Written by
Audra Edwards
“The love between humans is the thing that nails us to this earth.”
-Ann Patchett, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage
The Emergency
I’m shoving his toothbrush, a clean pair of boxers, slip-on shoes, and a charger into a duffel bag. I’m kicking myself for not already having this thing packed. Just like his “go bag” that’s always packed and ready should my active duty Airman husband get called to war, our hospital go bag is meant to always be prepped for unforeseen emergencies.
“Unforeseen” – what an unnecessary word. I mean, really…what other types of emergencies are there?
I tug the zipper closed and hear Ross assembling the dog gate to keep our pups safe while we’re gone. I shake my head. He should’ve let me do that. I pull my dirty hair back into a ponytail before cramming a baseball cap onto my head. I sacrifice two seconds to do a quick check in the mirror. Rough, but it’ll have to do. Damn it – why didn’t I take a shower first thing this morning? Did I brush my teeth? No time. Shoes. Shoes! I remember they’re by the front door, so I scoop up the duffel and start to head that way…but remember I’m not wearing pants. As I veer into the laundry room, I see Ross bent over, holding his stomach. He’s worse now than he was fifteen minutes ago.
“Almost ready!” I yell.
I haven’t been home from my recent work trip long enough to do laundry, so I dig through my suitcase until I find a pair of passably clean sweats and throw them on. Ross has caught up to me by the time I’m sticking my feet into my old Skechers, and he hands me the keys to the truck he bought less than a week ago. Even his hand is hot with fever.
“Please be careful,” he urges.
Driving Ross to the ER in San Antonio lunchtime traffic is so not the first drive I wanted to take in his new truck.
Even physical pain won’t deter my husband from chivalry, so he helps me in to the driver’s seat before easing himself into the passenger side. I maneuver the truck through 75-mile-an-hour interstate insanity, wincing as Ross starts shaking with pain. I start thinking fatalistically. Why did I waste time grabbing a hat, checking my appearance in the mirror? What if those two extra seconds are the ones that could have made a difference?
The car in front of me is a snail. I start to pass, but Ross snarls that I’ll miss the exit if I don’t stay in the lane. By the time we make it to Luke Gate, my husband has transformed into a grizzly bear – at least in temperament – and I frantically dash tears off my cheeks before I have to hand my dependent ID to the gate guard.
“I’m sorry,” he manages through gritted teeth.
Years ago, we made a pact not to demean each other by name-calling. Sometimes, though, responses spill from my lips before my frontal lobe can censor them.
“You’re allowed to be an asshole when you’re in pain,” I blurt.
His voice is still edged with that pain but softer. “No, I should be able to stay in control – no matter the situation.”
We’re next in line, so I roll my window down and pass my ID to the guard instead of responding. She’s incredibly chipper, smiling and asking about my day. I wonder if my eyes are red, if my face is marked with stress lines fracturing my appearance into something that will worry her. She waves us through before I can ruminate further, and we’re soon turning into the ER parking lot.
Pain and Patience
We check in and find a couple of seats in the nearly empty waiting room. A nurse comes outs and calls a patient back. Then another. And another. I swear these cases supposedly more urgent than Ross’s are starting to materialize out of the walls. He’s doubled over in his seat now, eyes closed and fists clenched against the convulsions racking his body. I put a hand to his forehead but feel his fever spiking before I even touch skin. I’m ready to go Tasmanian Devil on this nurse if she doesn’t call Ross back next.
“Edwards!” she yells. I nearly trip over my feet trying to haul us and our bags to her waiting clipboard.
A technician records Ross’s answers to what brings him in today while the nurse takes his temperature and blood pressure. She doesn’t get a good reading the first time; the machine doesn’t have a setting allowing for full-body tremors, I guess.
The nurse ushers us into first one room and then another, and then we’re joined by a trainee so young it makes me feel like my approaching 40th birthday might as well come with a senior citizen card.
“Sir, we’re trying to make sure our trainee here gets more practice with needles, so I’m just going to let her draw your blood and put in your IV, okay?” the nurse says to Ross.
I’ve been known to be a bit of a bulldog when I’m in hospital settings with my loved ones, defensive when I think they’re not getting the best care and knowing the importance of self-advocacy in the medical world. Ross has previously suggested I take a breath and recognize that he’s a capable adult with a voice of his own, however, so I nearly bite the tip off my tongue waiting for him to use that voice to protect his veins.
