ER memories

For whatever reason, but thanks be to the gods, the itchy heat rash that I had on my legs and arms over the past few days, is gone! It's like a miracle. The weather is still hot, and now it's humid. We had thunder and lightning that woke me up at about four this morning. I had to go around and close windows, especially up in the loft. I again had slept in the guest room downstairs, where it is cooler. At first I couldn't find Walt anywhere, but when I turned on a light in the living room there he was sleeping on the couch. I told him to go sleep where I had been sleeping, on the guest bed, so that I could make some coffee and turn on the TV to see the morning news. I haven't been sleeping in the guest bed, but on it, wrapped (or not) in a king-size sheet, depending on how hot I felt. I've actually been sleeping pretty well.

There was no news yesterday from the tile contractor. I guess I don't expect any, unless he sends us a bill for the garden shed work. We're glad the shed has been shored up and maybe now it won't fall down. The cracks in the walls don't matter, since we've never seen evidence of any water inside the shed after it has rained. Maybe we'll get some cement and patch the cracks ourselves, just for esthetic reasons.

I keep thinking about that emergency room at the hospital in Romorantin. The space where I spent about 18 hours on a gurney was not exactly a room. It was kind of a passageway with a door on each end, and a sink, a wall of shelves, and quite a few cabinets on one side. There was a lot of traffic through the space. When I first got there, there was a man on a gurney on the far side of the room from me. He basically slept, snoring loudly, all the time. And then a woman was brought in. My bed was pushed back to make room, and portable screens were set up to give each of us a modicum of privacy. The woman who was brought in had suffered a very bad fall at home, I gathered, eavesdropping shamelessly. I had nothing else to do. She screamed in pain every time she moved or one of the nurses tried to move her. She pleaded with the nurses — aidez-moi, aidez-moi — in a weak and squeaky voice. I could only imagine how old she was and what she looked like.

Then three young gendarmes came into the room and questioned her. How did you fall? She said she didn't know. Did you jump? No, she said. Did your husband push you? No again. I was beginning to understand that she had fallen out of a window, not down a flight of stairs. When she said she had fallen out of her bedroom window as she was washing it, they told she was wrong. You weren't in the bedroom. You were in the débarras (a room used as a storage or "junk" room) one floor up from your bedroom. We found a spray bottle of window-cleaner and a cleaning rag up there, and the window was open. I imagine it was what we call a French door. So how did you fall? Maybe I had a malaise, the woman said, almost sobbing. Had you been drinking alcohol? A little bit, she said. They ended their interrogation there.

Half an hour or so later, a couple of nurses came in to help the woman relieve herself. She again screamed in pain. And the nurses started interrogating her too, asking her pretty much the same questions the gandarmes had asked. When I told Walt about that, he said that maybe the nurses were working with the police to see if the woman's story was consistent — and because they seemed to suspect foul play. After that, a man wearing medical whites with SAMU Médecin (emergency squad doctor) printed on the back of the shirt, came in. He told the woman she had a cracked lumbar vertebrae and was why she was in such pain. He also questioned her about how she had been injured. You know, you fell from a third-floor window, a distance of 6 meters (20 feet) to the ground. Luckily you seem to have landed on your back and not on your head. Otherwise, you'd be dead now. At that point the woman was given a sedative and seemed to go to sleep. The screen separating us was re-positioned slightly and I could see the woman's head and face. She was younger and less frail-looking than I had imagined — maybe 50 years old with short, graying hair and an unwrinkled face.

The next morning, the man on the other side of her had disappeared and I hadn't even noticed. A doctor showed up to talk to me. He concluded that I was ready to be released. He handed me a prescription form for some drugs to take during my recovery. He advised me to go see an allergist and get tested. A nurse came over and took out the catheter though which I had been receiving some kind of medication intravenously. At the same time, I was talking to Walt on a cell phone that another nurse had let me use to call home for my ride. We were speaking English, of course, but the nurse interrupted and asked me if my friend was going to come pick me up. She smiled and said to me: Press down here because otherwise it's going to ring! That's what I heard, so I pressed a button on the phone I was holding in my hand. No, she said, and burst out laughing, pointing at a gauze pad on the back of my hand that she was holding in place. I laughed too, having understood. She hadn't said sonner (the French word for "to ring") but saigner (French for "to bleed"). A few minutes later I was outside waiting for Walt to arrive, and he and Tasha drove up about 10 minutes later. It was all like a dream.

P.S. The woman in the space next to me was given a Covid test at some point in all this. I asked a nurse if I could be tested too. No, she said, we're running short of tests and only giving them to people who are going to hospitalized after leaving the ER.