01:21 - 10.06.07
Emergency
At 4:14 this morning my phone started ringing. On the call display an odd pattern of wavy and dashed lines that appeared then disappeared randomly. Next up four digits that might have been a local or extension I guess. That's the third time that's occurred in a 24 hour span. Wasn't quick enough to catch the caller but I'm not certain I want to either. Maybe ET has finally found a way to call home using a landline, eh?
Next call came at 7:30 am just after I had called my youngest upstairs to start his workday. This time it was number five son. Did I have a copy of his health care number. Why? "I'm standing outside the hospital and I need to be seen in the emergency department". Oh my! Which hospital - me planning to make a beeline for whichever one he was attending. "The one in a community about an hour and a half's drive away in a private vehicle". He and his girlfriend were going to play golf in his girlfriend's company tournament - or not. Problem severe stomach pains of a description that suggested either food poisoning or appendicitis. Oi. The mother gene was starting to take over my mind and body. This is one of the sons who has life threatening food allergies you see. I had been riffling through my critical documents and had found his health care number by that point. No health care card could mean a significant delay for treatment until the paperwork was found by other means. Searching for government data on a weekend would be an issue if a human contact became necessary. Therefore it was a huge relief to locate those numbers. Healthy young men never think they are going to be sick so why carry the extra weight in their wallets - right? I asked if I should make the trek up to be there with him. No it's ok. He has his girlfriend. She is the one I met during my Mother's Day outing and liked a great deal. Taking nursing means her knowledge would be a bonus. They would call me when they had any news.
Wait times in an emergency department in this city is averaging about seven hours. I sat at the computer compulsively sending out resumes for something to keep me sane. Did the garbage run and other lifting type tasks to keep that extra adrenaline from pooling in some unhealthy corner of the body as well. Round about 11:30 am a call from his girlfriend. The staff had run the usual tests for appendicitis with inconclusive results. Then as the doctor was talking to my son about discharging him, my son commented about his shellfish allergies. He stated that he didn't think any of the restaurant food he had eaten contained shellfish, but the doctor reminded him that some food additives and dyes are made with materials extracted from shellfish. Ah.
Another call at 1:30 pm, this time from my son himself, added to the story. As a result of the allergy he had been spirited back into emergency and over to the CT scanner. Showed a dilated appendix after all. The upshot was that the staff were trying to schedule surgery for the afternoon, in which case he would be discharged in the evening. Laparoscopic procedure now instead of the old scalpel and scar routine makes it a much quicker and, usually, safer operation. Works for kidney and gall bladders, so that sounded alright. Some discussion then about logistics for the care of his girlfriend. She had spent part of her childhood living in this northly neighbour city. Turned out one of the surgical nurses was an old school friend who offered to put her up for the night if it became necessary. I asked again if I should head up to that hospital, but the response was that if the surgery was done during the afternoon then all I would end up doing is turning around and coming home. Besides he had his girlfriend and she was taking great care of him. So she was at that. I was thanking my guardians/angels that it was this girlfriend and not a couple of the others he's had. Nice enough young ladies, but not really the type that would function well in an emergency is all. I called my Dad and left a voicemail for him as soon as I got off the phone with my son and his girlfriend. You see, my Dad's brother and his family had settled there in the 1940's, so there was an alternate support system if it became necessary for someone to be an advocate at the hospital or if another place to bunk became necessary. I wasn't convinced, laparoscopy or not, that my son would be up to travelling all the way back to our city, even if he was discharged in the evening.
The wait began again, knowing that walk in emergency rooms drive hospital admissions and that triage say the sickest get treated first, which only makes sense. However I was hoping the staff would find my son a bed somewhere other than the emergency room as his girlfriend was describing one of the patients a couple of beds over. Handcuffed to her bed and violently acting out, as two policemen stood nearby for good measure. I asked if it was a drug overdose, but my son's girlfriend said it looked like someone mentally ill who was off their medications. She sounded pretty edgy as she was telling me this and describing what she was seeing. Under normal circumstances my son would likely be able to protect himself and his girlfriend if necessary, but given the amount of pain he was obviously in added in to the fact that he was pretty drugged up by that time, he would have been very vulnerable if that handcuffed patient somehow got loose. I knew from having worked one floor up from the psychiatric ward when I worked in the physiotherapy department at our city's big hospital that patients suffering from psychotic reactions could become superhumanly strong and uncontrollably violent. Not the best mix of attributes, that, especially not if they were in your elevator.
I fussed at different tasks, not really being able to settle to anything as supper time came and passed. Surfed facebook and "poked" a couple of people I found from my own past hoping for a diversion that way; answered survey questions posed on the telephone. Made dinner for my youngest and talked to him and some of my other sons who were calling about their own issues. It passed some of the time, but I was getting edgier as the hours passed. I know that time in the recovery room can be a couple of hours minimum or considerably longer depending on the anaesthetic used and the length of time one is under it's influence. Even so, by 8 pm with no call from his girlfriend or the hospital, I was determined to either get an update shortly or to be getting on the first greyhound bus out of our city heading north. Several calls to my son's and his girlfriend's cell phones demonstrated that both were turned off. Standard hospital requirements when inside the structure. Started surfing the internet until I found the hospital's contact information. Finally got through to the ward he had been assigned to about 8:15 pm. "Oh well, he was just sent up to the operating room about half an hour ago. Call back after 9:30 pm please". Well the aphorism about no news being good news was bourne out, but it meant another round of waiting. More housework was the salve for those twanging nerves all through my body.
I know appendicitis is considered a minor ailment, but one of my sisters and my one uncle both were put off with respect to surgery and paid a heavy price for it. My uncle's appendix burst about a month after his Mom - my grandmother - had died. Right around my birthday as a matter of fact. For the next six weeks the phone rang frequently in the middle of the night with staff from that hospital telling my Mom she needed to get to the hospital immediately as it seemed he was about to die from the poison left in his abdominal cavity. Toward the end of that time my mom just stayed at the hospital, while my Dad and I looked after day to day responsibilities with respect to the house and my siblings. Oh wait that was during that 35 year astrological phenomenon that I wrote about in February. The one where Saturn and Neptune duke it out. The last of the three exact aspects for this current go-round in the celestial boxing ring is on June 25. Two weeks to go, with several complicating aspects just to make it a little more interesting. During the last manifestation of that phenomenon in 1971 - 1972 my uncle was recuperating nicely when - six weeks later, a pattern emerging here - my Dad's father died. I'm hoping that this is the last swipe in our family dynamics. I'll take the unemployment stress for a bit longer instead. Anyway, no information by 10 pm so I called the hospital again. One of the nurses caught my son's girlfriend as she was heading out to bunk with her friend, the OR nurse. She said she had been intending to call me when she arrived at that home. She sounded exhausted and kept repeating how tired she was, but assured that my son was awake and feeling no pain - yet. The operation seemed to have gone very well. I asked her if she needed me to wire some cash up to her for her own expenses, but she said she was fine. It was obvious she just wanted to get some sleep so we agreed to talk in the morning. I did try calling my son on his cell, but it was turned off. Probably just as well, since he will need sleep even more than the rest of us. I crawled into bed for a nap shortly after and plan to get some proper dreamtime in now. Good night dear diary.
�
�
