Playing the Good Daughter

Today, for the first time, I took off work to care for an aged parent. I'm not sure what that makes me? Old? Oh I know. I makes me A GROWN UP.

Here's how it all went down:

2 a.m.
Phone rings about a hundred times. My Kid - the only one in the household who's awake - manages to break away from playing video games to answer the phone.

Kid enters our bedroom.

Kid: Dad? Dad?
Me: What's the matter?
Kid: Dad needs to call Pa. I couldn't really hear him, but he said the fire department is at their house.
Me: Daddy. Daddy. (pokes with elbow)
Big Daddy: Hmmm?
Me: Call your dad. There's an emergency.
Big Daddy dials phone.
Big Daddy: Hey....uh-huh...uh-huh...Do I need to get up?...OK. Bye.
Me: What's going on?
Daddy: They're taking Mom to the hospital.
Me: Oh my god. Don't you think you should go up there?
Daddy, who has taken an Ambien a couple hours earlier: (*snores*)

I laid in bed and considered the situation. Should I go? Should I not go? Should I wait and go later? AM I EVEN GOING TO BE ABLE TO GET BACK TO SLEEP ANYWAY?? And all I kept thinking is, "This is why we're here." So I got up and got dressed and was at the ER by 3 a.m.

They brought her in because she was having severe difficulty breathing. When I got there, they had an oxygen mask on her and had taken several tubes of blood but that was it. She was really struggling to breathe. I won't give you the play-by-play of everything that went down in our 6 hours in the ER...well, maybe just the highlights:

• Around 5 a.m. I realized that I could never have been a nurse, when Mom coughed up some rusty-colored sputum and insisted on showing it to me.
• 2 albuterol breathing treatments
• One extra tube of blood
• A chest X-ray
• The possibility of a pulmonary embolism thrown out
• Two trips to the hospital Starbucks (that was me) (BTW, they open at 6:30, not 5:30 a.m.)
• My FIL, who's logged 1,300+ hours as a volunteer at this hospital, insisted on wearing his hospital jacket with this volunteer ID badge and nosing around like he was the CEO of the place.
• A tentative diagnosis from the ER doc of congestive heart failure
• MUCH drama from the MIL, including shushing Dad when the two of us would talk and she was no longer the center of attention
• A call to her blood doctor by the ER doc
• A decision to admit
• (That was a 2-hour process. Which I do not understand b/c I refuse to believe that the hospital is FULL and they had to discharge one to have a room for another.)
• After Mom was in a room, I went to their house to pick up some things for her, including two new long-sleeved Oscar de la Renta gowns that she bought at Macy's just in case but (*sob*)hoped she would never have to use
• Listened to expressions from MIL like, "I'm not long for this world..."
• Helped Mom into one of her new gowns which, I am sorry to report to you, involved seeing my 83-year-old MIL naked.
• The realization that my FIL will not eat or take any of his medications if Mom doesn't do it for him and taking adequate steps to address these parental issues.
• Frequent update calls to BILs on both coasts to let them know what's going on.

And now...I'm going to Baskin Robbins. Because I TOTALLY deserve ice cream.