ZERO ability to fight off a darn thing. It went through her school, and the teachers noted that none of their students were healthy for years afterward. But I guess that's preferable. On these ones, I just don't get it. I really don't. But my niece thinks she can cure them all with vitamin c and veggie smoothies. Sigh..........

In the case of my sister in law, she calls herself a naturopath but has ZERO training other than some Reiki certification, and some classes from a non-accredited, for profit, the degree isn't worth the paper it is printed on kind of organization. She's never even had an anatomy and physiology class! It is a problem in Michigan. There isn't enough regulation or enforcement. There are some really great programs for this, one of which is in Arizona and was headed up by an MD, medical professor, Dr. Andrew Weil. Really good stuff. So I know there are very legitimate programs that help blend traditional western medicine with legitimate alternative methodologies. But my sister in law would never agree to study something like that because unless a person needs trauma surgery to save their life or a bone cast, or a prosthetic, she doesn't otherwise believe in traditional medicine. One of her "treatments" for cancer is to tell the patient to starve themselves with radically low blood sugars so they "starve their cancer". I am waiting for someone to die of this and their family to sue her. I would help them find an awesome attorney! She is just that dangerous.

My boys all had to provide proof of MMR vax or titers in order to attend college. Maybe there are colleges that don't require it, but think a lot of the public universities in Michigan do, and especially so for dorm residents. I'm all for it. What I love about my boys' schools is that the health center offers them for free, all kinds of vaccines, and freshmen who want to attend but who weren't vaccinated prior, can start accessing shots a month before school begins. They can get a waiver on their MMR and tetanus in order to move into the dorms because they have started the process so it doesn't delay starting classes. They also offer some that we can't get at our rural health department, meningitis B is one of them. So all of my guys were able to get that vaccine for free. Meningitis scares me when it comes to college students living on campus. It is fatal so quickly, and everyone lives in such tight quarters.Meningitis has been known to make its rounds of college campuses with devastating results, so I was thrilled when they could get the second type.

Agreed, For my niece, the disconnect began with her mother. Her mother embraced some sort of anti-medicine, "natural" healing, essential oils cure everything, iridology, reflexology, Vitamin C and veggies will cure everything including cancer, nonsense and then discovered she could make huge money off it by calling hersel a naturopath and giving very dangerous advice to people in a "practice". She told her daughter that a month after being given her MMR vax, she contracted pneumonia so obviously the vax killed her immune system. REALLY???? She got it because her father had pneumonia first. (It was viral pneumonia.) So she grew up thinking this crap. But, I just can't give her a pass anymore. She's dangerous, and I think her children should be taken away from her because she is so incredibly extreme. I've seen them put in very real peril over lack of medical treatment. When they all came down with pertussis (which she did have confirmed by blood work because she wanted to brag that she and her kids had it and survived - staggers the imagination), she sent her very contagious eldest child to her ex husband's house to infect his pregnant wife as revenge and bragged about it. Wife was fully vaccinated, and pretty wise, told her husband that she could have no part in the insanity of his ex, and promptly sent her step daughter home to mommy until she was better. It was a huge fight because niece kept insisting they take my great niece back because she was doing them a favor by building their natural immunity! I couldn't believe it! Who uses a child as typhoid mary???? It was like that scene from Star Trek Voyager where the family deliberately bred a child to sacrifice to the Borg in order to infect the hive with a disease. For the record, my ex nephew in law has exactly NO SPINE. He should be trying to get custody of his daughter, but he makes no effort at all. Her child was horrifically ill for six weeks. I thought that child would bust her ribs from the coughing, and end up with a secondary infection that would kill her. All her mother would do was feed her high doses of vitamin C and veggies. After six weeks, symptoms began subsiding, and niece announced, "See! I'm curing it with nutrition and vitamin c!" No one could convince her that this was not true, and the virus had just run its course with her body finally able to form enough antibodies to attack it. Nope. Not in her head! How do you argue with someone so delusional? Yes, she has been turned in to CPS more than once for medical neglect. But nothing she does is bad enough, yet, for them to be willing to get off their asses and do anything. I guess she has to be allowed to kill a child before someone goes, 'Well darn. I guess we should have intervened." And she works as a waitress at a very busy restaurant so the worst thing is she is in prime position to transmit a lot of disease to a lot of people. Makes my brain bleed.

My head exploded the other day when my niece who allows no vaccinations, not even tetanus and has said that if her children were exposed to rabies she wouldn't even allow them to have those shots, is hoping for an epidemic in Michigan so she her three kids can get it and have "natural immunity!" Thankfully, we don't have anyone immune compromised in the family at this time, but I did say to her matter of factly that she needed to keep her kids away from us. I just simply won't be the one that gets in on my hands or something from babysitting her kids, and then transmits it to the transplant patient in my place of work. I know it is supposed to be only airborne. But I don't want to risk it! I am very concerned about these diseases making a comeback. I think there is a lot of complacency here in America where the assumption is that either we are now too healthy to die from these illnesses, or there is so much medical support that it's no big deal. They don't seem to get it! Vaccines were invented BECAUSE these viruses are so dangerous since we don't have treatments. Her take on it is that she can cure her kids of anything with large doses of vitamin C and vegetables. It scares me.

You would be surprised how many "experts" do not understand the fundamentals of kitchen chemistry. There are some GF only bakeries popping up around the country, and macrons are one of the most fun things they make. It's a French "cookie", but it comes in a ton of flavors. They look great on trays for parties as they tend to come in a lot of colors as well. So you might want to google for your state and see if you have one. My son in law is allergic to wheat and dairy. This past Christmas vacation we were able to find a GF bakery in Huntsville, AL. We got a birthday cake for grandson. OH MY WORD IT WAS AMAZING! I paid $40 so it wasn't a cheap endeavor, but since they rarely have desserts at their house, and with my wheat allergy I also don't get it that often, it was worth it. I hope you can find one within a reasonable distance. Sometimes getting special cookie or brownie when having to embark on such a life altering dietary restriction can help ease the pain.

