Sigh Candy.



It might not look like much to you, but believe you me, this picture taken just this morning, is a Sigh for these Sore Eyes.

I'm kind of at a loss as to what or how much to share of my past two days. Because everything seems to be okay now, the emotional havoc I've recently endured, seems a bit melodramatic in the retelling. But I still feel the need retell, so I'm just going to open the lid and see what tumbles out onto the keyboard. So bear with.

We returned home from the cottage Tuesday night, the house still a mess from when we left it, with the addition of extra fur blobs scattered about, likely from Bella renting herself in grief, in response to our absence.

Anyway.

On weekends and vacations, my husband ::aka Cabana Boy, but today he's E.:: and I take turns sleeping in, and Wednesday morning was mine to sleep into. About 9:50, E comes into the room and announces that he had just passed out in the bathroom and needs to go to the hospital. He looked poorly. Greenish. I thought maybe he was getting the flu.

So I got up and dressed and we headed to the ER, where I dropped E off at the door, and went off to park the car.

For the sake of brevity I'm going to try to bullet the high and low points of the adventure. ::And no offense or anything, but I'm mostly writing this for me and not you, but I need to be brief with myself too, because I gots shit to do.::.

After finding E. with the intake nurse in her little intake cubby, I experienced what I call the first in a series of Little Terrors.

Little Terror #1: The intake nurse appearing obviously concerned with my husband's medical presentation as indicated through her muttering "With a pulse of 43, we don't have time for a temp...he needs to be seen....Now."

Little Terror #2: After getting Cakers situated in the waiting room, I walked into Trauma 2, where it felt and looked like a scene from the T.V. show, E.R. Orders were being barked while professional bodies moved about the room and around the equipment and one another, in a frenzied yet oddly synchronized dance.

Little Terror #3: A nurse stopped the frenzy to ask if she could call someone to come in to be with me.

Little Terror #4: The fear in E's eyes.

Little Terror #5: They put pads on his chest in case they needed to use the paddles.

Long Portion of Story Shorter, it took about two hours for his pulse and blood pressure to creep into their respectfully normal ranges, although they were still low.

Once the color started returning to his face, we relaxed a little and started enjoying Little Happies, In Light of the Situation.

Little Happy In Light of the Situation #1: Whenever the monitor showed a considerable dip in blood pressure or pulse or a red alert came on the monitor, my facial expression indicated alarm. ::E couldn't see the monitors. I'm sure that's on purpose.:: He finally asked me to either stop looking at the monitor or develop a better poker face, because I was scaring the shit out of him. But I initially thought he said "porker face," so every time I looked at the monitor, I held my nose up like a pig. It was still hard to hold a porker face in response to scary dips in the numbers, so I would still look scared, porker face notwithstanding, which made E laugh...okay I guess you had to be there.

Little Happy In Light of the Situation #2: The nurses station was right outside his room. One of the nurses walking by the door, dropped a pen and stopped to pick it up. E. then called me over to whisper "I have some ER gossip. That nurse is wearing a red thong." I laughed and with my best porker face, looked at his blood pressure reading and saw that it immediately went up a couple points. We then decided to tell the doctor that his blood pressure Got Up at the Crack of Thong, and maybe he can get a prescription for some of that.

Blood work showed E was low in potassium, so that was added to his IV, which seemed to help, after a while. The doctor ordered him to spend the night so they can monitor his heart and undergo further evaluation. Once he was stablized and a plan was in place, I went home to pack a bag for Cakers to stay at my in-laws, to let the dog out and tidy up a bit for when the in-laws came by. Through the course of tidying up, I somehow picked up a blob of peanut butter on my palm, which I somehow got on the steering wheel and console of the car, and a little on my jeans and purse, and nothing handy with which to wipe it off.

Back at the hospital, I had a very hard time getting a straight park with E's behemoth car ::It's a hatefully huge SUV.:: and was in and out of the car three times to check how crooked each attempt was or wasn't. I never did get it quite right, but barely good enough was good enough for me.

