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Albany hospital, day one
Tuesday, September 12 2017
This morning after walking the dogs (but not losing them for long in the forest), I drove up to Albany, drinking Stewart's "richer roast" coffee for most of the drive. Our neighbor Andrea had called this morning wanting to help out (as have lots of people) and I'd happened to answer; this was how I found someone to feed the dogs tonight.
St. Peters is a much larger hospital than Northern Dutchess, and not only did I have to park in a parking structure, but I had to drive more than half way to the top before finding an open space. The complex was so big and sprawling that it seemed prudent to take note of prominent structures (particularly a tall brick smokestack) so I could find my way back to my car.
Nobody was in Gretchen's room when I arrived; Gretchen herself was off getting drainage ducts driven into her fallopian tubes (they would enter from the side, through punctures in the wall of her belly). Before she got back from that procedure, Gretchen's parents appeared, and we sat talking about random topics mostly unrelated to Gretchen's condition. I found that I would introduce a topic with a brief mention and then Gretchen's father would monologue about it for paragraphs. One such topic was traffic on the highways from Maryland, though there were two or three others, and it took nothing to completely launch a new monologue.
When Gretchen was wheeled back, she seemed cheerful despite the new holes and tubes. The latter ended in transparent bags strapped to each thigh by medical-grade garter belts.
Part of Gretchen's good spirits certainly derived from the fact that the closest members of her human family were all there, and this continued for awhile. Eventually Gretchen's parents and I went out for lunch at Little Anthony's, a vegan-friendly Italian restaurant Gretchen's father had discovered years ago when he was in Albany for some very different reason. Gretchen and I had been there once; it's a divey place beside the I-90 overpass on Central Avenue with weird modern re-imaginings on Hieronymus Bosch posters on the wall. I ordered the Philly "Cheese Steak," which took the kitchen a little longer than the calzone and pizza ordered by Gretchen's parents. Little Anthony's vegan Philly Cheese Steak isn't as good (or as greasy) as the one you can get at Blackbird Pizza in Philadelphia. But that's a high bar. And Black Bird is actually in Philadelphia. Gretchen's father got to talking with the guy at the counter about how Little Anthony's came to be vegan, and the answer was that he, the owner (his name is not Anthony) is a vegan. Sometimes the actual answer is the simplest one.
We took an enormous amount if vegan Italian food back to the hospital for Gretchen, who was expressing interest in normal food for the first time in weeks. She proceeded to tuck into it to a remarkable degree, suggesting a rather large improvement in her health.
Later in the afternoon, I went to a quiet area in the hospital where semi-private desk areas had been set up for people such as myself to do work while in the hospital attending to a loved-one. I had a phone meeting with some remote colleagues concerning a sticky matter related to the CAN-SPAM Act, and I was able to make my modest contribution from there.
Back in Gretchen's room (where she still had no roommate), Gretchen was either asleep or something close to it. Gretchen's parents were back at their hotel, so I just sat there quietly, either working or something close to it.
Later, after Gretchen's parents returned and as the sun went down and the room grew darker, Gretchen's pain medications started wearing off and she started complaining more and more about discomfort. Unfortunately, a shift change had happened at 7:00pm and there's always a bit of chaos after that happens. Gretchen didn't get her oxycodone until about 7:45pm, and it took about an hour for her to go from a subjective pain level of 7.5/10 to 2/10. Once Gretchen was sleepy, I thought maybe I'd try to slip out and drive back home. But in a hospital context, it's hard to find the right moment for a graceful exit. I said something about leaving at 8:50, but it took an announcement over the PA system at 9:00pm (that visiting hours were over) to drive us out. Walking out of the hospital with Gretchen's parents was a little like walking the abandoned streets of after-hours Rhinebeck. They kept finding things to stop and read in the hallways. All I wanted was to be free to find my way home.
Finally I was in the parking structure by myself. As I drove down towards the bottom and fiddled with my phone to navigate my way back out to the Thruway, I saw that The Organization's web server was overburdened again with too much traffic. This past weekend I'd determined that the problem was Postfix (the result of a poorly-considered web-based emailing campaign that used the web server to send all the email). I'd been tweaking the Postfix settings and hoping for the best, but evidently my tweaks hadn't restrained Postfix enough. So there I was in the Prius, parked in a random parking structure spot with my trusty laptop Hyrax in my lap, my phone on the dashboard providing a tethered link to the internet via the cellphone network. Killing the Postfix process eventually brought the web server back to normal behavior, but not before causing considerable stress to my colleagues. Once the server was behaving itself, I could exit the parking structure and begin my drive homeward.
As I often do on the long drive to and from Albany, I was drinking a beer. I was feeling a warm connection to all of humanity, so when a big tractor trailer indicated it wanted to merge in front of me, I flashed my headlights momentarily, a benevolent gesture I rarely do. With him in front of me and driving about 76 miles per hour, I didn't have to pay attention to my speed; I just followed him at a safe distance, something that takes almost no mental effort (I could've also used cruise control, but, as it is non-adaptive in our cars, I don't like the way it gradually gains on or falls behind the next vehicle in front of me). I realized as I was driving that vehicles following each other on the road serves as a bit of a cooperative network. The vehicle in the lead sets the pace, and the vehicles in the rear provide a buffer against malicious actors (such as police) that tail (that was, for example, how Gretchen got busted about a year ago for handling her cellphone while driving). The trucker in front of me kept overtaking other drivers, though often he'd abandon a first attempt at overtaking, perhaps because the person being overtaken had responded to being overtaken by accelerating. I hadn't done that when he overtook me.
Gretchen had given me all her leftover vegan Italian food, and when I got home I proceeded to eat most of an enormous tin of baked ziti. Gretchen called me in the midst of this and sounded a lot better than she'd been only hours before. But she was in a weirdly obsessive state, wanting me to launch a social media war on a woman who had chastised her for oversharing her medical condition on Facebook. That seemed like an overreaction, but no big deal. Then when I mentioned how I'd only just got home, Gretchen seemed dismayed that it had taken me two hours to drive home from Albany. I tried to explain that I'd had to do some server work in the parking structure, and I never even got to the subject of how slow Gretchen's parents had been at leaving the hospital (and my feeling of social obligation to walk at their pace regardless), but Gretchen started picking apart these statements in a way that seemed totally unfair. Finally I said, "Look, I don't want to have to account for my time!" Gretchen was shocked by my snippy tone and said, "Ok, well I'm gonna go..." to which I said, "Okay, goodbye!" and hung up. I don't know if I was being a bad husband or not, but during that call she'd seemed perfectly healthy. Perhaps, though, her worst personality traits were amplified by medication and the stress of hospitalization.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170912 feedback
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