"Sweet"

[Re-posted with updates, 6:30 p.m. Jan 4]

Remember what I said about clouds on the horizon and how what you bring as gifts to the marriage with a new year may be greeted by something unexpected? First, know that we are ok. Really. Don't you hate that? People always say that before they tell you that there was some crisis.

Well, ok. H was at the airport yesterday on his way to D.C. He called to say that instead of being on the plane, he was at Mass General Hospital having come there by ambulance with heart pains. He prefaced that with, "now, I don't want you to freak out, but..." Right. In any case, I flew over black ice and through the coldest temps yet this year, to Boston. I dropped off the cats at the house, and found him awake, aware in a hospital bed in the ER observation unit, down from the main ER after the first of a series of EKG's. There have been several more, and a "blood draw" at 1 a.m. We are awaiting the results of the stress tests and the multiple EKGs which will be read some time between 2 and 4. Presumably they will let him leave then, since the tests seem to have shown no heart damage or changes in the night.

Then we are on to figuring out what this was.

So, he's ok it seems for now. So here are my observations... See? Always the observer...

1. He's ok

2. Life can change in a heart beat—literally.

3. The opportunity for great medical care in a hospital like this one, where the nurses are competent, efficient, responsive and smart ( I'll explain that later) is a real luxury. And it is not available to people in many other places. And it should not be a luxury. It should be available to everyone as a human right.

4. I am getting older. I know that, because as I rode up the elevator to his floor this morning, I knew the sound of major equipment that hums constantly in the background in a hospital. And I knew the huge elevators that accommodate a stretcher. And I knew the wise, distant, weary, ironic, and somewhat pinched faces of the staff. You get to know that after you have been in a hospital enough times. I have been in a hospital enough times.

5. Great nurses bring visitors a recliner at midnight in case you might want to stay over, and they supply a sheet on the recliner, a pillow, and a blanket without being asked. They can draw blood in the light of the darkened hospital room without turning on the lights to disturb the patient.

There ought to be a word for that light. It's the light of computer monitors and lights from outside the window and something else indefinable. And the only place you see that light is in a hospital. Did I say I have been in a hospital enough times? 

H and I listened to the interview of the new patient on the other side of the curtain. He arrived this morning. He says he fell. Landed on his face. Wrecked his only good right eye. He had had cataracts twenty years ago, and when the anesthesiologist refused to give him general anesthesia for the surgery, they pierced his eye administering the local. He didn't go back for some years, and by then it was too late. He is in his 60's, single, and he told his sister not to come today. She lives nearby. Yes, he has a few drinks a day. Stopped smoking. Doesn't need the proffered nicotine patch. He quit. "Sweet." Great nurses ask in several ways and at various times, how it happens that when you just happened to fall, you landed on your only good eye. But they don't ask it that way. Then they bring water to clean the blood off the eye that wasn't cleaned in the ER. So I probably will have a few more stories before we get to put this behind us, as the bad start to a new year, that could have been much worse, we think. But so far, we are ok and not freaking out. "Sweet."

[Late-day addendum:  We're home, cleared of all heart and lung suspicions.  Appointments to come in the next couple of days to do a more definitive diagnosis.  A false alarm.  But probably an important one anyway.]