Critical Care

My sister in law is in the critical care wing at Baylor Scott & White or at least I think that’s what the hospital is called. That’s where I spent the weekend. Good old times, sitting in a hospital room for two days.

She’s not in good shape. That’s for sure.

It was raw, man. I don’t know how else to describe it. You’re sitting there in critical care, so nearly everything happening around you is serious. Life and death. Actual trauma. People running through the hallway with a gurney, doctors shouting at each other, alarms going off.

At one point, I saw a guy who had severed his thumb. He had his hand covered up with this bloody rag, so I didn’t see the injury itself, thank God. But he had the thumb in a clear plastic bag. The bag was full of blood, and the thumb was just floating around inside it.

A human thumb.

I was like, oh my goodness. This is crazy.

Then I saw another guy, and I honestly thought he was dead. He was lying there with what looked like a tire track running straight across his throat. I mean, an actual black tire tread mark across his neck, like something out of a cartoon. It looked like a truck had driven directly over him.

Then the nurses came over, and the guy woke up. He sat up and started talking like everything was fine. I’m standing there thinking, how is he talking? How is this man sitting up right now? He was telling the nurse that he had fallen out of the back of a truck, and then the truck had run over his throat.

Over his throat.

And he was just sitting there explaining it. Talking clearly. Seemingly fine, except for the giant black tire mark printed across his neck.

I thought, well, it’s crazy that he isn’t more hurt than this. I don’t even understand how that is possible.

It was nuts.

 Trying to settle down, and suddenly I hear something over the speakers.

“Patient in room 473, critical.”

Then everybody starts running.

A little while later, beep, beep, beep. “Code blue.”

Everybody starts running again.

Then something happens in room 472, and they’re all moving in that direction. It was nuts. It felt like every forty five minutes, somebody was screaming bloody murder or an alarm was going off or a whole team of people was sprinting down the hallway. And I’m lying there trying to sleep.

My normal base level of anxiety is already pretty high. Put me inside a critical care wing all night, surrounded by alarms, shouting, suffering, and people possibly dying, and oh my gosh. It was a lot.

After a while, you get so tired that everything starts feeling unreal. You’ve been there for two days. You haven’t really slept. You keep drinking coffee because you’re trying to stay awake and stay positive for everybody. But the coffee isn’t even helping anymore. Your eyes are stinging. Your body hurts. You start thinking, I cannot believe this is happening. 

Eventually, I had to bail out for a little while. I went down to the parking lot and crawled into the backseat of my car.

Now, I’m not exactly a small fella, so sleeping back there was pretty rough. It was also hot. Very fucking hot. I kept hoping security wouldn’t come over and start questioning me about why I was sleeping in my car in the hospital parking lot.

But somehow, I managed to get a couple hours of sleep.

A couple hours folded up in the backseat, sweating, worried about my sister in law and hoping nobody knocked on the window. Then I went back inside.

It was a rough weekend. Really rough. But I’m getting it done. Trying to stay positive. Trying to be there.

And now I’m finally about to sleep in an actual bed.

Oh man.

It’s going to be great.☮︎♡⃛