“Honey, I need to go urgent care.”
This is the last thing I wanted to hear my husband whisper at 11PM on a Saturday night. It was December 6th and he could barely walk or talk. Five minutes later he was at the sink vomiting.
“Urgent care is closed. Should I call an ambulance?” I asked shakily. He shook his head. I have never seen him look this pale and frail in the 27 years we’ve been married. My heart was pounding as I looked away and prayed silently. I have PTSD at the thought of having to go to a hospital. It’s one of the lasting effects of living in a hospital for three years and holding my lifeless daughter in my arms for hours after she had passed away at UCSF. I wanted to cry. I wanted Grant to say he was feeling better after throwing up. But I held it together as best as I could.
I found myself changing out of my pajamas into warm sweatpants, looking up the nearest emergency room, and checking for Grant’s driver’s license and Cigna insurance card. I also grabbed a plastic bag just in case there was another episode of vomiting. Sean offered to drive us. I was grateful that even in the midst of finals week at Cal and with an assignment due the next day, he dropped everything for us.
In ER, the nurse confirmed Grant was running a fever. He started to decline but as he realized he lacked the strength to walk, he reluctantly accepted the wheelchair. A different nurse pushed him to a room and they ran multiple blood tests and a CT scan. We had been to urgent care the day before and they had found a small gallstone. Tonight, they wanted to make sure it wasn’t anything else.
I was relieved when his CBC came back normal. At 3AM, the young female physician’s assistant on duty told us Grant’s liver enzymes were not elevated to the level that would warrant emergency surgery to remove his gallbladder. She wanted to keep him overnight for further testing. I wanted to go home but Grant said, “What are we going to do when we get home and it happens again?”
We decided I would go home to sleep and come back the next morning. I didn’t actually fall asleep but I did rest for a few hours. At first, I sat in bed, sad and exhausted. Then I got angry at Grant for eating spicy hot Cheetos and greasy fast food, which I am convinced has caused this emergency room visit. Suddenly, I thought of the endless times walking through hospital hallways when Grant carried Natalie with piggyback rides because she was too weak to walk. And how he was too weak to walk. How lucky Natalie was to have a father who loved her like that.
When Grant proposed, one of the reasons he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me is because he didn’t want our dates to end. He hated having to leave me after a date was over. I wonder if he had known back then that a date that doesn’t end means being with each other during the low times too. It means we can’t leave when we are in an awful argument, or when one of us is having the worst day, or when our kid has leukemia, or when one of us has to stay in the hospital. In our twenties, neither of us imagined a never-ending date would bring anything but good times.
We’ve been fortunate to have had magical moments on our date that have carried us through many painful, hard days. As much as I wanted to be angry with Grant for his dietary choices, all I could think about were the times he carried our daughter in the hospital hallways.
When I visited him on December 7, I think he was giddy from the morphine. One moment he was telling me how spoiled he felt that we live in a country with advanced healthcare and the next he was saying his hospital bed was big enough for the both of us to sleep in if I was tired.
“Spoiled” was the last thing I felt in a hospital. I did my best to endure the beeping from the infusion machine on Grant’s IV pole. I tried to ignore the sharp and bitter antiseptic smells -and the strong desire to run out of the sick and sterile environment I felt trapped in. My friend Jen was nice enough to sit with me while they took Grant to his MRI because she knew how triggering this situation was mentally.
I was glad to take a break and go get Grant a lemonade and Peanut Butter Moo’d smoothie when he asked. He couldn’t eat anything solid yet; they wanted him to be ready to do the gallbladder surgery if it was finally determined he had nothing but a gallstone. I never told him, “I can’t do this hospital thing,” but I think he knew I was having a difficult time.
A few hours after his surgery on Monday, I came back (with another bottle of lemonade) to find my husband out of his patient gown, dressed in street clothes, and sitting upright in his hospital bed. I was willing to soldier through another day at the hospital for him and he was willing to leave early for me.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he replied firmly and with a rueful smile. “I can’t put you through another minute here.”