Today my Grandmother underwent her second (and hopefully final) angioplasty surgery. She’s getting up there in years (80+) and her doctors discovered she had exteremely poor circulation below the waist due to severely blocked arteries. The circulation was so bad that the choice was either have the angioplasty or almost certainly amputate her legs in a few years.
My brother is a military cop at an Air Force base here, and has been working 15 hour days ever since the 9/11 terrorist attack, so last night Lisa and I drove to Battle Creek, Michigan. She returned to our house with my daughter, and I slept on my Grandma’s couch.
This morning I drove my Grandmma to the hospital, she went through the surgery, and as the surgeon put it, she was back to her old ornery self within a couple hours. But then things really started to get weird.
Lisa was supposed to pick up Emma from her school, get her some food, and then drive to Battle Creek to pick me up (the drive takes about 20 minutes). I figured she’d be there around 6 p.m., but wasn’t concerned when she still wasn’t there at 6:30 p.m. When 7 p.m. rolled around, though, I was a little angry thinking she was dinking around rather than coming to Battle Creek right away.
By 7:30 p.m. I was past the anger and straight into being worried that something had happened to her. Her cell phone kept giving me “That caller is unavailable” and when I tried to call her family members, none of them were home either.
By 8:00 p.m. I was basically freaking out. I finally got her father on the phone who said that when he had talked to her around 5:30 p.m. that my daughter had a fever and had thrown up. So now, I’m calling all the hospitals, her pediatrician, the urgent care at the doctor’s office, and other places seeing if she had taken my daughter there.
Finally I decided to go back to my Grandma’s apartment and see if she was there, but on my way out I checked all of the parking lots and was very happy to see her car there. I ran into the hospital to hear my name being announced over the loudspeaker asking me to return to my Grandma’s room.
It turns out her evening had been just as frustrating as mine. She had shown up at the hospital at 6:30 pm. only to be told that my Grandmother had been discharged earlier in the evening. This was completely false, but she had no idea. Thinking my Grandmother had been discharged, she had spent two hours alternating between hanging around my Grandma’s apartment complex waiting for her to show up and taking my daughter to a nearby store to keep her occupied (the last thing in the world you want to do is sit around waiting with a four year old).
By the time 8 p.m. rolled around she figured something was up and returned to the hospital. Asking for more information about when my Grandma had been discharged, she was told that in fact she was in a critical care room for an overnight stay.
Whew! I was really stressing out there for a few minutes with all sorts of ugly scenarios and possibilities going through my mind.