April 5, 2012

• Greyfox is now officially an amputee.

  Dr. O’Malley removed parts of two (or three?? — I haven’t seen the newly remodeled foot yet) (edit 5/27/13:  All 4, actually) toes from his left foot yesterday in Anchorage.  The trip down the valley from here to pick up Greyfox, then from Wasilla to Anchorage, was uneventful, except for the fact that everything went smoothly and on time, a big event for me.  My personal inner clock doesn’t go tic-toc.  Sometimes it buzzes along in a rush, sometimes it staggers and clunks, or vanishes altogether.  Punctuality is not one of my strengths or virtues, but yesterday we were there with ten minutes to spare.

  My day became suddenly eventful right after we entered the hospital.  I let Greyfox out at the entrance, parked, went in, found him in admitting and let him know I was there, then returned to my car to unburden myself of coat and unneeded stuff.  That was when I had my closest moose encounter in over twenty years, right there in the hospital.  There’s an arctic entry — two sets of big double sliding glass doors that open automatically when someone approaches.  I stepped up to the inner set of doors, triggering them open at the same time a young cow moose approached the outer set and they opened for her.  On the sidewalk, walking parallel to the doors when they opened beside her, she paused, swung her head around, and looked at me.  For a moment, I thought she was going to come in, but then she continued on her way.  When I got to my car, she was browsing on some young trees in the landscaping.

  I love/hate hospitals.  Those of you who know how empathetic I am will understand the hate part:  an atmosphere of pain, fear, anxiety, etc.  My love for these institutions of hurting and healing is compounded of long familiarity and a Virgoan appreciation of trained professionals doing competent jobs.  Alaska Regional appears to function like a well-oiled machine.

  I’ve worked in hospitals that didn’t run nearly so well, in Kansas and California in the 1960′s, before computers lubricated the admissions, record-keeping, and communications aspects of the process.  I’ve been a patient in even more hospitals, both civilian and military, in several states and in Japan, including an emergency experience there at Alaska Regional twenty-some years ago after a car wreck.  Built during and after the Trans-Alaska Pipeline boom of the 1970′s, it has always been a clean, well-lighted place staffed with competent people who tend to go overboard trying to put patients and families at ease.  The forced cheeriness is cloying and vaguely jarring in contrast to the undertones of time pressure, preoccupation, various personal issues, but I understand.  In sum, it’s an interesting place to just sit and pay attention to what is going on around me.

  Greyfox phoned just now as I was writing, and we’ve decided I’ll go down there today and give him some nursing care.  We both were briefed by Joe, his recovery room nurse, before I took him home.  However, neither of us read the three-page detailed post-op instructions that said he should be attended for the first eighteen hours.  I helped him into his cabin, did a few things that needed to be done, saw him installed comfortably on his bed with foot elevated, and let him shoo me out and send me on my way.  I felt like staying and tending to him, but he insisted (quite reasonably, considering the signs of fatigue I was showing) that I should be on my way home while I still could function well enough to drive safely. 

  I phoned him as usual to let him know I’d made it home, and the first thing he said, in an anxious tone, was, “Hon, I’m bleeding.”  He had paged Dr. O’Malley and was waiting for his return call.  Instead of letting me prepare food for him, Greyfox had thought he was up to microwaving a frozen dinner himself.  He tried.  Then, when he noticed blood on the floor, he sat down, elevated the foot as ordered, and called the doc.  After O’Malley got back to him, we discussed whether I should go back down there last night to change his dressings.  As we spoke, he was on the bed with the foot elevated and both the dinner and the bandages were a few feet away, out of reach.  It’s a small cabin, one room about 10′ x 14′, but not everything is accessible from his bed.

  Last night, his machismo overruled my machisma and he changed his own dressing, but today he was strong enough to admit that he could use my help, so I’ll be on my way down the valley as soon as I’ve had breakfast and a little time to gather my wits and some supplies.

  

   

  • 12:24 pm
  • 11 Comments