Shhh…. I have a secret

Realized that I had not written in a while. I have been taking a computer break since I ended my last class. Basically, through a serious of ridiculous events, I had two days to write my final a week before it was technically due.

Thank goddess I managed it!

I decided to take a breather, and requested three weeks off to get caught up on things around the house, and sleep! Of course, nothing goes as planned.

My daughter ended up in the hospital.

First she came out of the bathroom and said she didn’t feel well. The next second she was on the floor, sobbing in pain. It was that fast. I didn’t even stop to think, but had her loaded in the car and headed to the ER immediately.

Why did I not call an ambulance? We live literally a block from the hospital. It was so much faster just to load her in the car and go.

(My husband fell two years ago in the backyard. It took the EMT’s 15 minutes to get to our house. Now, the hospital is, as I said, literally a block from our house. The fire station/EMT’s are literally three blocks from our house. We’re talking maybe a quarter of a mile. So, 15 minutes? I thought it was more than a bit ridiculous.)

Anyway, we get to the ER, and she is immediately seen.

See, the town we live in is fairly small. I think the current population is under 16,000. However, Salem is just 15 miles away. The reason I didn’t just take her there is because, if we had driven into Salem, we would have been in the waiting room for HOURS. Salem hospital is the busiest on the West Coast, between the Canadian border and LA. It is a certified trauma and cardiac hospital.

I know, I was surprised too.

So, I knew the fastest way to get her help was to take her to our little hospital. Here they could do the CT scan, Ultra Sound, blood work, and get her pain meds quickly. And they did. We also knew that if she needed to be admitted, they would ship her to Salem and we would bypass all of the nonsense in that ER.

What was the verdict?

They decided that she had an enlarged ovary. They also decided that since Salem was currently slammed and it appeared that her pain could be managed with meds, that she should go home, ‘and wait and see’.

The next morning, she was throwing up.

Yep, back to the ER.

After another round of tests, it was decided that she had an abscess on her ovary and needed to be admitted and hit with a shit ton of antibiotics and better pain meds. We just had to wait until the ambulance was back from its run and a bed was ready for her in Salem.

Did you know that ambulances have horrible shocks? I mean, you can feel every single bump in the road. I know this from my ambulance rides. When one is in pain, every single bump and sway aggravates the pain.

Basically, one needs another shot of pain meds either before or directly after an ambulance ride.

Anyway, her wife and I got to the hospital right after she was settled in.

There is seriously nothing worse than being a parent and seeing your child, no matter the age, in pain and suffering and knowing that there wasn’t a thing you could do to help but hold their hand.

Try to be strong so they don’t know how scared you really are, and keep that up so that their spouse doesn’t see it either.

This is where we discovered that she inherited another trait from me- small rolling veins. Trying to get an IV started…. and then drawing blood…. So many misses.

As a rule, people get two tries to do me unless the first try is really bad, and trust me, there have been many of those. She went through four different people, at two tries each, before they took blood. I normally go to our local hospital for blood draws. They are just so much better and listen when I tell them, “Small rolling veins, butterfly needle works best, left arm, and I know my veins look good, but people blow through them’.

Her IV was started in our local hospital to give her pain meds, fluids, and ink for contrast on the CT scan.

We were in her room at the Salem hospital late. Actually, I was. Her wife decided to spend the night on the rooms futon. She had brought blankets and a pillow, and settled in for the night.

I went home to my bed and my husband and cried.

I went back the following morning after more tests had been done.

And this was our pattern for the next three days.