I Had No Idea

In our last episode, Bear had just come home from an emergency cauterisation surgery-type thing. We were happy, I made jokes about his new nose. Things were good.

About six hours after we got home, Barry started bleeding. Again. Two hours later, he got another nosebleed. He controlled it and I started frantically calling our ENT--who is apparently difficult to reach, as he serves all of the nether regions outside of the Kansas City's asteroid belt. We were determined not to go the ER, so I started calling other ENTs that we had visited in Bear's last episode two years ago. They wanted nothing to do with us. Then, an hour later, he got another. And that's where I packed him in the car and headed for the ER.

They admitted us on Tuesday. On Thursday, the doc (and the only ENT that serves our hospital, what's up with that?) scheduled Bear for "real" surgery. On Friday, Bear had lost so much blood from the nosebleeds (that continued after the surgery) that the doc signed him up for a blood transfusion.

Yeah, that's what I said. From nosebleed to blood transfusion. That's one way to spend the week.

So, in all and in short, Barry has spent the past five days bleeding and turning various shades of white and green, pre- and post-op, and I've spent it arguing, fussing, and hiding in the vistors lounge under the pretense of making phone calls so I could cry and generally freak out of Bear's ear shot.

Thank God for Barry's parents and my best friend KiKi, who drove and flew up special. Apparently, Kiki's spidey-sense is so keen (or I'm so very transparent) that after about five seconds on the phone with me, she dropped everything, including her tickets to see her hunk-a-tv-love Stephen Colbert and booked a flight to KC.

Yes, I have a friend like that.

And I've learned a lot that I didn't know over the past week. Like which ER you go to severly affects your after-ER care. That choosing your hospital is as, if not more, important than choosing your doctor. That getting a second opinion is excessively discouraged and some nurses will even bully and terrorize you to make sure you're scared so shitless that your husband and father to your child will bleed out in the ambulance that you won't dare to mention the request-that-will-not-be-named again. And that not even doctors will cross the Missouri river willingly.