Saturday, February 06, 2010

New Surroundings

As I write this I am sitting in the EMS quarters at Station 3 in Newton. I started my shift on Medic 1 today and will be working here on Saturdays for the foreseeable future. So far, so good – it’s approaching 12:30PM and we’ve done one call up to now. Realizing that it is still really early in the shift all bets are off, for the most part. I expect that we’ll pick up more business as the day goes on.

This past week has been a bit of a backbreaker. My Mom got sick at the end of last week; she contracted pneumonia and had an episode of something resembling angina to kick it all off. She was taken to the local hospital where she lives, was treated, and spent 3 days there. While she was an in-patient the hospitalist who was managing her care ordered a non-exercise stress test – a MIBI – which had some unwanted findings. Enough that the cardiologist who read the results thought she needed to go for further evaluation to a higher level of care.

She was transferred to the Beth Israel Wednesday. While she was there she had a cardiac catheterization done. No vessels were found to be occluded, which is a very good thing. However, she does have congestive heart failure, and she has an aneurysm in her abdomen. That was actually diagnosed quite some time ago, but it concerned the attending cardiologist enough that he wants her to see a vascular surgeon. For that she has an appointment this coming Monday. And I’m going with her.

Between this, my daughter’s impending childbirth, and my mother-in-law’s recovery from back surgery with it’s own set of issues, this has been a week fraught with what I can only describe as overwhelming high-speed activity. I do hope it slows up soon, but sometimes when we get what we want it isn’t really what we need.

So, I’m going to do my best to take deep breaths and not let all of this get to me.

Now all I want to do is sleep, but I have way too much to do. Studying, for one thing. I have to work on putting together the content of a lab report for an exercise we did last night dealing with blood typing. It was very interesting and it taught me some things that I’d either forgotten or didn’t know. As I’m always up for learning, that’s a really good thing.

So now I should probably get back to work.

2 comments:

Elizabeth @ The Garden Window said...

Walt,
my prayers for you and your family.

TOTWTYTR said...

I hope all goes well with you mom. And your daughter of course. I'll welcome you to the new grand dad club once it happens! :)