Good morning from my world that is stranger than fiction. Yesterday, Monday, I received a call in the morning informing me that Robert was going to be discharged.

He wants to come home.

He can’t come home, he was in a rehab facility.

Oh, I’ll call you back.

I never received a call. I connected with the rehab, they knew nothing. “Always call the hospital first.”

Let me ask you a question. (I got it in:) “Why did my husband roll out of bed three times? Don’t you have bed rails?

Well get this: the answer is NO. That is considered a restraint in New York State and it is illegal. So they lower the bed practically to the floor. It was not clear as to whether there was a mat near the bed. As for an alarm, it rings after the fact. By the time you tumble off your perch and crack your head open it is just an alert that something happened and it’s too late.

Robert’s last two rolls onto terra firma cost him, cost us all, however, because he passed out he had entrée into the hospital. A whole month and more has passed since the first major fall at home, and it is most likely that Robert was rendered unconscious at that time, though his eyes were open, he was unresponsive. What did I know from all of this? I might have been able to spare him three days as a bed-less nomad in the ER. Maybe we could have gotten answers a month ago.

So, a whole day passed and I had a sick feeling, I went to bed laden with my CBD pass-out gummies and was out of it well before midnight. I removed a bedroom landline from the hook, lest a spammer or a hospital scare the crap out of me. (I had gotten many calls from hospitals in Florida in the middle of the night, when my mother would sign herself in with panicky high blood pressure.)

OK, remember that. The landline was off the hook.

Around 2:30 am my eyes were pried open by anxiety; I lied there in the dark with that nervous pit in my gut, in a sweat.

Then I did the sleep-no sleep-dance for hours.

Out of bed around 9:30 am. Feeling as usual like I never slept.

I called the rehab: no information

I called the hospital: Your husband was moved to 4 West. Here’s the number.

I called the number: I reached Flushing Hospital. WHAT? He was moved to another hospital? No, the hospital numbers are frequently crossed. WHAT!?

Something told me to check the caller ID on the landline. Remember, the one in the bedroom was off the hook.

There was a call at 2:30 am. A woman’s name. It appeared on both the landline and the cordless. On the cordless system there was a message. This was Robert’s nurse and she wanted some information.

So, the mystery is that this call went through on a landline phone and a cordless when a phone was off the hook. Then the panic: And didn’t it have to be an emergency for them to keep him, to move him to another floor, to call in the middle of the night?

I called the floor station several times, was disconnected, finally spoke to a nurse, left a message that I wanted to speak to the doctor, to an advocate. When I called Robert’s cell, he didn’t answer. Very usual, and by now it might be totally depleted of juice.

I know how that feels.

I called the number back of the person who left the message in the middle of the night, at the time when my eyes popped open. She was my husband’s nurse last night, and was now home and it was my turn to tag her and make sure she wasn’t sleeping. They had moved Robert to her floor, she was assessing him, he was unable to answer her questions. She went into the records after the fact and found he had come from the rehab. “I don’t know,” was his most used response.

I don’t know either. I left messages for his neurologist in Manhattan. I left messages for a few friends for moral support.

Then my brain left.

Robert can only say: I don’t know.

I have to agree: I don’t know.

I don’t know if I ever will.

 

Addendum: 1 I have call blockers on my cell phone that reroute calls from unknown numbers. It appears that a call came in from a neurosurgeoun last night at 8:00 pm as “Unknown” and because it had no caller ID it was sent to voicemail. They were evaluating the brain shunt but did not have the ability to perform a needed test in Queens, it is only done at Weil Cornell in Manhattan. That made me feel a bit better, but so much for attempting to block spam calls!

But the mystery of a call getting through to a phone that was off the hook is another story.

Addendum: 2  Someone finally called to explain why Robert wasn’t discharged: I just found out he tested positive for Covid. He must have gotten it in the hospital. Can this day get worse?

 

 

 

📌The series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

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