What Day Is It?

I’ve been remiss in updating this, and so to catch up:

The missus went into the hospital on the 12th for the surgery.  The surgeon came to visit me in the waiting room roughly three and a half hours later (why aren’t surgeons all hunchback dwarves?  Standing in one place for even thirty minutes has my back in knots.  Oops, I’m forgetting they have their giant wallets to counter-balance, never mind) to tell me that the procedure went very well, my wife had no problems and was in the recovery room, and she would be moved to her room in an hour or so.  The desk would page me (and there would be no “is that for me?” page-iness about it; these things are the size of paddles and they howl like air-raid sirens) when I could go up to join her.

Uh-huh.  Remember that game I mentioned, the one the hospitals play every. single. time. we’ve had to visit one?  Oh yeah.  We played that game.  The pager went off, I turned it in at the little blue-haired lady volunteer desk in exchange for the room number, and off I go to the 9th floor, to Rm# 920.

I waited in Rm# 920 for nearly two hours.  See, I know that time elongates in a hospital.  That’s a given.  Tell me that it will be half an hour’s wait and I’ll happily bury my nose in a book and settle in for an hour and a half.  I know that rule and I’ve made my peace with it.  After two hours, however, I started to suspect that the hiding of the spouse had been perpetrated, and that, as they say, is not cricket.  See, you can demonstrate to me the particular aspects of the hospital continuum:  the warp of time dilation, the bottom-line physics that dictate what I call dollar gravity wherein an aspirin costs twelve bucks.  I’m a sci-fi fan, so this kind of stuff is not outside my experience.

Hiding my spouse, though, is not cool with me.

I got up and went out to the nearest desk and asked one of the ladies what the status of my wife was, as I’d been told she would be in her room in half an hour and I’d adjusted for Hospital Warp Factors but she had still not appeared after almost two hours.  I was referred to a gentleman sitting one desk over, and when I repeated my question he looked over my shoulder at a dry-erase board on the wall behind me (time and technology march on, but a hospital lives and breathes by the dry erase board; I always worry, when I have a stay in a hospital, that my identity as a patient will end up smeared across the sleeve of a preoccupied intern or a patient wrestling an IV stand down the hallway, as my pitiful wails from within an “unoccupied” room go unanswered) and said “Room 920 is empty”.  Just as I was about to say something along the lines of “Yeah, Action Jackson, it is now because I’m standing out here now!”, he added “Oh, there was a room change.  She’s in Room 977“.

I f-bombed that hallway like Normandy Beach.

Having then found the right room, I settled in to keep my scooby-snacked wife company.  I’m so glad I never went in for the druggie culture in my youth because, to be honest, although listening to someone under the influence is entertaining for awhile, it does hamstring two-way conversation.

She: “I love you, honey.”
Me: “I love you too, sweetheart.”
She: “But the old doctors are keeping the serum from the younger ones!”
Me: “Uh…oh?”
She: “Youth serum…peanut butter.”
Me: “Ah.”
She: “And the wheel thingies…*zzzzzzzzzz*”.

I wasn’t at the hospital the entire time.  At her urging I went home to take care of the cats and to sleep.  Meanwhile, she had a couple of misadventures with an incompetent CNA (in this instance, that acronym stands for Can’t! Nah! Ain’t!) who stranded her in the bathroom for nearly half an hour before she had to make her own way back to the bed, and refused to re-position her to relieve stress on her hips because “you’re too heavy”.  This CNA was sent home for inappropriate behavior, fortunately; most of the rest of the staff were efficient and friendly and we were sure to fill out comment cards for them and thank them on our way out.

We came home Friday the 16th.  That night and the first half of Saturday will never be remembered fondly by anyone involved, but after that it became hard to keep her down.  She’s looking at twelve weeks of very limited mobility (and then she starts physical therapy!) per the surgeon’s instructions, and she’s already kicking against the bricks.When I return to work on the 26th I hope my co-workers will be patient and understanding when I call home fifteen times a day to assure myself she hasn’t fallen off the balcony or some other horrendous damned thing.

Thanks to all who wished her well.

I’m fuzzy and unkempt and in need of bathing.  L8r y’all.