PharmCountry

Last night, at 7:10 PM exactly, my grandfather passed away in his sleep at the age of 92. He survived the Great Depression, World War II, and his wife’s passing, not to mention having my mom and uncle as kids.

Sunday morning, my grandfather was hospitalized. He had cancer, we knew, but we didn’t know that the end was coming so quickly. Sunday morning, Anthony (My grandfather’s step-grandson) was told that he had six months to live. Hours later, the doctor said that my grandfather probably wouldn’t last the night.

Sunday evening, I got a call from my mom, telling me to get down from New York, quick. I hopped on a bus at 1:30 in the morning, arrived in Chinatown in DC around 6:30, and took the metro out to Virginia, where I met my mom at the metro station. Another bus took us to the town where my uncle lives, and we drove down together to the Outer Banks in North Carolina.

My mom and uncle actually behaved themselves more I expected. Usually in car trips (the last one was to bury their aunt just one year ago), they’re at each others’ throats the entire way.

When we finally got to the hospital, we walked into my grandfather’s room. He was sleeping with his mouth open, just like I remembered he used to. At first we thought he was snoring, but then realized that the sound we heard was the fluid that had built up in his lungs. About 90 minutes later he started breathing shallower. We called the nurse, and just as she was taking his vital signs, he took his last breath.

His death was very peaceful, and I’m grateful that there was no pain. This was the first time I’ve ever watched somebody die. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. The hardest was watching my mom watch her daddy die. She cried, “What am I going to do without him!” and I just held on to her because I didn’t know what else to do.

After a few minutes, I started making the phone calls. Yet another impossible task, but one that couldn’t be put off. I choked through very short phone calls, and went back to the hospital room, just before the funeral home came to take him away.

My grandfather was one of the strongest people I ever knew. He grew up in a Catholic orphanage in New York during the Great Depression, sometimes not having food for days or weeks at a time. He was a sailor who survived his ship being sunk by the Germans during World War II.

He survived his wife of more than 40 years, after she had a stroke. He had to take care of her for years before she finally passed away in 1997. He remarried soon after (too soon a lot of us thought at the time) to a wonderful woman named Grace, who I will meet for the first time today. He’s had to take care of her also, but in the end, he was the one who had to be taken care of, which I’m sure he hated to no end.

And through it all, the sound of his voice couldn’t help but make you smile. He was just that way. He was always there, through thick and thin. I wish I had known him better. I will miss him.

RIP Edward Trenz
1917-2009

I’ve had a website of some form or another online since I was 11 years old and obsessed with Egyptology. I’ve been thinking about my journey, where I’ve been and what I’ve been through in the past 14 years (so you can infer from that number that I’m about 25; this December in fact).

Searching your history through the wayback machine can be fun, provided you remember the web addresses. I’ve had websites about Star Trek’s version of the 29th Century, frames, tables et al included; it was even designed for 640×480. Those were the days, huh?

Actually most of my sites were related to Trek in one way or another. The first was for an IRC sim (aka RPG); the second was based on Voyager, the 3rd/4th on my own version of Star Trek (see 29th century above.)

My first blog was called “On the Edge of Forever,” after my favorite original Star Trek episode. (Can you tell I like Trek?) I wish I still had the graphics for that site, but, alas, they’ve been lost in time and archive.org not saving the stylesheet. I was in my freshman (and sadly, only) year of college. It’s amazing what I thought was so important back then, that seems so trivial now.

That blog went online in March of 2004, so that means I’m coming up on my 6th anniversary as a blogger in just 5 short months; not that I’ve been active most of that time. A quick perusal of the archives of this site will tell you that. I tend to post for a while, then go for months without posting. I’ve stopped trying to analyze the reasons why.

A couple of years later, I started this blog. I originally intended it as a kind of “Pharmacy News without Corporate Influence” blog. Podcasts were all the rage, and I even recorded a couple of 10 minute podcasts in which I spoke too fast. I don’t think anybody ever subscribed to them.

So, as is my wont, I let the blog go for a few months, then made another foray into the online world, posting funny and/or annoying stories about my day at work. If you’ve been a long time reader (do I even have any?) You’ve suffered my puns, felt my pain, laughed at (and with) me, and given me an outlet for all my successes and failures. For that, I thank you.

If you’re new to the site, take a moment and look around. I’d like to think some of my old stories still hold their weight. For now, I’ll just say I’m going to try to post more, though the many gaps in my archive are evidence of how well that usually goes.

Otherwise, you can find me on twitter. Yes that was the whole point of this post. It’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally caught the twitter bug.

Well, not the whole point. Or was there even a point at all? You decide. I’m too tired to.

(Sorry for the rambling post. I just felt like typing this out, so, well, there ya go.)

So, for those of you who didn’t know (and there’s no reason you should), I was organizer of the DC Bloggers Meetup Group for the better part of this year, even though I didn’t really post on this blog (or any other blog for that matter) for most of that time.

Since moving to New York, I was disappointed to find that there wasn’t really a social blogging meetup like the one in DC. The NY Bloggers Meetup had apparently been inactive for quite a few months. So I emailed the current “Organizer” and asked if she would be ok with me taking over, and for now I’ve been made assistant organizer until the current organizer’s meetup.com subscription expires.

So if any of you out there are in the NYC area and write a blog, want to write a blog, read blogs, or just want to have a good time with bloggers, go and check it out. We’ll probably start having meetups after the first of the year. Right now, I’m going to be too busy volunteering with WordCampNYC, which is coming up in November, and by that point the Holiday’s will be here and nobody is going to want to start planning for a meetup.

Also, if there are any pharmacists, technicians or interns in the New York area, I’d love to get a pharmacy meetup going. Send me an email to andrew [at] chronolink [dot] net if you’re interested.

P.S.: If I’m going to be organizing the NY Bloggers group, I guess I’d better get my butt in gear and actually post some stories.