Can you guess where these attractive people are?

If you guessed “Emergency Room, 5 AM, Memorial Day”: YOU ARE CORRECT!

Aren’t they remarkably attractive considering how early in the morning it was? I KNOW! My family is adorable.

Memorial Day weekend got off to a kickass start as I had Saturday night free and spent it eating Italian food and watching some hilarious improv comedy with my peeps. My brother and his wife came and ended up driving me home to Queens from Manhattan around midnight. The plan was for me to run into my apartment, grab some clothes, get in my car and drive out to my parents’ house. I was needed early Sunday morning for Dad Duty (someone always needs to be home with him) and I figured I’d just make the drive the night before.

I opened my car door and found the passenger seat full of shattered glass. Oh, what fun! I discovered that between the hours of 4 pm and 12 am, as my car was parked directly in front of my apartment (in what I honestly consider to be one of the safest, most chill neighborhoods in all of NYC), some jerkface broke my window. He didn’t steal my car. Or steal anything IN the car. (THANK GOD! I have seriously awesome mixtapes from 1999 in there!) He just…bust the windows out mah car. So to speak.

FOR NO REASON!

My mom later wondered aloud if it was part of a gang initiation which, come on. Is my mom adorable or what? I suppose it’s POSSIBLE. But in Astoria?? What kind of gang lives in Astoria? Besides the feta cheese gang, I mean. SERIOUSLY FOLKS.

So. Annoying.

My roommates helped me clean off the seat and sweep up the street and I drove out to Long Island with a very intense breeze blowing in through the passenger side. Let’s just say all of the LIE heard me blasting my showtunes all the way home and I AM NOT SORRY. You know you love the original Broadway cast recording of In The Heights. YOU KNOW YOU DO.

I parked my windowless car in my parents’ garage and fell asleep in my childhood bed around 2 am.

No sooner had I dozed off when my dad yelled out in his sleep from the hospital bed in our living room where he sleeps.

Dozing dozing dozing…

Yell.

Scream.

Dad? Are you okay?

He mumbled, “I’m just moaning.”

The moaning eventually escalated to yelling and my sister, my mother and I ended up in the living room administering pain medication and massaging his left leg. Because he can’t put any weight on that foot due to the cement fixture residing in his hip, his muscles seize up when he lays down. They spasm uncontrollably causing him intense pain and he just yells.

My mother and sister tell me every night is like this. Not to mention, one of them needs to administer his antibiotic through his PICC line once every few hours or empty his catheter bag or give him a Percocet or any number of other drugs. Basically it’s like having a newborn in the house except the screaming is a little more intense and we don’t need to heat up a bottle of formula and I guess babies shouldn’t take Percocet but I don’t have one so I DON’T REALLY KNOW.

One of the most irritating things about my dad being in pain is the fact that the hospital seemed so unconcerned when they discharged him last week. My dad spent a total of 25 days in the hospital and every night, needed extra help to manage the spasms. He told every nurse and every doctor that saw him that the muscles hurt and was constantly rubbing his thigh trying to remove pressure.

Last Monday, they discharged him with some Percocet and a friendly wave. BYE!!!

Sure enough, a few hours went by and around 1 am, my father was screaming for help. Except…we didn’t have any help. So my mother called 911 and he went back to the hospital. They explained the situation to the doctor in the ER and in less than five minutes he said, “Muscle spasms? That is very common! You need an anti-spasm medication!”

I’m sorry. What?

Why hasn’t he been getting this the ENTIRE TIME?

When my mother asked the surgeon’s office the next day, they gave the lame excuse that my dad hadn’t mentioned it.

I’M SORRY, ARE YOU KIDDING ME???

They said he didn’t actually say SPASM so they didn’t know to prescribe that drug.

HA HA THIS WOULD BE HILARIOUS IF IT WASN’T SO TRAUMATIZING.

All weekend, I’ve been walking around the house saying OH! I am sorry! The correct answer was spasm. It needed to be phrased correctly in order to get proper medication! YOU SHOULD’VE SPOKE UP SOONER.

