ER

4/30/2007 10:56 AM

The phone rang this morning. It was my friend Shawna. She was not feeling well, and was going to take herself to the ER. She just wanted me to know so that I could get her kids if she did not make it home before they did. This of course was ridiculous because the reason that she was going to the ER was chest pains…like I would even let her drive herself!!! So I gathered up my passel of children, including snacks and GameBoy DS, and we headed to pick her up at work. We are now at the ER waiting to hear back on the blood work, so far her heart seems fine, and her oxygen is normal. Throughout the morning I have tried to keep her spirits up, cracking jokes and reminding her that I owed her a ride to the ER anyway, since she took me back in August. I was not as good of a patient as she is now, I was the moaning and hollering type, a great memory for the both of us. As they were drawing her blood work, I saw a sign that read “If you take Viagra please tell the nurse” I told her she better just let them know now. She laughed. We continued to chuckle about the funny nurse who was seeing her, his name is Jeff, which made us laugh to begin with, he informed us that if the monitor started beeping because her heart stopped to make sure and holler at him…and he would run go get the paddles…he loved to use them…to which I replied that we could get them and use them anyway, it could be fun. The X-ray department like her chest so much the tried to take her twice to get a picture of it…she politely declined. My boys are out in the waiting room…really tough life, watching cartoons, and Micah is in the room with us…I am sure we are about to get kicked out because she is SO loud…which is made worse when she was listening to my MP3 player, sitting right next to me and yelling that my favorite song was on. She is also the town crier…every time the blood pressure machine beeps(which it does every 5 minutes) Beez announces, “that beep means it’s time to check on the brothers” like they are in the microwave and are ready for us to eat them. After about 4 hours, the novelty of getting out of school has worn off and my kids, who have now joined us in the ER exam room are growing weary. They have already eaten a weeks worth of snacks, watched 3 Andy Griffiths on the DVD player, and are longing for a change of scenery. So I inquire about an estimated time frame, jokingly asking if we were looking at 15 minutes and my kids could just be hungry till we made it home, or if I should just give up and take them down to the cafeteria…Jeff, our comedian nurse quipped, ”its looking like cafeteria time kids” So now the fun really begins. My kids were in “field trip” mode…like this was going to be some kind of adventure or something…an elevator ride, a long dim hallway, that at last lead us to the grandeur of the hospital cafeteria. They obviously knew something I did not…this turned out to be quiet the adventure. You would have thought that Jared had never been to a restaurant before…and Beez, still being louder than even humanly possible, was giving us a loud speaker version of the Crum lunch play by play. I was torn between praying that nobody would recognize us and begging for someone to know us, and at least validate that we were not always this circus-like spectacle. Did I mention, that even though we did manage to get dressed and get our teeth brushed, that no one had a chance to brush their hair…me included. The kids all had bed-head and I was no better with all mine pulled back in a pony tail and not a stitch of makeup. So we finally and miraculously made it through our lunch field trip and headed back to the ER to check on Shawna. It was quickly decided that I should go and pick up her kids, which I did. She was finally released that evening, with a take home monitor to boot. All in all, a very interesting day. The laundry went undone. The house stayed a wreck, due in part to the tornado of us rushing to leave earlier that day. My email, survived without me checking on it, as did my myspace page. And the kids never did get their hair brushed. Kind of like a MasterCard commercial. All the prices paid that day did not compare to the moments helping a friend in need. PRICELESS. Come to think of it, I guess the kids did go to school that day…the school of life.