When Lou was wheeled into the hospital room that would be his bedroom for the next two days, he was alert, and he actually seemed better than I could’ve expected.
But within a few hours, he started to take a turn. He had been under the anesthesia for six hours — one less than the doctor predicted, but still way too long to emerge without a lot of side effects. Lou was nauseous and feverish, and his lungs were still very achy — and, it seemed like the onset of his symptoms were hitting him all at once.
When you’re under anesthesia for so long, the whole body is in a kind of suspended animation, and bringing everything back into the normal range of function requires a gentle kind of awakening.
But for Lou, there was nothing gentle about it at all. What he was experiencing was way worse than bad Hawaiian Pizza and bladder cramps, and I felt so sorry for Lou. There was literally a nurse by his side for hours, sorting him out, and keeping an eye on his vitals.
He wasn’t out of the woods yet.
All I could do was sit in that uncomfortable vinyl bed-chair in the corner of Lou’s room, and pray for my husband. Eventually, the worst of it seemed to be over. But Lou and I were conditioned to never let our guards down back then. You never knew when the onset of a new symptom might emerge.
I remember feeling wired and shaky, but in time, the nurses managed to find the right combinations of things to quell Lou’s symptoms. When Lou finally calmed enough to fall asleep, so did I. My body was exhausted, but I couldn’t really give into the demand it was placing on me to sleep unless Lou was sleeping, too.
So the night before I moved us into our new condo in Sugarhouse, I slept half of the night in the seated position, waiting for Lou to miraculously improve enough so I could go back to Henry’s basement to catch a few winks.
