Making A Call

I never really know who to call or if to call anyone.  I know to let our children know, I know to let my parents know, but beyond that, I’m never sure who to call and say we are in the hospital again.

Part of my reluctance is that I really don’t want to bother people, part of it is I never know how long or serious and one event is going to be and a big part of it stems from my west Texas machismo, that I don’t need support because support means weakness and real west Texas men don’t need and don’t do weak.  Mostly I just don’t know how much others want to know.

We went for 3 years without being in the hospital.  When Marty went in February it was different so I reached out to some of our friends.  Since then, since last night, this is our third visit and I just don’t know if people want to know every time we darken the doors of Providence.

We went to the emergency room to have Marty checked out Saturday, mainly because she was really fatigued and my anxiety level was in the red zone.  We spent seven hours getting blood tests, urine tests and x-rays and essentially found nothing.  My anxiety went below the red zone, but not by much.

I went to Dallas Sunday during the day for my middle grandchild’s 2^nd birthday celebration.  My daughter Erin said I seemed tense; my response was “ya think?”  When you have lived with someone and watched them as long as I have cared for Marty you just get a sense of things, it’s hard to explain, but my “Marty-sense” was tingling all day Sunday.

By the time I got home Sunday evening Marty’s blood pressure had dropped and we piled into the van to take Marty back to the ER.  By the time we got there her BP was still too low and she had started to develop a rather ugly red rash, great.  I sent a text to our Great and Wise as we waited for a room.

There are a limited number of things that the rash could indicate.  A couple of things are not good at all, but it’s most likely a reaction to an iodine IV administered when she had a cat scan on Saturday.  The tech had asked me if she had ever any reaction to the iodine, I didn’t know and rolled the dice to get the x-ray.  Marty got the rash, that’s somehow not completely fair.

Great and Wise, bless his soul, came up to the hospital to check Marty out and in and wrote out the orders to admit us to the hospital.  There was never any real question about whether we were staying the night in the hospital.

As we sit here this evening Marty is a little doped up on Benadryl, her face, neck and abdomen are red with a rash and her blood pressure is still too low for me to feel comfortable and I don’t think we have figured out everything that is happening. 

Yes, we are back, 4^th floor east, and I’m up here wondering who I call, I’m wondering if I call, I’m wondering if people want to know, I’m wondering if you do this enough do people get a little immune to the seriousness of the situation and the call becomes a “one more time” kind of thing. 

Try as I might to get used to it, I don’t.   I still get anxious, I still worry, I still don’t sleep, and as many times as we go, as prepared as we are to go, as crazy comforting as it might be, being in the hospital is still a big kind of scary deal.  

Maybe calling some people is not a bad idea.