What I Didn't Say

Always game for anything that will switch up my staid Saturday afternoon routine, I spent 8 hours yesterday taking TOG to and from the ER and practicing silent meditation in between.

TOG's urological health is as compromised as a politician in a whorehouse. Beginning with his dawn catheterization he observed blood in his urine. By the noon cath it was, to spare the gory details, bloody worse. Fortunately, he kept me informed of the details as they emerged.  So I rescheduled bourbon Saturday and it turned out that I was as sober as possible to take him along for the ride to the ER with me and the prophylactic Zoloft I had the foresight to ingest.

During the entire afternoon I managed to say nothing in my head. And by manage, I mean bossed my head into silence by sheer force of self-restraint by saying "Don't even THINK about it!" and giggling. Thanks, Zoloft.

There were the hilarious jokes about the "3-way" Foley catheter that none of the nurses had ever heard. There were the jokes about turning water into wine as the clear saline flushed the clot through his bladder into a container marked in metric increments (that, early on, looked disturbingly like my mom's old glass measuring cup filled with Dr. Dr. K's good red wine aI drank upon returning home at 10:00 PM.

There was a hilariously misguided attempt at reassurance from a nurse in the hallway who compassionately promised despite his agitation and terrible pain, that my dad was going to be fine. Although to be honest, while I didn't SAY anything in my head, at that point my brain did a figurative spit-take.

Not a fun day for any of us, but as dramatic foreshadowing goes, it wasn't so bad. Now, this either reveals the extent to which I've given up on life; or the strength of character I have figuratively pulled out of the vicinity of my ass. Which, as the ancient Sumerians believed, is the seat of your soul.

So my dad and I are consuming plenty of liquids today, although not the same ones, and not for the same reasons. And definitely not together, even though we'll always be there for each other. As a compassionate floor once told me: if you fall, I'm here.

The Case of the Missing Medications

I grew up sharing a bedroom with my younger sister and my paternal grandmother, one of whom was fun and the other who was a hypochondriac whose only way to get anybody pay attention to her was to be sick. Which was sad on many levels; but for the purposes of this post, it was sad because as long as I knew her, she read a book a week and was probably capable of conversation on any number of interesting topics. On the other hand, The Other Guy hasn’t read for many years, and for many years most of his conversations begin like this:

TOG:   I had a bad night last night….

Me:  Sorry, what happened?

TOG:  (Texting words, many of which included: heat, trouble breathing, werewolves, pain in his side, living a life of whiney desperation, not having any appetite, unable to sleep).

I know how to follow this script without breaking a sweat. I’m resting from a particularly strenuous day at the park with the dog, followed by a trip to dog beach with the dog, and I’m watching a particularly good Perry Mason episode with Michael Rennie and drinking watered down bourbon.

Me:  Time to see the doctor?

WISIMH:  Lucky for me texting is literally phoning it in.

TOG:  (Texting words, some of which include: I’m on it like hair on soap, I’ll get around to making an appointment when an iceberg crashes into the gates of hell, ok, trouble breathing, I’m reading a most interesting book.)

Me:  How about starting that course of steroids prescribed by your pulmonologist for when you have a “flare”.

WISIMH:  Flare. Now there’s a term with a metaphorical value of 9 out of 10. It’s short for flare up which is what happens when: a) Smokey Bear doesn’t remind campers to extinguish campfires; or b) the suffocating symptoms of people with COPD spiral into a feedback loop and get worse and worse. Wait, can loops spiral? Also, I’m pretty sure the blackmailer’s girlfriend killed him, not the defendant. TOG has a standing order for steroids to take when flares occur, but he won't think of it on his own.

TOG:  Prednisone?

WISIMH:  No. Cyanide.

Me:  Yup, prednisone. Do you have that, or do I?

TOG:  (Texting words, some of which include: I don’t see the prednisone within my immediate reach, so I’d have to get up and open a cupboard door or at least lift up a stack of mail on the table next to me to see if I have it and that’s not going to happen any time soon, it hurts to move even the slightest distance, why don’t you look for it in your house before I bother to do anything more than sit here and breathe like a failing sump pump, better chance it’s in your kitchen cupboard, had to get my dinner “to go” tonight because I can’t sit in the dining room.)

WISIMH:  Then again, maybe it’s the defendant’s uncle who wants her in jail for murder so he’ll get control of the wealthy company her father left her. He’s pretty sketchy now that I see how mean he is to his alcoholic wife.

Me:  (Having actually gotten up and looked in the kitchen pill cupboard finding only expired tranquilizers prescribed to me and no steroids prescribed to TOG) Nope. I don’t have the prednisone here. It must be with your pills. Suggest you start (the 5-day regimen) tonight with your bedtime pills.

TOG:  K

WISIMH:  Dammit! It WAS the lawyer’s assistant because he was the only one who could have seen the combination to the safe when the defendant accidentally bumped into him in the hallway.  Wait, I might be mixing up the plots of two consecutive episodes here. Maybe that bourbon wasn’t watered down as much as I thought.

Me:  Ok, sweetie. Hope you sleep better tonight. Love you.