Priorities

A week ago today, Granny, who's 81, was hospitalized due to a rare complication of diverticulitis, a common disease of the elderly that fifty percent of us can look forward to when we hit sixty. The not-so-common part was bleeding out several pints, and I'm not talking about through her nose. You might think rectal bleeding is something a woman of a certain age wouldn't want broadcast to the world, but if you'd heard the gusto with which Granny described the discovery of her emergency, it would be clear to you that she won't mind this post.

Mom had called to apprise me of my grandmother's condition late Wednesday morning. My afternoon class had been rescheduled once already, so my plan was to go ahead and teach that and then leave work early to join Mom at the hospital. I figured if I left Atlanta at 3, I'd miss the rush hour. In the end, I could have unicycled to Paulding Medical Center faster than my car crawled incrementally through the West Cobb traffic. When I finally arrived around 7 pm, Granny was awake, eating ice with a spoon, blankets piled like my Saturday laundry, up to her neck.

She was so pale I could practically see through her. She'd been poked in every visible vein. She was suffering chest pains and having some difficulty breathing. None of these things seemed to bother her much, though. She was too upset that she hadn't eaten since dinner Tuesday night, and the doctor had said 'no food whatsoever' until the bleeding had stopped and all necessary tests had been run. When the workers changed shifts and the new night nurse came in, Granny decided to get her up to speed.

"I'm starving," she told the nurse, "If I'd known last night that I wouldn't be eating again for more than 24 hours, I'd have gone to the Chinese Buffet. I'd have had the Moo Shoo Pork AND the Moo Goo Gai Pan. And I'd have gone to Baskin Robbins afterward for a hot fudge sundae with extra nuts and full-fat whipped cream." She scraped an ice chip from the bottom of her cup.

The nurse was sweetly sympathetic. "Honey, I'm so sorry. Let me call the doctor and see if there's anything you can eat."

Granny cut her off: "Oh, we've already talked to the doctor. I know the answer. I can't have anything. I just want to complain about it."

About that time, Mom's friend Brenda stopped by to visit and reported that another friend, Rhonda, had gone by my mother's house to feed the FIVE dogs and let them out and that everything at home was currently under control.

So, to sum up that instant: Granny is in the hospital, bleeding into a pad the size of a couch cushion; I can read the Wellstar logo on the pillow case through her cheeks; she's waiting to go down to radiology, where they plan to remove yet more blood, add some kind of nuclear dye to it, and shoot it back into her system before scanning her GI tract; both her daughter and her granddaughter are hovering around her, trying their bests not to imagine worst-case scenarios...

and Granny wants to know if Rhonda hung out with the dogs for a while and talked to them.