Air Evac
My wife started coughing up blood last week. She had a really unusual event of coughing very hard for about three full minutes, so I figured the coughing had broken a blood vessel in a lung and was causing the hemoptysis (which simply means ‘coughing up blood’. But it’s a fun word.)
Although a little gory, a few milliliters of hemoptysis is not necessarily immediately life threatening… but the underlying cause can be any of over a hundred different things, including cancer and a lot of other deadly and semi-deadly diseases. So we got on the hump and make it in record time to the local hospital, where they did X-rays and a CAT scan and more on that later. In any event, they could not figure it out. So we got Air Evaced to the big hospital about a hundred and fifty miles away. Where we ended up staying for several days. I slept on the floor, which was fine, because I wanted, and in my mind needed, to be with her.
I had about half an hour to get whatever we needed for the journey and stay at the hospital. Home was twenty minutes or more away from the hospital. No way I could get there and get things and get back in time. I would have missed going with her if I’d tried it.
So I went out to my car, and got clothes and water and some Quik-clot (you never know) and a few other goods out of the trunk. I put them in a bag that was there for just such a purpose, and then joined my wife in the ambulance to the airport, then the Air Evac plane, then another ambulance to the other hospital.
While we were at the big hospital, where they keep the climate control just above Arctic winter temperatures and the nurses wear heavy jackets, we were warm and comfy. I had brought two watch caps, so both of us wore them. I’m afraid we looked ‘cute’. Especially her, with the hospital gown… well, actually two gowns, one facing front and one facing back, provided by a sympathetic nurse… and a black field jacket and a black watch cap and thick socks. We were most glad that we had changes of underwear and sox. I also really needed a second pair of pants at one point. I had them.
We’re back home now. It was basically the broken blood vessel thing, although I’m very glad an exceedingly bright lung specialist prescribed the heaviest-duty antibiotic to help clear up the base cause of why it ruptured, which was apparently an atypical pneumonia. I was so impressed with him and his top-notch professionalism. For critical care, I’m really in favor of the big gun drugs to keep a person alive. It’s just the drugs for chronic problems that I have such a problem with.
Be that as it may. The reason I bring all of this up is… if we had not been prepared with some of the simpler items I keep in the car, we would have been miserable. We would have survived without them. Probably. But we would not have been very happy.
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