“Sorry, but I’m in too much pain to be used for training purposes right now,” he grits out. “If you’re more experienced, I’m going to request that you be the one to stick me.”
My shoulders relax a fraction but tense up again as the veteran nurse still blows a vein the first try. It happens. I just wish it wasn’t happening now, on him. Eventually the duo leave with several vials, and a doctor takes their place. He asks Ross to describe his abdominal pain and for details about onset and accompanying symptoms.
He started feeling bad a few days ago. The pain had suddenly spiked mid-morning while he was at work. His fever had been over 101° before we left for the hospital. No, he’s never experienced anything like it. Yes, he still has his appendix and gallbladder.
The doctor starts pushing on Ross’s stomach, and I feel nauseous at my husband’s grunts of pain.
“Well, I’m ruling out your gallbladder, since I just had my hand up under your ribcage,” the doctor says, “but I’m ordering a CT scan to see if we’re dealing with appendicitis or something else.”
New nurses come in to administer morphine before wheeling Ross down to Imaging. When they bring him back, his face has lost all color, and he’s clammy. I pull a blanket up to his waist and then stroke his head. Even morphine isn’t giving him relief. When the pain forces his jaw to a nut-cracking clench, I put a wooden tongue depressor between his teeth and tap into my yoga training to help him breathe and try to relax.
The doctor comes back in. “Well, it’s diverticulitis – where bulges have formed in your large intestine and have become infected and inflamed. Don’t think you’ll need surgery, but I’m still waiting on the blood tests to tell me a bit more. You’re probably going to be transferred to BAMC. I’ll order an ambulance if that’s the case, but I’m going to get antibiotics and additional pain meds pumping into you before we do anything else.”
We ask several questions while a nurse starts Ross on his cocktail drip. Fifteen minutes later, a team of five nurses rushes in.
“Doc suspects you might be septic,” the lead one says, urgency lacing his voice. “We have to take more blood in a very specific way, so we’re going to need to stick you several more times.”
The room becomes very small as the team buzzes around my husband, swabbing and jabbing and filling and applying pressure and labeling. A paper towel dispenser digs into my back as I press myself against the wall, trying to give the team as much room as possible to help my husband.
Septic. Sepsis. Those are bad words. The kind salted with warning. The kind passed around small-town prayer chains. The kind preceding extended hospitalization, emergency surgery…obituaries.
Before they leave, the nurses inject a potent NSAID into Ross’s IV. His jaw and fists finally unclench, and his eyes droop. I drag the heavy visitor chair across the linoleum to be closer to his gurney. I lay my head on his thigh and rest a hand on his shin, his knobby knee. I feel my phone buzz and crack an eye open to check that it hasn’t woken Ross.
It’s a text from my “Mountain Mama,” a dear friend and adopted mother-figure who lives in West Virginia, far from our current duty station in Texas. She’s worried about Ross, about me. Her message reads: “Goodness – is anyone with you? A friend?”
I pause for a minute. The idea of having someone else with me hasn’t even crossed my mind. Ross and I have been nomads since we graduated high school. As a military couple, we’ve continued that transience together. It’s a great life – full of adventure, exposure to a multiplicity of cultures and environments, the opportunity for bulking up our self-sufficiency. What it often doesn’t include is proximity to our nearest and dearest. In times of need, that drawback can really make itself known.
It’s strange, though. In this moment, while I listen to Ross’s breathing settle out and deepen, I don’t feel alone. I’m an “inch wide and a mile deep” kind of person, so I typically don’t end up with a huge posse of friends every time we PCS. I begin thinking of the friends I do have in the city, of my milspouse sisters north of us in Killeen, of my old grad school buddy in Dallas, of my friends and family sprinkled across the States. No matter their distance, I know my “chosen family” would be here as fast as the drive or flight would bring them if I just said the word.
I type out a reply. “Nope – just me, but I’ll be okay.”
Ross is blinking his eyes open when the night nurse comes on duty and pokes his head in to check on us. He lets us know the ambulance will be here in 30 to transfer Ross across the city to the big Army hospital. He also checks Ross’s blood test results and tells us that, while final word will come from Ross’s internist at BAMC, he sees no indicators of sepsis in the lab results.
