Weekend Plans Post: The Hospital
I had reason to hate hospitals when I was a little kid but, in recent decades, they’ve turned into much nicer places. I wanna say that 9 out of the last 10 times I’ve had reason to spend more than a couple minutes at a hospital was because I was visiting a friend who had just had a baby. It’s fun to visit people who are hours away from having a kid or hours away from having had one. Bring in a bucket of chicken. Everybody else brings stuffed animals and flowers. Hand the chicken to the dad and watch his face screw up and hear him ask “HOW DID YOU KNOW?”
The non-baby visits to the hospital? Those tend to be some weird mixture of “bad” with “bad but I’m glad the hospital can do something about this”.
With that said, we’ve got to go to the hospital tomorrow. Or we get to go there, I guess. Spend all day there and we were told that there’s a 50/50 chance that Maribou can come home early/will have to spend the night. But, Lord Willing and the creek don’t rise, Maribou will be back home on Saturday and I’ll get to spend the next two weeks getting her stuff.
*DING* “I just wanted some tea.” *DING* “I dropped my book when I took a nap, can you get it off the floor?” *DING* “I forget why I dinged you. Sorry!”
I kid, I kid. It’ll be good. Knock wood, we’ll be moving from “stuff is getting worse” to “stuff is getting better” and then things will be good for another couple of decades. We’re 99.44% sure that it’s not cancer so we’re not particularly worried about that and the main rough part will be the whole “day at the hospital” thing.
I look around my circle of friends and have reason to hope that the majority of the reasons I’ll be visiting in the hospital for the next decade or so is because their kiddos will start having kiddos.
I hope.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is the top half of “Hotel”. Photo taken by Maribou.)
Ugh yeah. My last two hospital visits were both ER visits – one in 2016 where I had persistent stomach pain that I scared myself into thinking was gallbladder (turned out it was gastritis after having had food poisoning; the NP pressed on my belly a couple places and when i didn’t scream in pain she said “yeah this is almost certainly not gall bladder but we’ll look at bloodwork to be sure” and ultimately I had to take a course of PPIs to quiet my stomach lining down but then was fine) and most recently a sprained knee (still hasn’t healed up totally but is getting there) that I was afraid was a blown meniscus (again, i didn’t scream at any of the “trigger point” pressures, could move everything, and the x-ray was unremarkable)
But yeah. I have visited people in hospital with something serious (or near the end of their lives) and that’s really not fun. Haven’t had a chance to do the new-baby visits, which would be more fun – most of my loved ones had their babies far away, or else, it was at a time when visitors weren’t extremely welcomed unless they were immediate family.
I have a vague childhood memory of my dad throwing my brother and me in the back seat of the car, my mom in the front seat, and driving like a demon to the nearest ER (about 20 minutes away; he made it in 15) because my mom had taken an antibiotic she’d been prescribed and then said, “you know, I don’t feel quite right and my throat is scratchy” and luckily he knew the right way to react; a dose of some kind of corticosteroid and a warning to call her doctor the next day and we all trooped back home.Report
Well, thanks to insurance issues, we’re rescheduling. We had everything planned out and all our ducks were in a row… if the surgery was Wednesday. Since it’s today, nobody had shaken hands on it yet. Oh, it *SHOULD* be covered, we were assured. But nobody had officially agreed that it was.
So we’re kicking the can down the road for another duration.
Ugh.Report
yeah insurance is always the bugbear here. I haven’t got my bill for my recent ER trip yet and am dreading it.
The doctor asked me about pain relief and I said I usually used tylenol but hadn’t taken anything in case they needed to see unmedicated pain and his response was “well, I’m gonna tell you to wait until you get back home; if we give you any here it will be like $100 a tablet”
That said: having to wait extra time for a procedure really sucks, I feel bad for Maribou.Report
The irritating thing is that there is so much DRAMA. There are surgeons who are being moved to another hospital and they’ve got opinions on that so they’re dragging their feet leaving other surgeons with minimal room time and we lucked out and got a window within that minimal room time and… jeez. What a pain in the butt.Report
You and Maribou will be in my prayers.
I had a funny moment this week involving the word “iteration”, so I immediately thought of you. I was in computer training, and the instructor put up a slide describing a process as iterative, and she said, “It’s important to understand that the process is iterative. You’re going to be seeing this again and again.”Report
Heh. Thanks. We can use all the help we can get.Report
Poor Cody.
The Royal Rumble now means nothing.Report
Those are pretty cats (they also look like mine so I’m biased).
Jaybird, take of Maribou.Report
Yeah, they’re pretty awesome. The template spat out three good ones.Report
Good luck to you guys, hope all turns out well.Report
We’re hoping to reschedule this week. Friggin’ open enrollment.Report
I’m horrified you’re going through this and hope it continues to get better. Normal is never appreciated in the moment.Report
Thanks, North. We’ll get through it.Report
Good luck and God speed.Report
Thank you, Lee.Report