Drew will not be accompanying you on the Tilt-A-Whirl today.

Drew has come down with a rather serious and inconvenient inner ear disturbance that has left him flat on his back with his eyes screwed shut.

He started barfing in earnest yesterday evening while at work. More specifically, at a car fire.

I got to drive him, dizzy, nauseous, barfy, and moaning, (he was moaning, not me), to the ER. He was so dizzy he couldn't walk straight, so I got to push him around in a wheelchair, while trying not to make it, you know, move, because motion made him vomit.

In the ER, he got a 12-lead, an IV, valium, and anti-nausea pills. A whole bag of IV fluid. Drip, drip, drip. I read a six-month-old copy of Glamour. If you could see me, you would know how much I might thoroughly enjoy reading something entitled "Glamour." But now I know how to keep my nails looking nice longer between manicures. There was a TV in the room, but it was behind me, and showing some true-crime show about how bad it is to kill somebody.

This morning I used my last eyedropper full of gas to fill Drew's new prescriptions for Valium and two anti-nausea pills. One of the anti-nausea pills is some high-powered super-pill they give to chemo patients that cost $295.00 to the uninsured. $295.00! Good God! What do the uninsured do?

It's frightening. Gosh, wouldn't have fixing the national health care insurance crisis have been a super way to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, instead of invading a country with a lame-ass dictator with no credible ties to terrorism and no WMDs?

Ah, well. Live and learn. Or invade and learn. Or invade and dissemble. Whatevs.

Now I have no gas and my gas putter-inner is out of commission. This is serious because my gas-putting-in-phobia is worse than my telephone-o-phobia.

If I'm in luck, I have enough to get to the border so that I can get it filled by professionals in Oregon (thank you, Oregon, and your archaic gas-filling-by-professionals-only laws!).

More phobias later.