After some sort of confusion about who was going to discharge and then not receiving the discharge order from the hospitalist before he left and being told we would have to stay, the doctor reached out to David personally by room phone and said he got it handled and we could go. Our day nurse was tired and ready to go home I am sure, but she worked to get an answer and even ran down a few people for answers working hard to get us out of there before having to hand us off to night nurse who unwittingly inherited two people packed up, sitting on a suitcase ready to bolt with no discharge orders. Around 8:45 pm David was able to have the last IV line removed and get dressed in his baby’s going home outfit. Night nurse brought the paperwork and said they normally did not allow night discharges after a certain time. She said she was going to take him out so he could walk out with her if he wanted or she could get a chair. He opted for the walk to the front door while I ran (not really ran because I don’t have that kind of physique and I fall down like a toddler a good bit) like mad to get the car before someone changed his or her mind. I wasn’t looking forward to having to tunnel out of the hospital plumbing Shawshank style if they said we had to stay until morning.
We got home around 10. We both are exhausted. No. Exhausted isn’t even in the same thesaurial dimension as the word for what we are. A 30 min routine doctor’s visit turned into a 4 day hospital stay. Cancer is unpredictable and mean and scary and it does not give a &*@# who you are or what you had planned last weekend or this weekend when you had to reschedule last weekend. It just does not care. It is an equal opportunity diabolical ass of a disease.
Through this, we could not have asked for a nicer group of people from the moment we walked into the ER on Friday afternoon until the time we walked out tonight. That includes doctors, PAs, NPs, nurses, techs, students in training, housekeepers, nutrition workers, etc. I wish I could express that to all of them personally. They all made an uncertain situation much more tolerable. Not one single doctor in all of the ones we saw, made us feel like they had any other place to be but right there talking to us.
Now, I am going to sleep for weeks. Nite.
