One minute I’m fine. The next, not so much. Two hours doubled over the toilet bowl, followed by fits (momma hates this word) and faints. <\/p>\n
T makes a bed of towels on the bathroom floor. Gets a cool cloth for my forehead. Feels like it weighs a ton. I try to sit up and throw up but I can’t. So I lay down and do it. Because it’s all I can<\/em> do. Not a good idea. ‘People die like this’<\/em>, I think, and pass out again.<\/p>\n The guy with the glasses and the real soft hands gets there first. He smells like my grandmother. I’m hallucinating and I know it. I tell him “Ma, there’s a baby in the wall.” He puts an IV in my arm, one of those double header kinds, and rubber bands an oxygen mask to my face. I like it. O. Fresh. From the can. It’s great. <\/p>\n In the ambulance my chest goes tight, and starts to hurt. A lot. I can’t breathe and I’m still sick. I throw up in my mask and the woman next to me straps on another. Four hours later I still feel like I’m dying; but I’m pretty sure I’m not. I’m too young and too healthy and there’d be more than three nurses hovering around if I were. <\/p>\n I ask for a blanket ’cause I can’t stop shaking. I get no blanket and a fan<\/em> – a flashback to age six, Scarlet Fever and an ice bath. My blood pressure is higher than its ever been (excluding a bad anesthesia trip when I was 17) and I can’t feel my left leg, but my stomach is emptied and the drugs are kicking in. <\/p>\n By the next day almost-normal<\/em> is on its way back. That semi-shock state the body goes into after being violently ill is settling in. I say a prayer for a poor somebody going into cardiac arrest in the corner, and then spend more hours than I’d like listening to an old lady across the ward squeal ‘I gotta weeeeeeee’.<\/p>\n T is asleep in a chair next to me, looking worn and tired and gorgeous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One minute I’m fine. The next, not so much. Two hours doubled over the toilet bowl, followed by fits (momma hates this word) and faints. T makes a bed of towels on the bathroom floor. Gets a cool cloth for my forehead. Feels like it weighs a ton. I try to sit up and throw<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hum-drum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}