The Long March

I’ve been waiting a lot lately. Thursday after work I waited for three hours for the train to arrive—in the rain—while they attended to “track work” 45 minutes earlier up the line. Eventually I got sick of being cold and uncomfortable so I called Nik to come pick me up. We had dinner while we waited for the traffic to finish clearing.

Friday we had to be at the hospital for Nik’s surgery at 5:15 am so we hurried over there and the staff there proceeded to separate Nik and I for as long as humanly possible until just before they wheeled her off to another part of the building I was not allowed to go. I shuffled from waiting room to waiting room trading one uncomfortable chair for another, exhausted and wanting sleep but not getting any unless you count my rear end going all numb and pins-and-needles from the “cushions” on the seats.

I tried to keep myself occupied with books and various computing activities such as watching Battlestar Galactica on my laptop but nothing was interesting enough to suffer through the discomfort for very long. Eventually the doctor came and told me Nik had done just fine and I’d be able to see her in a little while which turned out to be an hour and a half.

Fortunately Nik was fine and in good spirits when I came in to see her and it wasn’t very long at all before she was getting up out of bed (albeit slowly and with some understandable effort) walking herself to the bathroom and so on. It was pretty clear by about 1:00 pm that she was doing fine, eating before she was scheduled to, mobile before she was scheduled to and clearheaded before she was expected to be. They had originally said that she would have to stay the night but I was thinking pretty early on that she might as well just go home.

Here’s the thing: I’m no doctor so I don’t know squat. It would certainly be tragic if a patient were rushed out of the hospital before they were ready and had a setback which required them to come screaming back in via ambulance or something shortly after getting home. But generally speaking I think that there needs to be some kind of mechanism in place to evaluate patients based on their indicidual progress. A nurse actively denied Nikki some solid food because she said she didn’t want her to throw up. Anyone who knows Nik knows that she’d rather have performed the surgery on herself minus the anaesthetic than vomit even a little bit so her asking for food was pretty much a 100% guarantee that she was ready for it. Of course when she finally did eat she kept it down fine.

Sometime after dozens of lame TV shows a nurse finally noticed around 6:00 that Nik was doing fine and suggested that they try to talk to the doctor about discharging her early. (Digression: I’m a fan of TiVo, the product. I think people should buy and use TiVo and for the most part I like TiVo the company, too. There are many, many upsides to TiVo but there is one pretty major downside which isn’t expressly obvious at first but gradually becomes clear: Once you get used to watching TV on TiVo, it absolutely positively sucks trying to watch TV without it. I’m not even talking about commercial skipping exclusively here, either, although that is a major appeal to TiVo. I’m also talking about the fact that in the three plus years we’ve had and used TiVo, I can remember maybe one or two at the most times where I’ve felt like watching TV, sat down to watch it and found nothing to watch. If you configure TiVo properly, there should almost always be something you’re interested in waiting for you. Watching the hospital TV with it’s abridged cable channel selection and dodgy remote during peak daytime TV hours was probably the most painful thing Nik had to endure the entire stay. I know it felt like I was getting a lobotomy.)

Of course they couldn’t find the doctor to authorize the discharge so we waited. And waited. Technically visiting hours are over at 8:30 pm. When that came and went I started to wonder how this was to be handled. On one hand the hospital isn’t exactly a hop skip and jump from our apartment or even our home town. We’re talking about a solid thirty to forty minute drive and that’s for a guy who’s working on not much sleep and a long exhausting day of being completely useless. It’s rather amazing how tired literally doing nothing can be. I’d almost have rather worked a whole day truth be told. I’m glad I was able to be there for Nik but my actual value aside from providing Nik reassurance and the occasional display of sympathy (expressed via a complex facial expression that takes literally seconds to fabricate) could have been measured in nanoliters.

At around 10:30 the doctor finally bumbled in (getting out of his last surgery of the day which if you calculate means that he had been cutting people open and toying with their insides for about 17 or 18 hours which is somewhat disconcerting) and looked at Nik and said, “Want to go home?” She nodded. “Okay!” he replied cheerfully. And that was it.

I thought if that was all it took I was pretty sure there had to have been someone that could have done that six or seven hours earlier. But I think Nik was just glad to get to sleep in her own bed. She and I had both been worried up until right before he walked in that I might have to take off without her and leave her overnight regardless of any doctor permission because my ability to safely drive home was rapidly diminishing. Fortunately I had enough left in the tank to push through the discharge procedure and make it home in time to crash and spend the rest of the weekend working.

Fin

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