Life was going along swimmingly. Or so I thought.
Heather had moved home and was a great help to us.
Morgan, Heather and I were going to the Oley Fair—a real country fair with blue ribbons, cows and even goats in coats.
We had a great time and had seen enough tractors. but I needed fresh apple cider. And that was our first mistake.
Cider stand and garbage cans attract more than fair goers—they attract buzzy things.
And Morgan is highly allergic. He carries his Epi-pen so I wasn’t too worried.
I wasn’t even worried when the buzzy thing stung him on the finger.
Or when he told me that we could wait until we got to the car for me to give him the injection.
That was our second mistake.
We made it less than 20 feet before he grabbed onto a pole and dropped down to the ground.
I was finally worried.
I couldn’t get a pulse. His breathing was erratic. The ambulance was called.
He was taken to Emergency Ward.
Heather drove me to the hospital after retrieving our car from the pasture-like parking lot and nearly hitting a cow on the way to pick me up.
I called Morgan’s son to meet us in the ER. When he got there he was white as a sheet.
No one came out to talk to us.
Don’t they usually come out and get the wife?
Don’t they need information?
We waited and waited.
No one came—until—
One nurse and two security guards escorted us back to this small waiting room. We were the only ones in it.
For about fifteen minutes or two days (I’m not sure which) we waited. I think each one of us thought he was dead.
Finally a doctor and a member of the chaplain service came to tell us they were “working on him and he’ll be taken to Medical ICU.”
When we finally saw him, he had an endotracheal tube in and was connected to a ventilator.
I know about these things since I was once upon a time a nurse but I worked in long term care, not too many vents there.
Dirk and I stayed with him that night as they slowly weaned him off the ventilator.
When that was done, he was more awake, breathing better but his cardiac enzymes were elevated.
So they transferred him to the telemetry unit—just to keep an eye (actually a monitor) on him.
The bottom line:
The yellow jacket did us all a favor. They found two clogged coronary arteries requiring three stents. He may have had a heart attack in the near future with worse results.
Now if I can just keep him away from little buzzy things—and ring bologna.
Mitzi Flyte 