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"Can't you call someone?" No phones in Intensive Care - Fate Fairies - book version
This entry was posted on 1/2/2012 1:45 AM and is filed under Fate Fairies:Fate Fairies - book version.
As has happened from time to time my whole life, my blood and heart condition flared up in late 1996. It was a particularly hard episode, perhaps a commentary on becoming yet another decade older. While studying at the ambulance building while taking a shift, our of the blue, I had a peculiar feeling in my chest. Poetic, I suppose it happened at an ambulance building. But I did spend a good deal of time there volunteering for shifts. It was a good place to study in peace.
I did a quick pulse check and realized my heart had dove into an irregular rhythm. This would tecnically turn out to be the first official major heart episode. It was an extreamely temperamental and uncomfortable one. As my doctor later said, "Your condition has progressed to a phase where you can no longer tolerate it. Some people live their whole lives with odd heart beats, non the inconvenienced. Try to find a good heart beat in a nursing home and you will slink away defeated. But my condition is tangled with a blood clotting disorder and it is never routine when it all comes home for a visit.
I made it through my ambulance shift but later became fatigued trying to breath and move. So, I drove myself up to the emergency room in Madison for help (which by the way they yelled at me for doing by myself). I remember walking in and some of the people knew me from ER training and my ambulance work.
"You don't look too out of sorts," said the triage nurse. But heart problems are in the chest, not usually on the face. She took me back to a cubicle and started to hook me up to the monitors. The docs out at the common area could see what the room monitors were saying. I was just laying back on the cot and easing my anxiety and one doc hustled in and said, "These readings ain't good. Who the hell is in here anyway?"
After what seemed like only a couple seconds he started rattling off orders to the nurses about what medications to pump into me. Long story short, within a few minutes I found myself up in Intensive Care. Things seemed to get blurry for a while. When I came back into focus a bit later, Heide was in the room.
Because of better her job, Heide always got toys before I did. She had a computer long before I did; as well, she had a cell phone before I did. She was on her cell phone trying to get ahold of my lifeguard bosses. As the story unfolded I could make out about most of what was transpiring. The YMCA boss was right on que to be empathetic and knew from the get-go this was going to take a couple weeks to sort out if it sorted out at all.
But in perfect University elitist-esque fashion, the Sports Medicine crowd was a horse of a different color. I could tell what most of the conversation was like with that boss, Heide filled in the rest to me later, and any left out color I pieced in myself. It went something like this:
"Oh thanks for calling Mrs. Keith. Tell Bob to try and make it back as soon as possible, we are always short of help. And just a reminder, we would prefer employees call in themselves instead of their spouses, parents, girlfriends, and boyfriends et cetera. Oh, by the way, can you have Bob call some of the other guards to see if they can fill in for him?
There was a pause. Heide is usually annoyingly quiet and reserved. But, after a couple seconds, the words poured out of my wife's mouth like Tourette's Syndrome.
"Are you a crazy person? Bob is dying. The least of his worries is your pool. And one more thing, you fool, even if he could, he won't be calling anyone; there aren't any phones in Intensive Care. No one needs phones up here for where their next stop will be."
Then she hung up. There are small, few, and far between gems in modern marriage. But I savor them when they pass my way. It was as the television commercials of the era coin, "priceless."
I made it of course, a cat with a dozen sets of nine lives; "The Y" did not bat an eye when I came back to work there three weeks later. And as for my wife's new nemeses, I smiled to myself when I got back to University Sports Medicine to pull a shift there and walked past all the Soviet-esque art on the way to the locker room.
Note: This blog "Fate Fairies" - book version Category is a work in progress. The original vignettes are being edited for book form. Go to the Cooldadiomedia Web site and the Fate Fairies Page for an ordered chronology of the book vignettes (chapters).
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