I'm home
The morphine is gone, but the headache remains
It feels good to bend my elbow without setting off an alarm.
We went to the ER at 12:30 Wednesday morning. According to my thermometer (which I now think is a liar) my temp was 102 or maybe 101.9- either way I had told my husband that I would call the doctor if my temp got that high. (Even though the doctor told me to call if it got above 100.4, that just sounded like a silly number to me.)
I called the on-call doctor, and it turned out my doctor was on-call. Just when he was about to tell me to Not come in, he asked about the antibiotics I was supposed to be taking. I told him the pharmacy had told me twice that they had never been called in. Twice after office hours of course- so I hadn't started them yet.
Then he sort of freaked. He told me I needed to go in immediately. He said he was calling the ER doctor to give him instructions for when I got there. He said, "They are going to admit you."
So we began gathering the stuff- looking through the bags of stuff we hadn't unpacked from the last trip to the hospital. This pillow- that robe, don't forget the headphones and the phone charger, yes I need my slippers and I should take a book.
In the waiting room Eowyn wanted to know why that girl was crying and kept asking if I was okay. I told her I was okay and she struggled to keep her eyes open. She didn't want to miss anything. When my name was called I shuffled along behind the tech. Daniel and the girls shuffled along behind me. In the exam room a beautiful blonde nurse and a handsome young doctor introduced themselves and told me what they were going to do- then they both disappeared for over an hour.
The nurse came back to draw blood and put in an IV. She was pretty, but didn't seem to have much practice with "rolling" veins. Although the floor nurses had not had any trouble finding a vein, ER nurse was having no such luck. The girls thought the whole procedure was amazing. Eowyn was basically up under the nurse's arm trying to see what would happen next- and she kept giving me advice- "Okay mama, close your eyes! It's only gonna hurt a little bit!" Then to the nurse, "What's that? What are you doing? Why are you doing that? Can I have that? I can hold that for you."
Eventually she had the IV in and two blood samples for cultures and one for the immediate lab use. That's when I said, "The doctor mentioned something about pain medication?" She said, "Oh! I'll get that for you and your fluids, and your antibiotic."
When she came back an hour later and hooked me up I asked when I would be moved to a room. By that time it was nearly 6:00AM and we were all starting to lose it. She said, "Oh, I'll have to check- but maybe not until 8:00 or 9:00- we have a lot of people in holding because there aren't enough empty beds upstairs.
Surprisingly she came back less than an hour later to tell us I had a room and they were ready to take me to it.
In the room the girls got weepy because they were so tired and stressed, but they had really been so good all night in that cramped little exam room. They left their most prized possession with me, Eowyn's favorite Teddy Bear and Lailah's favorite toy 'Broccoli.' What sweet girls I have.
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