24 Hours In: The Hospital Chronicles (warning: adult language is involved)

When I was sitting in the ER yesterday, listening to the groans and moans of the traumatized behind the vinyl curtains, I was busy writing a story in my tiny little mother mind™about Issac The Nurse who wore beat-up tennis shoes, a scruffy beard and a yarmulke. We were in the ER at one of Los Angeles' most prestigious hospitals in order to gain admittance to get an overnight EEG. At 11:15 in the morning, 24 hours ago as I type here, we were placed in an ER bay to wait for the bed in the hospital so that we could gain some knowledge about Sophie's ESES shenanigans. We had originally planned to get an ambulatory EEG, but I was concerned about all the co-morbidities of the ESES (the increased seizures, the choking and inability to walk, etc.) and had had enough of it so insisted to The Nice Neurologist, who agreed, that maybe we should just go in to hospital to figure stuff out (pleaser remember this phrase for later, Reader) and get some tests, etc. I don't want to bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that Sophie and I sat in the ER bay for the next ten hours. When we finally got a room, we were told that it was too late to hook up the EEG and that it would be done first thing in the morning. Here's how I reacted:

My friend Sandra actually sent me this picture on about hour seven or eight in the ER, and let me tell you, Reader, that's what got us through. Even now, as I post it, it makes me laugh out loud. The only reason we needed to hook Sophie up (that's neurological parlance for attaching electrodes to the scalp in order to read the brain's shenanigans) was to see the OVERNIGHT ACTIVITY. Again, I don't want to go into details, but at some point The Hospitalist (further evidence of the corporatization of healthcare in this g-d country) who was earnestly trying to get a neurologist or a fellow or a resident to get the EEG thing going, told me that it was like talking to a wall. I called on the great forces of my tiny little mother mind™and asked him to send The Wall my way, but IT NEVER HAPPENED! I apologize for the Trumpian punctuation (whom, I might add, gave me my second massive laugh of the day when I read this quote:

)


Sophie's father came to the hospital at hour eleven, and I went home to sleep. When I arrived back at the hospital this morning, Sophie was still not hooked up and eventually Damage Control, in the form of The Hospitalist and Patient Care arrived in the room to talk me down.

Remember this?

Shortly after Damage Control, a tween with a nose ring and scuffed-up Converse shoes arrived to hook up Sophie, followed by a teenager who called himself The Resident Neurologist and who neurexplained to me what seizures were and how certain drugs worked. He also asked me whether our neurologists had ever thought of surgery for Sophie or the VNS. My tiny little mother mind™ was blown.







Wasn't I telling you a story?

Issac means laughter, Issac The Nurse said when I told him that I liked his name. We then had what I would consider a Biblical conversation (I actually have read the Bible several times and studied it both in a faithful sort of way in the last century and also as a very beautiful text that I do not believe as the word of God in the literal sense) about Issac and his mother Sarah who was believed barren when God finally graced her with a child, the news making her and her husband Abraham laugh uproariously at the thought of it since Sarah and Abraham were nearly one hundred years old. People lived longer then, Issac the Nurse said as he busied himself with Sophie, and I replied, No! Didn't they have shorter lives? Most women were dead in childbirth. Issac the Nurse informed me that this wasn't the case, that Issac From The Bible lived the longest of the three in his family and died at 180 years. I said I thought those numbers were probably highly significant and symbolic, but Issac the Nurse insisted that no, it was true.