Every Minute is an Hour When You’re Waiting in an Emergency Room

If you want to feel like your life lasts forever, spend it waiting with a sick parent in an emergency room.

Every minute in the er is an hour, every hour is a day, and the days are as close to eternity as we will get in this life.

I spend quite a bit a time in emergency rooms with my Mama and her breathing problems. I’ve done enough of it that I have my fav ers and my ers that I avoid.

An emergency room staff and their fine potions can get the old lady pumped full of steroids and other goodies that will set her breathing back on course again. The docs range in quality from the indifferent and nearly incompetent to the kind, caring souls who go the extra mile. Ditto for the nursing staff and intake people.

Last night was an emergency room night for me. I had one of those eternity-long evenings sitting alone with Mama through hours of waiting, excellent treatment that got her going again followed by an exhausted, tossing and turning night that was more worrying about her than rest.

Today, I’m tired. I mean tired. Not only did I do the emergency room do, but I’ve got the same cold that shut her down and sent me to the er with her in the first place.

We’ve all got that blamed cold. The whole family. We’re grouchy and tired. But she’s got 90-year-old-I-smoked-since-I-was-17 lungs. It’s known as COPD, and it works a treat with a cold, turning an ordinary blow and cough into an I-can’t-breathe crisis.

I am, as I said, tired. Too tired to think. What that means to you, my friends, is that any blogging I do will be later in the day.

After.

After, I give the emotional part of this tired a chance to roll off me, and after I regain a bit of my oomph. If I stay oomph-less all day long, then I doubt I’ll write.

Right now, this morning, I feel like my brain is wrapped in cotton. At this juncture, I do believe that Mama is friskier than I am.

Go figure.