Lucky

[derien]

Well, let me tell you about my past few days. I've kind of been avoiding posting about it until pretty much everyone in our inner circles was brought up to speed. The reason I put 'lucky' in the subject line is, basically, that Eor is alive and didn't even suffer a lot of pain from this situation. Things could have been so much worse.

Tuesday night Eor experienced a burning pressure in his chest and elevated heart rate. Not the usual presentation of a heart attack, not what you see in shows and all, but he knew something was wrong and asked me to take him to the hospital. I am SO glad he didn't brush it off as an anxiety attack.

Him asking me to take him to the hospital got my anxiety level up to the point where I dialed 911, and I'm SO glad I listened to the dispatcher when she said "my guys can get him there faster." She didn't add, but I also realized at the same moment, that they could be assessing him and helping him while on the way and could bump him to the head of the line if need be, so I went with it.

That was a long night. They ended up getting him right in for a procedure to put a stent in the front part of his heart, which was 100% blocked, and while they were in there they checked the back part to find that it was 80 to 90% blocked. And they decided to keep him until Saturday (today) This morning Eor told me and EB who was visiting that as you move down floors in the hospital [IE further from the Intensive Care Unit] they tell you more of the scary things they didn't mention at first, and that particular artery he had blocked is referred to as 'the widowmaker.'

The disappointing thing - Friday (yesterday) they kept him hungry all day because they were going to put that second stent in the back (or side, possibly?) of his heart. But two or three other people needed emergency stents so he ended up getting put off until next Tuesday.

And then today it was explained to him that if he went home he would lose his place in line and no longer be on the Tuesday surgery list, but possible be bumped weeks out because of the shortage of beds in the outpatient section of the hospital. Which seems crazy, when you step back to look at it. Do they keep the number of outpatient beds low in order to push people into making the decision which will cost them more and make the hospital more money? Although it's true they're always expanding, they can never keep up with space vs. need. But we have decided to exchange money for time and have him stay an inpatient so that he can get this over with sooner and get back on the road to recovery. In addition, several more weeks of enforced laying around could well have a further negative effect on his health; mental as well as physical. This is not a guy who is happy sitting around all the time. His stress reliever is to get outdoors and work hard, and he's already not going to be able to do near as much of that for a long time.

Meantime, I also had to tell him, today, that there was water coming through the outside wall in the upstairs bathroom, which I discovered after10pm last night. I ended up flipping off the breaker on that wall so I could sleep without worrying about a short. So I'm going to call the insurance company and see if they can do anything for us.

This has been kind of good for our communication, because I didn't want to tell him there was a problem with water coming through the wall and stress him out more, so we had this circumspect conversation in which he told me that situations which stress him out the most are the ones where I tell him that something needs to be done but then I don't immediately tell him what I'm going to do about it. And at the time I said that I'd gotten the impression that he liked coming up with solutions.

But I realized something else just as I was writing this: My habitual method of working things out is through talking (or writing). But he is a habitually a problem solver, so he hears the part where I outline the problem and he starts spinning up on working out a solution by himself. Thankfully, during my drive to Portland this morning, I daydreamed about sending him off to Florida to recover so that he would not have to think about the house and it's needs, and by imagining him not involved with the solution I came up with a solution on my own.

Communication is a tricky thing. Like, why don't we learn this kind of thing in school?