A funny thing happened on the way to the cardiac ward

I’m opening up the laptop at 9:09 PM at night after closing it just after 8:13 AM.

I’ve driven more than 300 miles today, and 238 of them were coming back from Traverse City. The rest of them were driving to and from Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak.

My aunt is in the cardiac unit at Beaumont. She has fluid around her heart and fluid in her lungs. That should be taken care of via diuretics and whatever the cardiologists determine when they meet with her and do an ultrasound of her heart tomorrow morning.

That was the story that I was told when I was there to see her, and I hope that things hold out that way. She’s a lot more humble than I’ve seen her in a long time regarding her health, though my dear aunt remains as insolent and willful as you would expect from the plucky 80-year-old.

Long story long, however, if she hadn’t fallen down the stairs, suffering compression fractures to her back and neck, she wouldn’t have gone to Providence and they wouldn’t have diagnosed her sodium levels as near fatally low…

But if she hadn’t been so adamant to get the hell out of the rehabilitation center to go home, spending a night with my uncle and aunt, and realizing the next morning (this morning) that she was unable to get home, she wouldn’t have gone back to the ER, and we wouldn’t have found out that she had the cardiac issues.

So, technically speaking, she’s come close to death a couple of times over the last six days, and if not for the fall, we wouldn’t know about the sodium, and if not for the worry about going home, we wouldn’t know about the cardiac issues.

I’d say that’s a strange coincidence, but I’ve already lost two parents to sudden and unexpected deaths, so I’m not certain that I believe in strange coincidences any more.

I don’t know when I’m coming back to work. I need to call my aunt’s doctor tomorrow, and then I need to call my therapist. Then I need to unpack, and take things from there.