For all aware of my colorful health past, it may come as a surprise to hear that before April 4, 2019, I never had rode in an ambulance! Of all the hospital visits and stays, none warranted a trip or the services of an EMT.
Ambulance one - Over spring break, being my body seems to have a sense of humor that I do not share, I spent three of the days of driverless bliss passing a kidney stone. As if that weren't exciting enough, both Shane and my Mom were out of town. Stubbornly, I never saw a doctor, which I regretted when my scraped up ureter became infected, spreading the infection. If I hadn't been so ill, I doubt I would have called the doctor, who informed me to go straight to the ER. At the stand-alone emergency room, CT and blood test results gave the attending physician cause for concern. He requested an ambulance to bring me to the nearby hospital for admittance.
Ambulance two - Two weeks to the day, I had just dropped my eldest off at her school and begun the trip homeward. Beginning to roll forward slowly at the green light, being I was behind two semi trucks and a car, I felt it - someone slamming into the back of my car, pushing me sideways on the road. Before I could break to pull over, the driver swerved around me. I realized her intentions were to bolt from the scene, so I tried to focus on her license plate. The vehicle in front of me had begun to pull aside, seeing I had been hit and in hopes of helping; however, the driver then hit their car as well! Again, she attempted to flee, but was blocked to a stop by a minivan. After I parked, I got out of my car, named lovingly "Toothless" by my eldest, from How to Train Your Dragon, the driver of the other impacted car ran to me, enveloping my body in her arms. "Are you ok?!" (Someday, when allowed, I will be sending them flowers and a "thank you" to this kind lady and her sister, for their care and compassion that day!) The gentleman driving the mini van, already on the phone with police, asked our ages. He had dialed for assistance in the minutes before the wreck after noticing the woman driving erratically. An officer was on the scene within minutes, with firemen and an ambulance close behind him. I was holding my sore neck, so they immediately put me in a neck brace, laid me onto a board, and brought me to the hospital.
The afterward - I spent two days in the hospital after the first ride, every rare waking moment with the acute desire to escape the confines of the room and IV pole attached to my right arm. Since moving to Florida, I have had some nightmare emergency room and hospital experiences. Ranging from misdiagnosis to aspiration pneumonia, the end results were horrible. However, the stand-alone ER and the hospital, Westley Chapel's Florida Hospital, newly named Advent Health, were both wonderful! Still - it is the residual and cumulative result of spending chunks of time in hospitals over the past 30 years that make even the best stay feel stifling, claustrophobic! As for the second ride, some x-rays and CTs revealed nothing broken, so I was released soon after to begin treatments and therapy with other specialists. The patrolman who visited the emergency room with papers in hand informed us that the driver who slammed into me was driving on a suspended license, after her second DUI, and, being she tried to run twice, would be facing a third DUI, this time a felony. She had been arrested on the scene. The "afterward" of this is still on-going. We have yet to discover whether Toothless will be totaled or repaired, let alone how this will all come to a close - it is a hovering unresolved situation to date.
The irony - Both took place on a Thursday. Whenever my children are doing something that may result in stitches, a cast, or the likes, I tell them to stop because we can't go to the ER that day: "We only go to the ER on Thursday and this is Monday,"...Unless it is a Thursday, in which case Tuesday replaces the day. My youngest reminded me that it was ok to go to the hospital both of those days, being they were both on Thursdays. That joke is officially going into retirement!
So, here it is, Thursday again, another two weeks have passed and I am safely sitting on my pretentiously named lanai, blogging again. Here's hoping the remains of this day are as uneventful as its beginning!
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| My eldest snapped this picture of the sky en route to school the day I was hit. |
