Sunday, December 30, 2012

How I spent my Christmas vacation

Whew!

We had all sorts of interesting plans for the Christmas holiday, many of which went awry on the morning of 12/20 when I got the message that my daughter had had a bike accident and perhaps broken her arm. She was brought to New York Presbyterian Hospital on 68th Street, about as far as you can get in Manhattan from Prince Street, site of the accident. But thanks to Sandy, the closer trauma centers are closed, and will be for the foreseeable future. Which means that Presbyterian’s ER is like Calcutta, only more crowded. After various tests and whatnot, it was determined that Kate had managed to break her scapula, which is really hard to do unless you’ve broken every other bone in your body by driving about a hundred miles an hour into a brick wall. She was going quite a bit slower than that, in traffic, when she hit a patch of ice; it being about 45 degress Fahrenheit, she wasn’t exactly expecting arctic conditions. It probably could have been a lot worse, all things considered.

She spent about a day and a half in the emergency room. First, she was lined up in the halls with everyone else lined up in the halls. You can just triage so many people, and there were only so many “rooms,” which in the ER are simply curtained off areas. Eventually she scored one of these areas, which she shared with another patient. Did I say it was crowded in there? My wife stayed with her overnight, and I heard stories of drunks and moaners and you-name-it. I came in the next day to take over, and I watched people spitting up blood and looking one minute away from death and generally being ER-worthy. Everyone had been there forever but no one was complaining much. It wasn’t as if it weren’t obvious what was going on and why it wasn’t going on all that quickly.

When Mike came by (Mike?) she asked him when the surgery would be and he said soon. Mike was her surgeon, or at least one of them, the one who talked to patients. With surgeons, talking to patients is low on the list of necessary skills, but this guy was young and good-looking and very presentable. You trusted him on sight, and would have given him a lead role if you were doing the casting. Anyhow, after an hour or two they did take her away, and I went from Calcutta to the Upper East Side, a special waiting room for families of patients in surgery. Very nice. A volunteer came and took all my information and promised to keep me posted, and when she went off duty another volunteer came and took all my information and promised to keep me posted, and after a few more hours I realized that the volunteers went home at 7:00 and there was a phone you could call to get information. “She’s still in surgery,” was the drift of it. Three and a half hours, and it was performed by the head of trauma, and it was rare enough that, I gather, it was rather a popular procedure for all and sundry. The general response when people would look at her and ask what the problem was, was a widening of the eyes and the response, “That’s really unusual.” What they ended up doing was framing her scapula with titanium, making a little metal triangle to hold it in place, and then screwing the frame to the bone.

She was in a lot of pain before, and after. She still can’t hold out her left arm much above her waist. Thank God she’s right-handed.

I was fidgeting in the waiting room when an old friend of Kate’s came by to visit. She said that she had been told that Kate was in Recovery. Oh. We talked for a while, and no one official came by, so we ventured out on our own. One truth always holds: if you look like you know where you’re going, you can go almost anywhere, no matter how many signs there are to the contrary. We found Recovery, and sure enough, there was Kate. I had expected her to be wrapped like a plaster-covered mummy, but she only had a large gauze patch over her left rear shoulder. Amazing. She was groggy and in a lot of pain, but she was with us. We talked to her, and the nurse, and eventually Mike, and they told us she’d be going to a room eventually (no more Calcutta) and I finally went home.

What a day. If you want to know how discombobulated I was, it was way late and I was starving and I stopped on the road to have a Burger King Whopper. You wouldn’t have recognized me.

The next couple of days were a slow climb back to normalcy so that she could leave the hospital, things like getting heart rate down and getting off the morphine and so forth. We brought her home on Christmas Eve Day.

The prognosis is for complete recovery. But there’s a lot of physical therapy involved, and we have no idea how long she’ll be staying with us. At some point we drove out to Brooklyn to collect vitals. For instance her cat, the Captain, is in our basement. Tik (pronounced tik) has demonstrated that this intrusion is one of those things up with which he will not put. When we tried to have them together, Tik cornered the Captain and hissed him into a paranoid fit. Now, when the spirit moves him, Tik sits outside the closed door of the basement making the sort of moaning sound we haven’t heard since we were in the ER last week. He’d make a good, albeit pathetic, patient. The Captain, on the other hand, sleeps like a cat. It's that Brooklyn background, I guess.

In the middle of all this, there was of course the poor spouse, who was still in England. He won’t be moving here until March. He was scheduled to arrive on Christmas night, just for a visit. Needless to say, he’s been with us too. Newlywed life can be…interesting. He’ll be going back New Year’s night, but it’s been great that he’s been here to help and to be with her.

So Kate has been doing fine, all things considered. She can go out, go for a walk, go to restaurants, go to the movies. She just has to rebuild her left side. Physio starts Friday. It will be a long haul, but in the end, she’s okay. Which is a lot to be thankful for.

And maybe now we can get back to normal.

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