You can't go home until you pee

My stated reasons for writing this blog are 1) my own amusement and 2) the possible amusement of my friends and family. That sort of limits what I write about to amusing things. Finding your life-mate on the dining room floor after an unknown period of unconsciousness is not amusing. She's fine, and I am thankful and grateful for the concern shown, and I probably should quit right here.

But there's just SO STINKIN' MANY funny things that happen during a hospital stay you just gotta talk about them, right? Like the guy in the room next door that the nurses never convinced that you could not make a telephone call with your combination call button/TV/lights control. He was still asking for someone to show him "how that #@$% phone works" when we left the next day. Or the guy walking down the hall shouting into his cell phone, "I don't know what kind of game you think you're playing, but I'm not buying it!" Couldn't tell if this was a patient or a doctor. Maybe he just got his bill.

I know why medical care costs so much. It's because of the pre-packaged, single-use medical devices and gee-gaws. At the house, I swept up a foot high stack of detritus that the EMTs left, and they were here only a half-hour at the most. Wrappers, needle covers, rubber tourniquets, disposable sharps containers, a dozen little round tabs for the EKG contacts, half a dozen EKG contacts, a yard of EKG printout paper, little plastic sleeves that made it easier to match up one vial with another, the vials themselves, and stuff I had no idea as to its use, but it was all left on the dining room floor. In the ER, there was a small mountain of trash; most of it seemingly duplicates of what the EMTs had already used, plus new and innovative apparati. They literally filled a trash can with medical jetsam during a 4 hour stay.

And we must talk about the parking garage. I admit it. I'm directionally challenged. I have drawn people maps to my house THAT WERE DEAD WRONG! I have, on more than one occasion, become lost driving from 4th and Congress, downtown Austin, to UT Memorial stadium. You know, that big thing that's right beside the Interstate - the only building in town that seats 100,000 people! 

But parking garages are my own personal hell. I do not understand them and I consider them evil places that exist to warp my mind and confuse my sensibilities. I have abandoned rental cars in parking garages in other cities, informing the rental company where they could recover their car if they could solve the puzzle; I could not.

So, given the fact that I parked hurriedly in the garage in the early hours of the morning, with other important things on my mind, and did not even think about finding my car until that evening, what do you think my chances of finding the car in the month of September were? Barb, ever considerate in spite of her own problems, told me that if I couldn't find the car, come back and she would get one of the nurses to help me. Yeah, right. Like once I left that room I had been carefully led to and actually left the building (not a given in and of itself)  I could find my way back! Not without a trail of bread crumbs, Gretel.

But I discovered the secret of leaving the building. Follow someone who looks like they too are leaving. But don't follow them through any doors that don't open automatically. Because then you have to explain to the nice security guards that you were NOT stalking a nurse. The good news is that the nice security guards show you the way out. And stand there to make sure you don't get confused and come back.

I was lucky, with the garage, too. Seton parking garage has only 5 floors (or 10, because parking garages have extra secret floors in between the real floors and your car gets moved to one of these phantom floors the instant you enter the elevator) and I did not exhaust the battery walking through all 10 5 floors making the car go beep with the door lock thingy. And finding the room when I came back? No sweat. I manned up and asked a little old lady volunteer to take me in hand and lead me through the maze. No crumbs needed.

Meanwhile, while I'm trying to navigate endless corridors and phantom parking levels, Barb has her most difficult time. No, it's not medical in nature. She can't persuade Kenny, the night nurse to leave her window drapes open. Kenny is insistent that there may be perverts with binoculars lurking on the rooftops a block away, spying on third floor hospital rooms. Barb insists that she will take that risk. She doesn't think anything in her room will be of great interest to the most dedicated of pervs, but Kenny prevails because Barb is restricted to the bed and will set off an alarm (more about this later) if she gets up to open the blinds.

The next morning, she is fussing about discussing Kenny's insistence with the nurses aide, explaining that she doubted anyone was interested in looking into her room. The aide replies, "Honey, I worked at a topless bar, and I can assure you that there is no limit to what men want to look at." Barb and I are sort of stunned at this because the aide doesn't really look like the sort of person who would work at a topless bar. NOT THAT I NECESSARILY KNOW WHAT THAT KIND OF PERSON WOULD LOOK LIKE. I'm just saying... She goes on, "Oh, yeah, men are pigs, but that was the best money I ever made. I would take home $500 - $600 a night and I was the hostess. I didn't have to take my clothes off." Phew.

About the bed alarm. When the EMTs brought Barb in they described her circumstance as "passed out and fell." Well, the passing out part is true, but as near as we can determine, she didn't fall. No bumps, bruises or knots on the head. I think she just slid out of the chair and lay down. Nevertheless, she got a yellow armband that labeled her as "potential risk for falling - don't let this one up because if she does fall the hospital will get blamed." Thus the bed alarm. Hop out of bed and the nurse comes running. Sit on the bed (as her doctor did) and the nurse comes running. And this is one of the wonder beds that wakes up ever so often and adjusts itself to a new position - usually just as you are finally drifting off to sleep!

And we have to talk about the "Code whatevers." Periodically someone on the PA system would call out a "Code Pink" or "Code Purple" or some such. Once there even was a "Code Blue" which on a coronary floor really stirs things up. Nurse Kenny showed us the back of his ID which listed all the important Codes. For instance "Code Gray" meant there was a belligerent or combative patient and according to Kenny meant that security should come, and I quote, "whup him like Rodney King." "Code Debby" was called once, which according to Nurse Topless meant that a mother had taken her own child and left the building. Hmmm. We joked later about "Code Barbara" which meant that if she didn't get dismissed soon we were going to skip out ourselves.

Which brings us to the situation described in the title of this blog. Barb had the doctor's okay to leave; all we needed was some paper work and some pee. So, in order to facilitate the process, we were consuming large quantities of liquid (my part in the "we" was obtaining the liquid). And we were successful. Actually, we were too successful. We had to make three bathroom stops before we got home. But get home we did, and all is well. And that's a nice thing to blog about, too.