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Friday, November 03, 2006
aren't emergency rooms fun?
We spent the afternoon at the ER, because all of a sudden in the past two weeks T has started to have episodes of cardiac arrhythmia -- as in one or two episodes a day -- when he had previously had no issues in that department at all. When he had one today we didn't have anything else pressing to do, so we thought, hey, let's pack everyone up and spend the afternoon watching cable TV. Or rather the kids and I watched cable TV in the waiting room* while T sat on a hospital bed wearing a fetching gown (Angelica: Always Rented, Never Sold. WHY is that a selling point? Cleanliness? Someday when I'm a nurse I'll find this out), rigged up with a maze of wires and tubes and stuff, with his heart behaving perfectly normally, because of course the episode ended about three minutes before they got him into a room, but after he had been called back into the check-in and prep area.
The kids were very good. Eventually my parents were able to pick them up, but they spent a good solid two or two and a half hours sitting quietly and behaving. And I knit for a while on the back of a sweater I'm trying to make for C with the bouclé yarn, which I have tamed to such a degree that I can knit OK with it (although I am still very obviously a total beginner. The woman sitting next to me in the waiting room watched me knit for a few minutes and then asked politely, "Are you just learning?" Maybe it was the tongue sticking out of the corner of my mouth that gave it away), but heaven forbid I drop a stitch or have to backtrack for any reason because then I'm just totally lost and I can never get all the stitches back on the needle right.
Anyway. So now T and I will have coordinating Heart Issues. Me with my tachycardia and he with his arrhythmia. Boy will WE be a hit at parties. When I realized that T is only three years younger than my dad was when his episodes of arrhythmia became severe enough to warrant medication and then a pacemaker, it made me feel like we're maybe a little bit... mature. Not in a bad way, just in that dang-we-are-really-not-kids-anymore way. At least he'll always be five years older than me, so that I have plenty of time to adjust to the idea of being whatever age he happens to be before I actually reach that age. Thirty-one, for example, felt way older when he was thirty-one than it does now that I am.
*get this: because the window between the waiting area and the work area is not soundproof, the TV has to be on constantly for patient privacy purposes. It's a hospital regulation that you have to sit there and let TV drone on and on at you, or else go outside. At least we got them to change it from CNN after a couple of hours of one political ad after another -- plus the commercials which were just as bad -- when the newsperson decided it was time to give my children an impromptu education about g a y s e x, so we could watch an episode of "Little House on the Prairie" and then a show on Animal Planet about animals in Namibia hosted by some guy with a death wish.
Comments
Oh man, Rachel. I am out of the loop. I haven't even turned on my computer in what feels like days, but I know that's not true. I love you so much. Call me if you need to.
Posted by: jenn at November 4, 2006 03:39 PM
