Where I Have Been

Life is fragile and can change in the blink of an eye.  One minute you are having dinner in a restaurant and the next minute you are on your way to the emergency room.  This past Friday my wife and I had dinner with our youngest son.  Afterwards he came to our house to pick up a piece of furniture.  I was helping him put it in his car and my wife was watching us.  Suddenly, with no warning, she lost her balance and went down like a bag of rocks.  Fortunately my son was there to help me get her up and into the house.  At first we thought it was a bad fall but nothing too serious.  I thought her pride was injured more than anything.  Thinking everything was fine my son left.  My wife and I sat at home for a little while before deciding a trip to the ER was in order.  We were in the ER for six hours and the diagnoses was a shattered elbow and three broken bones.  We left the ER at 1:00 AM and headed to Kroger for a prescription.  Kroger is a much different place at 1:00 AM, especially since my wife and I rarely go out after dark.  It was a long and difficult night and we had to be back at the hospital at 7:00 AM for her surgery.  The surgery was estimated to take an hour and ended up taking nearly three hours because the bone damage was worse than originally thought.  On the way home, after the surgery, and while my wife was very high on good drugs, she asked me three questions, i.e., 1) Was it raining in the car?  2)  Were we in Mexico? 3) Did she have another baby?  I started to answer yes to all the questions but I told her the truth.  The last few days I have a been a full time nurse and caregiver.  This is not my true calling and I have a new respect for anyone who does this full time.  We have both been sleeping in our Lazy Boy chairs because my wife can’t sleep in our bed with any degree of comfort.  We are both a little sleep deprived.  I would have worked from home today but I discovered last night that my home PC has a virus so I couldn’t log on to work systems.  At the moment the patient is doing fine until the drugs start to wear off.  However, I think it is just wrong that the caregivers aren’t given drugs too!