Insurance is one reason. Many companies do not recognize PANDAS as a legitimate diagnosis/illness/disease. Therefore they refuse to pay for diagnostic testing and treatment. Illinois passed a law forcing insurance companies to cover it. However, not all states have done this.

LOL, definitely my normal business attire look!

Normally I cook a very nice dinner for dh and I on Valentine's Eve, but this year I have a children's choir rehearsal, so that won't be happening. I will at least make up some chocolate covered strawberries for when I get home.

That's all. I have to write one to wring a relatively small amount of money ($500) from a committee that has many hundreds of thousands to play with - never awards more than they earn in interest annually and usually quite a bit less so the whole thing keeps growing - and are some of the most tightfisted scrooges ever. This is for a children's choir for sashes, cummerbunds, and programs for their concert, and it will all remain property of the organization so it isn't like it is some sort of personal gift to the kids. Parents are donating all of the refreshments for the after-concert reception and this program is supposed to be entirely free due to being in a low median income area. I am totally opposed to asking parents to buy the items because some of my parents are counting pennies these days. Their children enrolled in this extracurricular because it was totally free, and they couldn't afford anything else. And yes, I do know that it isn't necessary for them to have these things, they are just nice additions that make the program more professional, and even the poorest of local school districts have tuxes and dresses for their choirs. My kids are having to wear black from the waist down, white from the waist up so again, not asking for much. I'm just being grumpy because I don't think it is too much to ask of the endowment committee. It's also February, the hated month for every educator, director, and conductor in the land. That's the worst thing about having a community arts program based job. Groveling gets old. Oh well, I guess I should don my sack cloth and ashes for the meeting, and be prepared to kiss toes. If you hate grant writing, please feel free to commiserate here.

These are almost identical to my palazzo pants. Very dressy. https://www.macys.com/shop/product/alex-evenings-wide-leg-chiffon-pants?ID=863962&CategoryID=157&RVI=Search_4&tdp=cm_choiceId~z863962~xcm_pos~zPos4 Something like this with an updo or half up and nice accessories would work just fine. https://www.macys.com/shop/product/alex-evenings-wide-leg-chiffon-pants?ID=863962&CategoryID=157&RVI=Search_4&tdp=cm_choiceId~z863962~xcm_pos~zPos4

I have a lot of dress pants for cold winter, and I for dressy occasions, a pair of black chiffon palazzo pants. They look wonderful, and I have several dressy shells and tunics to where with them in a variety of gem tones. When wearing a sleeveless shell, I have a black chiffon bolero, and longer black chiffon shrug. I have a burgundy wrap that I wear often with the black sparkly shell and black bolero just for extra warmth. It is very, very pretty. For church I where dress pants, maxi skirts or dresses with leggings underneath, and then some mid calf boots.

Again, the negotiated rate was because my grandmother slept the bulk of the day. She also didn't want to earn more because it would mess her up with SS and taxes. Most employers don't pay for people to take naps, work on their own sewing, etc. If grandma had been awake more, then absolutely she would have been paid a lot more.

When in doubt, google on your phone while shopping. I have found that numerous celiac health sites have evaluated hundreds of thousands of products. Most likely you can google the product name and flavor with GF, and it will pop up with a recommendation as safe or not. One of the pitfalls is "spices", "natural flavorings" because they aren't listing individual ingredients so there could be wheat/gluten in there or a high probability of contamination.

This is normal with a home health agency. They get quite a bit more and often have to take travel expenses out of it if clients are less than 10 miles apart so that is built into the hourly rate, and then the costs of operation plus profit for the agency. Independently contracted CNA's in the Detroit Suburban area get an average of $12.16, and this would be typical work for them especially med routines and such as well as help with bathing/self care. Some would also make meals and such. Most agencies do not offer housework except cleaning up after making a meal, and sometimes disinfecting a bathroom particularly if a client has an infectious issue. Just providing companionship/sitting would not be offered. Our county has an agency for the aging and disabled, and through taxes and grants, offer once per week housekeeping such as vacuuming, dusting, mopping, washing counters. This is a free service to people who qualify so the OP should see if this is available. I was brutally disappointed when a petition to get medicaid/medicare to pay for in home help - non skilled nursing - failed. Its crazy. Many disabled and elder persons end up in nursing homes on Medicare/Medicaid at $3500-$6000 a month. Meanwhile, providing a CNA once per day to make up some sandwiches, salads, soup whatever, help with self care, check that meds have been taken on time, and clean a bathroom is maybe $40 a day or $800 a month. Paying a relative to do some housework or provide the same service, again, so much less than a nursing home that it's a staggering savings to the tax payer. But nope. The initiative failed! I don't get it. OP, also my parents contracted with a lady in the community who was retired and wanted to make some extra money. My grandmother did not require skilled care, nor did she need lifting, just someone to walk with her when she went into the kitchen or bathroom, and keep a hold of her gate belt to steady her, then make meals, hand her pills at the right time, and vacuum, tidy up. She was allowed to bring books, embroidery, whatever hobby stuff she wanted because my grandmother slept quite a bit. She asked for $200 a week for Mon - Fri from 8:30 am. to 5:30 p.m. So it was a lot of hours, but she wasn't physically working for a lot of that time, and often got to sew, cross stitch, read, and nap. Maybe so that is something to consider. If the situation is similar, this relative will be on the clock for emergencies but not necessarily doing specific tasks, and enjoying free time. Instead of looking at it by the hour, look at it more like a blanket weekly salary.