You Don't Know What You've Got 'Til It's Gone

In the continuing saga of Val's death-defying weekend...

I had arrived at MoBap around 5:30 on Friday night. Hick showed up shortly, having gone by our house on the way to pick up items that I had not asked for and did not need. If only I had known he was going, I would have made several requests. As it was, I spent the night lolling about in a hospital gown and black dress pants.

These were the halcyon days. The salad days. The days of wine and roses. REEEEEEEP! That's the scratch of the phonograph needle on a vinyl LP. Let me correct that. It was the halcyon DAY. The salad DAY. The DAY of wine and roses. The day I had a room to myself. The day before Screaming Mimi arrived. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Loyal Hick left me around 8:00 p.m. I turned on my very own wall-mounted flat screen and began to channel surf. Nothing much was on, but TV kept me company. Every hour, a staff member would walk in and look at me. Sometimes take vitals. My RN Christy left at 7:00 p.m., and was replaced by my RN Chrissy. She only had to wipe one letter off the white board and change it. I didn't notice much difference in them. Both had red hair, though Christy was more put together, and Chrissy was kind of an earth-shoe-wearing free spirit with braids that stopped just short of Pippi Longstocking territory. Chrissy shot a dose of blood-thinner into my belly around 10:00 (research after-the-fact shows that this drug should be injected into a fatty area, of which I have no shortage). Then I was pretty much left to my own devices to snooze or TV watch or gaze into space. My breathing was a little easier. I was given a bedside potty because I was not supposed to move around.

Near 4:00 a.m., I had a bout of hand-tingling and shortness of breath. I pushed the call button and was quickly attended by the patient care technician. She used the little black phone dealybobber pinned to her collar to call Chrissy the RN. Chrissy used the pulse-ox thingy on the wall, and said my oxygen was at 97%, so she was not concerned about me getting air. Then she used her collar phone to call the attending, who said to hook me up to a continuous pulse-ox machine. That meant the sensor thingy got taped to the badfinger on my left hand, tethering me to a machine. Oh, and when my oxygen went below 88 percent, an alarm went off, which served to wake me from a delicious sleep two times.

Saturday morning, still basking in my halcyon/salad/wine rose day, I was greeted at 5:00 a.m. by the phlebotomist. She might have been my favorite staffer of all. In she came in her dark blue scrubs, peeping to see if I was awake. "I just need to take some blood." She was a sprite of a thing, hair pulled back in a ponytail like a college softball player, and a voice like Suzanne Pleshette after a month-long bout of chain-smoking. She glanced at my left arm, then made a beeline for the right.

"I have a really good vein there. But I already have this thing in my left arm." BloodSucker looked at it. Swung her ponytail. And commenced to binding a length of rubber tubing around my upper arm. "Oh. Maybe you can't use that. I guess maybe it's for putting things IN, not taking things OUT."

"Right. Do you mind if I lay this stuff here?" Nope. Val's lap is one big blood-tube-holding bin. I must say, BloodSucker did not cause a bit of pain, even when she said, "Big stick." I felt nary a twinge. It was over before I knew it.

My thyroid pill came at 6:00, then breakfast at 8:30. I had two pancakes, a link of turkey sausage, a bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar, a tiny tub of grape juice, and some red grapes. It was what I had ordered the night before, but I did not feel much like eating. I downed one pancake, the sausage, the grape juice, and half of the oatmeal. I admit that I took the grape container and set them aside for later. Not knowing at the time that Hick would eat them out from under my nose.

At 10:00, cardiology came with a wheelchair to take me for a something-or-other test that was like an ultrasound of my heart. It involved a lot of deep breaths. Which I was not very good at. The technician was perhaps from Malaysia or Mexico. They're the same place, right? Not like that island, England. She had an accent, but I could tell when she said, "Breath in, then." Her term for exhale I do not remember, nor did I recognize, but after breathing out the first time she said it, I caught on. When she wheeled me back to my room, she made me carry her fat red notebook like she had on the way there. As she foisted it upon my lap, a paper fell out. She went in front to get it, and that's when I saw it...

Let me back up. As this lady was talking to me, I kept hearing a funny sound. A smashing, crunching, crispy sound. She made small talk about how much fluid accumulation I had. Probably not her business, but you know, maybe different cultures discuss these things as a matter of course. She had been unhappy with the main locking door not letting us in and out of that section of the hospital. The door would not stay propped for her to push me through. So she told me to reach out and hold it. I'm surprised she didn't just tell me to get up and walk through, or have me whip out a bobby pin to pick the lock when it wouldn't let us back out. Again, she seemed to have worked in a place with a lot less gewgaws and doodads than this hospital had. She did not take herself so seriously. In fact, she was not happy with her collar phone thingy not calling the people she asked for, because it could not understand her accent. But getting back to that crispy sound...as she bent over to pick up that paper, I saw that she held in her hand several squares of chopped-up apple. SHE WAS EATING THEM AS SHE PUSHED ME DOWN THE HALL. Seriously. She must have had some major one-arm strength to do that. I'm sure snacking on raw food while wheeling patients all willy-nilly is probably against hospital rules. Anyway, she got me back to my room and hooked up to the oxygen and the pulse-ox monitor again.

By now it was time for lunch, which was pork loin, diced potato, green beans, and a strawberry shortcake. With grape juice. I did a little better this time, as I was breathing a little easier. Hick arrived to watch me eat. Genius came in shortly after. We talked a while. Genius had eaten, and would not accompany Hick to the cafeteria. Only Hick would come to the hospital at lunch time without having eaten first. So he had my grapes. Genius made his exit. I had time to wash up. Then the halcyon/salad/wine rose day was shattered by the arrival of Screaming Mimi at 3:30 p.m.

A screamier screamer I have never heard that Screaming Mimi. A mere slip of a woman, 84 years old, seemingly in the throws of dementia. OR WAS SHE?

More on Screaming Mimi tomorrow.