All’s well that ends well enough: a record of this week’s surprises
It hasn’t been the week we anticipated, to say the least.
It started at bedtime Friday night. Evelyn stood up too fast from a kitchen chair, her feet slipped out from under her, and she tumbled into a plant and some bags in the corner. She landed on her bottom and didn’t hit her head, so I ushered her to bed.
She was still complaining of pain under her left arm the next morning, but only when she moved in certain ways, not constant, and not when she took a deep breath. I assumed it was a stretched muscle caused by trying to catch herself when she fell backward.
But the pain wasn’t going away so I wrote her doctor Sunday evening to ask advice.
“Maybe a nick . . .”
Without a reply, I called the office Monday noon, and they gave me the first available appointment Tuesday morning. The doctor did a thorough, careful exam and agreed we were probably seeing a pulled muscle. “But let’s take an X-ray to make sure she didn’t nick a rib.”
Soon after we got home, the doctor called to say the picture showed five fractured ribs, one of them in several places. And her lung had been punctured, causing it to collapse, and there was quite a bit of blood in the chest cavity. (Evelyn is on blood thinners, which complicated the problem). “Go to the ER,” the doctor told me.
A surgical team there inserted a tube to drain the blood and air from her chest cavity.
That was Tuesday afternoon. By Tuesday evening, the lung had filled nicely, and her chest remained clear. We’re on the way to healing.
“While you’re there . . .”
Meanwhile, I was noticing random, inconsistent, come-and-go pains in the center of my chest, and I thought Wednesday would be a great day to run to the doctor since Evelyn was comfortably situated in the hospital with a whole staff of caregivers.
But when I called for an appointment and they heard I was coming in for chest pain (mild, with absolutely no other symptom, which we established by my answering approximately four dozen questions), they still said, “You should go to the ER.”
I sat with a smiling Evelyn this morning at the hospital.
So after I left Evelyn dozing in her room about 8:00 p.m., I went downstairs and checked myself in at the ER. After answering all those questions again, submitting to an EKG, giving uncounted vials of blood, and ultimately standing for a chest X-ray, about three-and-a-half hours later the doctor said, “You’re fine. You can go home.” Maybe my random chest pains were due to indigestion or stress or indigestion caused by stress!
I had written another post for today, intending to polish it yesterday to appear as usual this morning. Instead, I’m sharing this news, for two reasons:
1) I want this bump in the road to be recorded in my “chronicle” for future looking back.
2) So many readers have been so generous with their promises to pray and offers of good wishes, I felt they would want to know about this.
It has taken me all day to write this, between interruptions in the hospital room. Now we’re home, and Evelyn is resting in her own bed. We’ll see if she wants to get up for supper.
The hospital referred us for occupational and physical therapy in-home, another step in the process of thinking about next steps. That’s the bigger issue raised by a week turning out in ways we certainly didn’t expect.