Friday, April 24, 2009

One of those evenings

Thursday is my busy day this semester. I start out in the morning at the Writing Center, teach my rhetoric class till about 1, then head home to tackle more mundane tasks like laundry and cooking or whatever presents itself. Yesterday, I had to take my mother to the psychiatrist after my class. When I got home, all I wanted to do was cook and eat dinner and go teach my poetry workshop at 7. But it was not to be.
When I came in from my mother's appointment, Jeremy was sitting in the living room. I handed him a fat envelope from my mother in law, containing pictures of the latest snow storm in Floyd (beautiful) and a lottery scratcher from VA.
Then I set to fixing dinner, which was in this case only a matter of microwaving a frozen Chinese dinner from Costco (not my usual tactic, but it looked intriguing and was of course fast).
Suddenly, Jeremy called out--"Mom! I think I won $100,000. with this scratcher!"
I came bounding out of the kitchen, but since I know nothing about Texas Hold Em, I couldn't decipher whether he had indeed won the prize. He was sure though, so we called my in laws and then I emailed the VA lottery.
Jeremy was very mature about this; I was probably less so, letting my mind run away with the things we could do with some of that money. My son kept reminding me that we didn't know for sure, and that we had been through similar things before with lottery tickets. He said if we did win, he wanted to divide the money equally among us, what was left after the taxes.
I set about getting ready for class, but just as I was about to walk out the door, at about 6, my dad called, sounding very unhappy and in pain. I had noticed when I dropped off my mom that the home health care nurse had changed my dad's foley (his urine bag and catheter), which happens once every 3 weeks. There was a little bit of orange liquid in the tube, which rang some alarm bells in my head. I asked him if he was okay, and he said that changing the tube really hurt this time. More bells. I told him to drink lots of water and keep an eye on it.
Now, three hours later, he had a bag full of blood and no urine. The nurse had put the tube in the wrong place.
I had no way to reach anyone at school to cancel my class, though I tried a couple of numbers.
So when Richard walked in, already beseiged with the lottery ticket and other business, I told him my dilemma. He offered to take my dad. I tried to get him to take my class instead, since he is certainly qualified to teach it. But he preferred the emergency room.
At class, I was a wreck. I had no way to call Richard since he refuses to have a cell phone. But the class went very well, actually. We discussed odes (Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" and Pablo Neruda's Elementary Odes) and wrote our own odes, then had a full workshop of poems from nearly everyone in the class. When I got home, Richard was eating soup. He told me that the ER took my dad right away because he was bleeding and in obvious pain. Once they replaced the tube, he was fine, making jokes, and today he went to the Center. He's a tough old bird.
Thank you everyone for your effort to assist me.

3 comments:

Lou said...

Good grief.

I was actually happy for you when you went off to your workshop, unable to stay in contact with the chaos. "Stuck" for three hours with poetry. :)

Robbi N. said...

I suppose so. Richard didn't have to wait long, at least. And he didn't complain or make a fuss. I made more of a fuss than he did because I was afraid he'd have to sit for 6 or 7 hours and I didn't want him to have to do that.

Robbi N. said...

All the same, I'll get a phone number in case of emergencies.