After
the flight from Hays to Wichita, my mother would have to be sedated often to completely
eliminate the lung infection. My mother’s
medicines had been adjusted to attempt to stabilize her heart rate for the
flight, which succeeded, but the infection still needed to be combated. My father warned me that the adjustment time
may be an unpleasant time as the medicinal cocktail my mother was receiving
gave her vertigo and at times made her very anxious when she woke up disoriented,
which would get worse in a new environment.
He asked me to stay home for a few days, in part so he could do what was
necessary to keep Jo Lyn calm and help adjust to her new surroundings, but also
he sensed how hectic the situation was to a new mother with a husband returning
to work for the academic year. I spent
some time trying to relax and enjoy the little moments of being new parents
with a crisis in our immediate proximity.
Those days didn’t have climatic events, but instead the simple moments
and joys of family that would keep me sane during what seemed like a
catastrophe.
When I first went to the Via Christi Hospital
St. Francis in Wichita, I went with my biggest supporter, my husband Daniel,
and my littlest man, Eli. We had to use
the GPS to get to the hospital, find the right parking lot, call my dad, and
have hit meet us at the entrance to help us get to where my mother was. This hospital was larger, in a part of
Wichita near train tracks and industrial areas.
Perhaps it was from the car port, or maybe the color scheme was
different, but the hallways feel darker in my memory. The main hallway from that parking garage had
a mural of a tree with many leaves as donors, and a painted glass mosaic of something
Christian but not quite unique enough to remember. This hospital wasn’t like the newly built
Hays ICU area with overly white walls and a too clean smell, instead the
hallways seemed tight, a little dark, and everything felt a little older, as if
funding were somewhat tight.
My mother’s room was on the 7th
floor, up through an elevator that wasn’t too white, and wasn’t too clean. Daniel, Eli, and I went down the hall to the
waiting room, a tight room with 6 chairs, two tables, a window looking out at
another building and a lot of flat room, and some 1000 piece puzzles to keep children
older than Eli occupied. Eli wasn’t
going to be allowed into my mother’s room, and the nurses seemed a bit nervous
about Eli being on the floor at all.
While the ICU was overly clean and had mandatory hand sanitizer at the
entrance, long term critical care had patients who were chronically sick but
not wracked in the intense moments between life and death perhaps except when
the patient chose to be.
When Randy came back to say that Jo
Lyn was awake, Daniel offered to stay with Eli so I could go talk to my
mother.
No comments:
Post a Comment