Major Plumbing And We Ain’t Talking Water, Either, Amigos y Amigas

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 22210 – 764:

Here’s the haps:

Had to take Mrs. Herb to the ER last night. She was having chest pains and a lethargic feeling and her oxygen kept dropping. Daughter said, “Dad, I don’t think Mom’s doing good. You better call 911.” Both daughter and Mrs. Herb are very practical and realistic about such things and Mrs. Herb didn’t put up a fuss about it which is troublesome. So I called 911 and, as often seems to happen, she started to do a little better when the paramedics got here. They did a lot, including giving her an EKG with this portable machine they have. Her blood pressure was high and her oxygen was low but it seemed to be getting better to the point where the paramedic in charge was starting to tell her that she seemed to be doing better and she could decide to stay home if she wanted and if she got worse she should call back or have someone take her in. Then she started to be more and more unresponsive and her blood pressure started going up again and her O2 started going back down and he said, “Hook her back up to the EKG again, please. Mrs. Herb. MRS. HERB. I think you better come with us, anyway.” When she lets you call 911 instead of the nurse line and then doesn’t argue at all about going in the ambulance to the hospital, it’s serious.

We went to the hospital I call the “pro-life” hospital (which reference you will likely understand if you were following this blog in February, but suffice it to say, for this post, that we have a definite preference in hospitals) and they took her into a room. The place is filled to capacity with Covid-19 patients. Her heart enzyme levels were good and something else was good but they decided to keep her overnight and give her a stress test in the morning. It took all night for a room to open up for her but it finally did.

Today the stress test came back with indications that she has something wrong with an artery to her heart. They will be doing an angiogram tomorrow to determine what the next step will have to be. This didn’t stop us from celebrating Givethanksing Day, though. We had a small gathering, compared to what we normally have (If you want to see what our gatherings are usually like, my son, Benjamin did a post about it on his blog, Brother’s Campfire, which you can read here and see yours truly read our annual Thanksgiving Day Poem), but we had a video call with her and she sat with us as we gave thanks. One of the common things we were thankful for was that Daughter had the sense of urgency to call 911.