A Night at the Hospital
Wednesday was a busy day as usual, came home from physical therapy to a quick crisis at work, which was resolved within about 30-40 minutes. Craig was home sick, he had gotten some nasty stomach virus previously that morning. I was running around at 8:30 at night making dinner for him, cleaning up the kitchen, finishing up the project for work, when the phone rang.
The phone call was from my mother’s fiancee to tell me they were at the hospital and my mother was being readmitted for emergency surgery. A quick background, she had surgery on Tuesday in the AM, and they discharged her Wednesday at 4pm. It was now 9:00pm and they were back there, she had been blacking out and her blood pressure had dropped to 60/30. Scary stuff.
I got myself together, called my good friend Kelly and met her down at the hospital. She kindly enough brought me Starbucks to help stay awake. Dan, my mother’s fiancee was there, filled in a bit more on the time line. We sat and waited until 12:30am for the doctor to come out. He said she had had a lot of internal bleeding, but no specific bleeder, gave us some possible reasons and said she was being moved to recovery now.
More waiting, but I had brought my iPhone and knitting, so I had something to do. I caught up on episodes of Diggnation. It’s always good to have some laughs while in a time of stress. We were told she’d there for about 90 minutes, then moved up to her room. We waited, and waited. 3:00am comes and I went and checked with the front desk again, we were now the last people there. 3:30am, they finally got someone in recovery to answer the phone and said we could go see her. It was good to see her, she was smiling and pretty groggy as well as shaken up.
I got home around 4:10am, it was a quiet ride home on the roads. I called into work and hit the pillow. Thursday, I went down and spent about 2 hours with her, she was sitting up and chatty as usual. She was giving instructions to the nurses on which medications she wanted and how much dosage, along with what does work and what doesn’t for her. She’s a nurses worst nightmare, she’s worked at the hospital for 30+ years and been hanging around medicine for longer.
It’s been a crazy 36 hours! But very glad to still have my Mom with me.
