My heart almost stopped with sheer joy when the power went off in the building about 45 minutes ago. Unfortunately, everything seems to have been restored other than my connection to the server and my waning energy level.

I slept for three hours last night and have another fifteen-hour workday today. I'm resisting the urge to cry or throw up and trying to figure out if anyone will notice if I go outside and take a nap in the backseat of my car.

For some reason this feeling is reminding me of those long boring lectures in college after all-nighters filled with studying, working, drinking, or a combination thereof. I looked on the internet this morning to see if it is possible to die from exhaustion, but found nothing.

Went to my parents last night after work. Apparently the breakdown on my mother's foot is starting to get a bit better. My mother is consumed with watching her body disintegrate before her failing eyes. If I were a better writer...but then, sometimes it is too much to even think about.

But I miss her, or at least, what I knew of her, the woman turning into the disease. I asked her last night where we lived in Michigan when I was so young that now I can only recollect the brown carpet in our house.

"I don't remember," she said. "I was too busy getting MS and taking care of you."

But I guess it was always there, at least for me. My sisters were older and had a few years before the diagnosis.

Once I came home from a bike ride and my mother was cooking dinner. I don't remember what she was making, only that she used to manage well enough in the kitchen with her wheelchair. But that day she had been chopping vegetables with a butcher knife (easier to hold in her shaky grip) and she dropped the heavy knife. It landed blade down in her foot. She bled all over the beige ceramic tile and I was the only one with her.

My sisters and I all had braces at the same time. My father would pick us up from school to take us for our monthly tightening and adjusting, so we were all home late that day. My mother had fallen while we were at the bus stop that morning and sat on the floor all day, leg broken, unable to reach the phone.

The only time Sam met her was when she had another horrible fall. My father was out of town. This time it was her femur that was broken. He helped her off of the floor.

Well, this wasn't the entry I was aiming for.