Breathing is Good

I cut out of work a few minutes early yesterday afternoon, being Friday and all. As always, especially at any time before 6 p.m., the first three miles out of the office could almost be walked faster, and can certainly be bicycled faster (I’ve seen it). So as I was sitting in the clot, the smellphone rang.

“Come by the hospital,” Mrs. Fetched said. “Mom’s here, and it’s not good.” Well… after you’ve said in the hospital, then it’s not good is sort of redundant. But Mrs. Fetched sounded upset more than usual during one of these episodes, and my first thought was that her mom’s aneurysm blew… but when her blood pressure soared from seeing the cows knocking down sections of fence earlier this year, I figured if that didn’t do it nothing would. But it was another issue.

Mrs. Fetched’s parents went to Ryan’s for lunch yesterday, even though her mom wasn’t feeling all that good and only ate a bowl of potato soup. She got behind the wheel, said something along the lines of “this is it, goodbye,” and keeled over. He freaked out, which is understandable, and gave her chest squeezes to keep some air moving around. Then he saw her cellphone in the van, called 911, and got back to it. The paramedics took out her teeth, got her some oxygen, and took her on down to the hospital.

So I met them in the emergency ward… several people were walking (or sitting) around with face masks, which I figure were people showing swine flu symptoms (the masks do a better job keeping the virus in sick people than it does keeping it out of healthy people). Mrs. Fetched and her dad got me up to date with what was going on, and we sat around doing not much of anything for most of two hours. The ER staff at the hospital managed to misplace her teeth, and tried to claim the paramedics didn’t turn them over at first… this resulted in Mrs. Fetched going into “DO SOMETHING NOW (without actually doing anything to solve the problem)” mode, which cost us about two hours this afternoon.

Meanwhile, her mom recovered enough that they moved her from ER to ICU, and took out the ventilator shortly before noon. By the time we got down there, she was sitting up and able to talk. A gaggle of relatives filed in, and she finally got worn out. Mrs. Fetched and her older sister (not Big V, as you’ll see shortly) pitched in and got business taken care of. Right now, her primary concern is getting her teeth back.

Not to be outdone, Big V went into some kind of convulsion yesterday. As expected, she’s not doing a thing to take care of herself — her diabetes is pretty much eating her up, and she doesn’t seem to care. So now she’s in the same hospital, getting surgery on her foot (due to an infection). So there’s two members of the same family in the same hospital, and neither car wreck nor fire was involved.

A rather strange Saturday, even by FAR Manor standards.