Thankful and Frustrated

The great news is that Mom made it through surgery and the doctor said they believe they removed all the cancer. Thanks be to God! This news came after five hours of waiting and wondering and praying. We were afraid to leave the waiting room for long, even though they gave us a beeper to carry around. So we sat reading, watching a TV (sans volume), and munching on snacks a dear friend of my sister had brought to us.

Once we heard from the doctor, we went to the hospital cafeteria and had dinner while we waited for Mom to get through the recovery process and into an assigned room. After dinner, we went back to the now familiar waiting room. At about 8:30 we were told she had been assigned a room in ICU for the night. However, when we went up to see her and say good night before going home, she was not in ICU and they couldn’t tell us exactly when she’d be there. It seems they had to play musical beds, move another patient to a then-unavailable bed, before they could bring Mom to her room. We waited some more.

Dad was a real trooper through all this, though sometimes he forgot where we were and why we were there. At about 7 p.m., he glanced outside the waiting room and said, “Hey, that looks like a hospital out there!”

But it was Dad, in a burst of clear thinking and decisiveness that he’s always been known for, who said at about 10:30 p.m., “We need to go home now.” We decided he was right. When Mom finally arrived at ICU she would most likely be asleep or so drugged she wouldn’t know we were there. Just before I went to bed at 12:30 a.m., I called the ICU nurse station and learned Mom still had not arrived.

This morning when I checked with the ICU nurses, there was some confusion because they had not yet updated the wall chart to show that Mom was there, and the nurse assigned to Mom was not available to speak with me. These communication difficulties don’t inspire confidence in the hospital! I need another dose of patience.

Sue