And it was a bitterly cold, snowy and windy day. When I was just outside the entrance of the hospital, I noticed a flurry of money flying past me. The folded bills looked strangely familiar as they tumbled away. As I watched a couple bills go down the storm drain I thought, Damn, that's my money! I chased after what remained, almost hitting my head on a parked car.

Little Happy In Light of the Situation #3: Between accidently transferring peanut butter from the kitchen cleanup to E's steering wheel and my purse, and the parking problems, and money blowing out of my purse and into a storm drain, I light heartedly determined that the first thing I will tell my husband when I see him, is that he cannot die because in the past hour I have seen what I am without him and it is not a pretty picture. Not only would he get a kick out of the image of my utter and complete dependency on him, but would surely prompt him to an even quicker recovery.

So I make it up to his room in one piece, to find that he isn't there. I stopped to inquire at the nurse's station, where several scrub-clad women were circled and jabbering like a nest of magpies. While I waited and waited. Finally a woman looked up from her nearby desk and asked what I needed. I told her I was looking for my husband. Clearly, this woman was new to the job and could not help me without first consulting with the magpies, who did not stop their chatter for yet another minute, as she stood by, waiting to ask the question.

Little Terror #6: The newbie told me that the magpies told her that my husband was still in the ER. Still? It's been hours, I said. She shrugged and told me that it can take a long time to get transferred to a room from the ER.

So, I head back to the E.R., which in this hospital, is kind of like changing terminals at a major airport.

Not so Little Terror #7: I get to the ER and head to Trauma 2, where I last left my E. But the door to Trauma 2, which was previously open the whole time we were there earlier, was now closed. When someone came out of the room, I could see and hear that there was some very serious shit going on in Trauma 2. With my husband. He's dying in there, I thought to myself. He's going to die before I can tell him that he can't. Die. Because if he dies, I will spend the rest of my life leaving a trail of peanut butter, and pulling in and out of angled parking spots,and letting money blow out of my purse and down the storm drains. Eventually we'll be poor and homeless and forced to live in an SUV, down by the river. Except we won't even be able to do that, because I can't park the fuckingly huge and hateful car.

He can't be dying in there, because I can't live without him. I just can't.

I don't know how long I stood staring at the door of Trauma 2, but I'm sure it was just moments. Finally a clerk behind the desk asked me if I needed something. I somehow choked out my husband's name and asked if he was in there, and pointed to the door.

No, he's been taken to his room, the clerk said. A nurse overhearing the conversation, piped in to confirm that she had delivered him herself and a floor nurse signed for receiving him. He was probably getting his echo cardio somethings or his doppler doppling whatchamacallits.

"They told me he was still down here. They told me..." and then I couldn't talk anymore, but only pointed again, to the door behind me. The door to Trauma 2.

And then I started to cry.

After some genuine consoling, I was given directions back to my husband's floor. While I was certainly relieved at the good news that my husband was not behind door #2, I had a hard time shaking the fear and made several wrong turns on the way to his room. I apparently had the look of neediness, because several hospital staff stopped to help me along the way. They were rewarded for their efforts by my bursting into spontaneous bawl and incoherently grateful blubbering. One woman, who appeared to be leaving for the day, recognized me from earlier, and walked me all the way to E's room.

Once I was up in his room, one of the magpies approached me and apologized for the breakdown in communication. It was genuine and she was forgiven. She later apologized to E as well.

There is definitely more blogging to be done, from this saga. I'm still feeling emotionally skittish, even though my man seems fine, for now. All his tests came back normal, and his heart is strong. Because of his congenital heart issues, he is scheduled for further evaluation, with the focus on trying to figure out what caused the problem. He'll also be fitted for a temporary monitor, which will record his heart activity over an extended period of time.

For now, I'm just happy that we're all back together.
College Boy is heading home at this writing, for the holiday weekend and tonight we're celebrating with one of E's favorite dishes, Black Bean Enchiladas.

I apologize for the choppy, messy writing here, but I really needed to get this out of me. Because I lost 2 days of spring break, wherein I had planned on doing some Easter preparation, I am sorely behind in that and all other household endeavors. And with Cabana Boy currently on medical waivers, I gotta get the getting going.

Have A Good Friday, everyone.

Labels: Deep Shit, eye candy Friday, Manpie