Winning

I’m in Florida, land of Everglades, theme parks and beaches. But is that where I’m spending my time? Of course not. I’m hanging out in Emergency and Hospital rooms---American ones this time. But I’m not the one on the bed. That’s my dad, although when it’s someone you love, it feels like you are interchangeable, like it doesn’t matter which of the two of you is lying there because you feel everything happening as if it were to you, the flinch when they poke you to take blood (again), the draining away of energy. We were in Emerg for seven hours, and at one point Dad was starting to wonder if he’d make it and began giving last instructions, dictating a letter that needed sending, just in case, and Mom and I were praying and trying to keep the quavering from our voices. 

After hours, it was if a switch flipped over, the meds kicked in, and Dad rallied from one moment to the next. By the time, 2 in the morning, that the tech rolled him up to his hospital room, he was dictating a joke about hippie hearts. The crisis was over. He’d won.

And finally we figured out who his Mystery Doctor was. All those hours and we still didn’t know. We thought this was because he was waiting for test results, and the first blood samples hadn’t worked. The tech who came in for five more vials from the other arm (as if we wouldn’t notice somehow) had sheepishly admitted the samples had hemolyzed. (Did you know blood could hemolyze?) This is a bad thing. It means the red blood cells have gone and ruptured and spilled their guts all over the machines and clogged up the works, so the tech has to start over. And they do this so cheerfully. (I had a nurse in the chemo lab run her finger over the veins in my hand and comment gleefully, “You have such great veins for IVs.” Great. It’s what I’ve always wanted.) When the doctor finally showed up, we realized he’d actually been in and out of the room several times, but he was so unassuming, never announcing his entrance, that we’d mistaken him for another tech asking questions. That’s a new one, a doctor coming into your little Emerg cubicle and not making an entrance. He was bald, black, handsome, and obviously not arrogant. Dr. Unassuming.

Dad is fine. By the next day he was preaching to his visitor (his pastor), gesturing wildly with his hands, forgetting that the nurse standing beside him was trying to slowly inject medicine into his arm through his IV line. She would patiently follow his hand as he waved it around to avoid pulling the line right out of his arm. We all took turns visiting and playing games, including  Quiddler. I won.

Then came my turn to scare everyone by having a fever. Fortunately, it stayed nice and low all night and all next day, so I put off going anywhere, and there was praying, and Mom’s couch and I got to know each other pretty well, and everyone else went to see dad and play more card games while I waited to see who would win out, me or the fever. I won again. I’m on a roll.

And I figure I wouldn’t trade these five days with Dad, Mom, Sister, Niece 1 and Niece 2 for any theme park rides or Everglade tours because getting through the stuff of life together is a kind of winning that doesn’t happen any other way, and just how many more chances like this am I going to get?