Sorry. I didn’t realize my dad screaming in the middle of the night wasn’t enough for you.

ANYHOW. He went back to the hospital the day he was discharged, got some new pain meds (anti-spasm meds! And Valium! Yay!) and was sent back home. Over the course of the week, laying in bed seems to be the most difficult. He’s happiest sitting up in the wheelchair and seems okay throughout the day. The issue is that he needs to lay down at some point, to sleep and to stretch that leg out. The doctors told us he really needs to try to keep it straight but oh, he hates it. It’s agonizing and so he spends most of the night crying out in his sleep or moaning or sitting up and laying back down and sitting up and…

It’s fun.

We noticed on Sunday that his bag o’ pee wasn’t filling up that much. We chalked it up to my dad not getting enough fluids and OH HO HO that was hilarious of us, wasn’t it? I awoke at 3 am, not to screams but to weeping. I stumbled downstairs and found my mom sitting in a chair, holding the telephone, willing it to ring and my dad sitting on the edge of his bed crying.

He kept asking my mom to take the pain away, make it stop, do something, please help him.

My mom called the 24 hour nurse and was waiting for her to call back. (BTW, I’m pretty sure “24 hour on call nurse” means SOMEONE BEING ON CALL FOR 24 HOURS but I could be wrong about that! I COULD BE!)

Not to humiliate my dad on this blog but let’s just say there was an issue with his catheter. As in, it wasn’t working. The nurse never called back. Her supervisor told my mom she wasn’t answering her beeper. So, reluctantly, as my dad cried, my mother dialed 911. Again.

It seems to be a Monday thing.

A cop showed up, an ambulance came and we all went to the hospital.

We figured we’d be waiting there all night considering it was a holiday weekend but it was actually empty. Twenty-two patients. One doctor. My mother said that was nothing compared to the week before when they took him there. We were met with a ridiculous security guard who stopped my siblings and I from going back to see my father.

“THERE IS NO WAY ALL YOU PEOPLE ARE GOING BACK THERE,” she said.

Then she went out to smoke a cigarette.

And we walked on in.

WHAT A FANTASTIC SECURITY GUARD! She is good at security. AM I RIGHT?

They fixed him up as we all sat around his bed, alternately dozing off and laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe because that just seems to be what you do at 5:30 in the morning, completely devoid of sleep and sanity. He was discharged at 7 am and as we exited the hospital doors, we realized that night was over and the sun had already been up for awhile.

We came home to a message left at 4:30 AM from the on-call nurse, HOW WAS HE DOING?

HA HA THANKS FOR CHECKING!

The house was silent Monday morning as all of us crashed and slept until the afternoon. Dad was better throughout the day but the evening was still hard. I felt extremely guilty getting up on Tuesday to go to work. My mother and my sister dealt with this every single night and there I was, leaving. I was there for a weekend and could barely function.

My dad has an appointment with a pain management specialist this week and we’re hoping to get a more accurate plan of what he needs. He’s taking an awful lot of drugs and some seem to be downright ineffective and unnecessary. A lot of them are also preventing the catheter from coming out and that is obviously not a good thing.

On the whole, I was grateful to be home, to offer any kind of support I could to my family. But I’m still totally wracked with a sense of how unfair it is that eventually, I get to go back to the city, back to work, back to a silent apartment that allows me to sleep for a normal stretch of time. My mom assures me that nothing can be done, that she appreciates any help I can give but that ultimately, I have to keep living my life and doing what I need to do.

She is a rockstar. My sister too. I am constantly awed by their capacity to give. We are all looking forward to the end of all of this.

Friday of this week marks four weeks with the cement.

That’s halfway there.

At the eight week mark, the antibiotics will stop. They’ll take a culture to see if the infection is still there. If not, dad can schedule a final hip surgery to get the cement out and a brand new hip in.

He is counting down the days, trying his best to remember that the pain is temporary, not permanent. That there is an end in sight. That this isn’t forever.

We’re halfway there.

We’re gonna be okay. 

(c) adelmann