Another First

Its not enough to occasionally be intolerant to food, or be fatigued to limp rag status, or even get me to go shopping up and down the isles at Michaels for what seems an eternity…but to throw in a fever over the acceptable level of 100.4 and make an unexpected trip to the emergency room…on a weekend…during a full moon…what…that’s grounds for something.  I don’t know what, but it must be something.  Our chemo nurses always emphasized the seriousness of a temperature of 100.5 or higher…you head for the E.R.  Well, Miki has flirted with it before, but she can usually tell if her temp starts heading upward.  We check it with all three of our thermometers, yes three, since they all don’t agree (we call them congressional thermometers!).  We’ll find the average, do some algorithms with it, transverse the hypotenuse, square it a few times, and throw a little Pi on it.  By then her temperature is down and we go on with Miki life.  She will pop a few Tylenol and that will normally nip it in the bud (idiom alert…if you are keeping track of my wreckless use of them).  This time the fever had some momentum with it.

Saturday evening.  We’re watching Mission Impossible…again… and she asks me to take her temperature.  I round up the three thermometers and one at a time wait for the beep to read the results.  First one…101.7F (remember 100.5 is a red flag)…”Oh Shit Bubba,” I think was what I said.  I am sure I must have had the look in my eyes that an expecting father would have when the expecting mother’s water breaks.  Second thermometer read 101.3F.  I am assuming my pulse increased, along with my blood pressure, and it’s been normal since I retired.  The third one, the most expensive one of the three, read 99F.  It has proven to usually read 2 degrees low…yeah…the expensive one, thank you very much! The one thing they agreed on was it was too high.

At this point my mind is already collecting all the paraphernalia that we have come to learn to take with us to any hospital visit.  I am throwing prescription med bottles and Fun Size Snickers into my backpack, along with her little comfort pillow she received from one of the volunteers on her first hospital visit and my laptop.  I slip her wallet with I.D. and insurance card into my back pocket, even though we’re in their system as a Platinum Member in their Frequent Flyer Patient Miles Program (not really) and I head to the car without her…just like an expectant father without his wife.  I actually do remember to take her with me, as we say goodbye to the dogs who are asleep upstairs.

It is about 8:30 Saturday evening when I wheel Miki by what appears to be a homeless person, sitting on the ground next to the entrance to the emergency room.  I continue in passed the double doors to her second in line position, as we begin the waiting game.  We are lucky.  With only one other emergency in front of us, we felt pretty lucky on this full-ish moon night.  We soon find ourselves being lead to a room where our nurse begins the litany of questions and procedures before care can be given.  By 10 or so, the nurse has a urine sample, drawn blood for an assortment of tests, and Miki has had a chest x-ray.  Our doctor makes his appearance and talks possible pneumonia, antibiotics, and getting a room upstairs.  The thought of antibiotics raises our eyebrows (yep Miki still has hers!) because of some warning about them and their effects with the chemo drugs…or something like that.  The ER doc calls our oncologist and a while later in walks some antibiotics with a room upstairs being prepared for our 4^th stay at The Point.

A new day begins as Miki sleeps through the midnight hour and we wait for our transporter and some explanations as to what is going on in Miki’s adventurous little body.  At 1am we started settling into room 624 to complete the Centerpoint Grandslam.  Miki has now officially stayed in each of the four wings (hallways) of the hospital, in the same calendar year.  Who woulda thunk it?

It is now a little after 2am, I am home for a few hours of sleep, or would this be considered a nap?  I left Miki in the capable hands of nurse Niki and her assistant Vicky.  The ER doc said she could be in from 24 to 48 hours and we are hoping that it is no longer than that, so she can stay on schedule to get her C/T scan on Tuesday and her 5^th round of chemo starting on Wednesday.  It sounds odd, wishing for the next round of chemo, but another one down means another one closer to the last one down.  Never a dull moment round here, huh?  If it is not a transfusion, it’s a tree house.  If its not diarrhea, its gonorrhea (no, I just made that up cause it sounded similar, she hasn’t had diarrhea for a long time!).  The fact is, I am lucky she is all mine, but I’ll continue to share.

My Zen from Home:  We are down to the roofing, siding, and installation of the door and windows for the tree house.  The bones of it are in place and have already attracted a number of you to visit at altitude.  Miki gets excited each time a progress report comes her way via me, a daring visitor, or a few photos.  From dream to fruition in a relatively short time, but its roots evidently go back a ways.  What I have learned this summer is for you dreamers not to keep your dreams to yourself.  If you put them out there, the dream-makers may find you sooner than later.  

Kelly and Derek make a surprise (to us) visit from San
Antone, Texas.  Here Kelly and I prepare to bungee jump
from the tree house as Derek sets to record it for social
media.