Relief, big and round and weightless, fills me up like a helium balloon.
We decide I’ll go home to take care of the pups and get some sleep before visiting hours open back up in the morning. I rearrange the contents of the go-bag to make it easier for him to get what he’ll need. We’re old pros at making overnight stays in miserable environments more bearable. Long charger, chapstick, eye drops, eye mask, ear plugs, travel shampoo and body wash, books, notepad and pen. I threw an old makeup bag into the duffel before we left, and now I carefully pack all the small items inside, listing them off to Ross. I take my time. He knows I’m stalling.
“Go home, babe,” he chuckles weakly. “I’ll be okay.”
I kiss his dry lips, the tip of his nose, his cooler forehead. Picking up my own bags, I tell him how much I love him and slip into the hall. The wonderfully Type-A night nurse is waiting on me with a post-it note.
“This is the building and department where he’s being transferred.” He pokes a finger at the second line of numbers. “And this is the number for the charge nurse there. You’ll be able to call them any time – day or night.”
“As a fellow Type-A,” I say, “I just want to say how much I appreciate you.”
He beams. “Would you like the number for here, as well, just in case?”
“You know I do,” I say as he smiles and passes over another post-it. I could kiss this bearded stranger. I could also benefit from some sleep.
Love in the Darkness
That night, as I lie in our bed alone, I feel it…the loneliness. The absence of his breathing on the pillow beside me turns the room into a vacuum. The missing warmth of his body, his chest beneath my head, the rhythmic thud of his heartbeat – I’ve forgotten how to live without them.
This feels like deployment. Not just the absence but the underlying worry. It’s always there, always in your throat, behind your eyeballs, shoved under your fingernails. I haven’t missed this.
I peer into darkness and battle the intrusive thoughts sticking needles in my brain:
What if the nurse mixed up the lab results? Maybe he really is septic. You should definitely pick up your phone and research sepsis instead of sleeping.
I reach for my phone. Put it down. Reach again. Argh! Wrecking the truck tomorrow due to lack of sleep would be HORRIBLE.
Better get used to this. Mortality’s a thing, y’know, and he’s always saying he’ll be grateful if he makes it to fifty.
That is NOT helpful.
Soooo…do you have your action plan in place if things go poorly?
Go to sleep, brain.
I roll over on my side and think back to Mo-Ma’s text. I didn’t feel alone then. I won’t feel alone now. The names and faces of my loved ones start flashing in my mind like pinpoints of light showing their locations on a map.
Ross and I hover above the ground like clouds, touching down for brief periods of time before floating somewhere else. Yet we don’t end up lost in the atmosphere, untethered and spinning off into the seeming emptiness of space. Our people give us anchor points. And the love we have for each other – this love that has thrown on spikes and hiked Everest a thousand times over, this love that will do so again through this latest scare – is like the Big Dipper, forever pointing us home. Love, I reassure my quieted brain, truly “nails us to this earth.”
I smile in the darkness and sleep.
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Originally from the rural Midwest, AUDRA EDWARDS has taught writing and English literature in Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia, Washington, North Carolina, & Texas. Her life as a nomad, living and writing from the wilds of the Scottish Highlands to the winter wonderland of Alaska to the scorching desert of southern Texas, (and many places in between), has given her a profound connection to the way in which our experiences shape our perspectives and perceptions. Audra utilizes this understanding in her work as both a writer and a nonprofit business manager for VSP and in her identity as the military spouse of her active duty Air Force soulmate. Her current work includes co-writing the memoir of Jeannie Puckett, wife of the late Korean War hero and Medal of Honor recipient COL (Ret.) Ralph Puckett. She was also recently selected to participate in the Dingle Writers’ Workshop and will be re-packing her suitcase for a writing adventure in Dingle, Ireland.
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Oh Audra, after reading this, and hopefully knowing Ross is completely recovered, I still want to jump on a plane and come hug you! I feel your pain and your resilience because I too, had to fend for myself in a similar situation. In Germany far from family, a two year old daughter, a husband needing to be in the field, and facing a one month stay in the hospital for me. It’s amazing how the “I can do it” attitude is there even without thinking about it. Military spouses are the strongest people I know… and I’m proud to be one.
Sure do miss spending time with you and the other VSP peeps. Come to KY and know you have a place to stay that comes with hugs!