Father's Day weekend started out innocently enough. It's Friday afternoon, I'm in the back room (my COVID "office"), and I'm running out the clock on another work week. Then she told me about a dehydrated mouse lying in the sun. She put a paper towel around it and gave it some water. Then she showed me the mouse and I put it in the shade. I went back to the "office". That's when the fun started…
An hour later she came to the back room and said "you're going to hate me. The mouse bit my thumb." Right - after 36 years I don't think "hate" is in the relationship vocabulary. I called immediate care for advise what to do. The nurse told me to take her to the ER. I told Carol "congratulations - you just bought a trip to the ER". We were there for an hour. Now she gets rabies shots. We have to go to the outpatient clinic for one more shot (four shots total). When I was a kid, I heard horror stories about rabies shots, that they were given with large gauge needles through the stomach. Today they’re given just like flu shots. A few days ago, after her third shot, I got a letter from the Department of Health. They concluded there was little to no risk of rabies. She'll get the last shot next week anyway
Saturday was quiet. It was a day to just lie around the house. Sunday was another matter. I was up until 2am, as is my wont on Saturday nights. I got up at noon, to be greeted by Carol in a lot of pain. Her face was green. That's never a good sign. The pain was on her right side. She said maybe she banged her hip on a counter or something, but she wasn't sure. Given where the pain was, Greg thought that maybe it was appendicitis. So I went upstairs to shower because I didn't want to look and smell like Saturday while waiting in the ER on Sunday.
After I was done, she said she needed to use the bathroom. She was hurting quite a bit, so I walked with her because I didn't want her to fall. We got to the bathroom and the pain was too much - she fainted. I was there to keep her from hitting her head on the hard floor. Greg was upstairs and I yelled to come help me peel her off the floor. Oddly enough, though she hurt too much to sit, she could stand. I knew I couldn't get her to the car. I had Greg call the ambulance.
Sitting in the ER with Carol was a stroke (mine) waiting to happen. She had been to radiology for x-rays. No broken hip, CT scan was ok. Maybe she had a urinary tract infection. It took awhile to get a sample the hospital could analyze. An hour later we learn there was no urinary tract infection. While we were waiting for all the tests to come back, Carol decided she wanted to do some housekeeping. After I helped her put her pants back on, she decided she wanted to fold up all the sheets of her hospital bed. All the while, she's hooked up to the machines that were monitoring her vital signs. I had visions of her fainting again and me peeling here off the floor again. I also thought if this happened, I wouldn't be so lucky to catch her. She just did what she felt like doing, her husband's mental health be damned. Luckily she didn't fall again. After all the tests came back, the conclusion was that she had a really bad upper leg muscle cramp. The doctor told me that incidents of bad pain can induce fainting in dementia patients. Five hours after we arrived at the ER, we were finally able to go home. My stroke will wait for another day.
A postscript - Today we got the bill for the ambulance. It wasn't inexpensive, but luckily I have the means to pay it. Carol looked at the bill and asked "why are you doing this for me?" I reminded her of everything that transpired on Father's Day weekend. She doesn't remember any of it. I certainly do.
