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.