A call in the middle of the night

Well I scheduled that poem to go up on Sunday morning, then in the middle of the night on Saturday night there came a phone call. If you’ve been reading here for a while you might remember this big drama. So my brother-in-law calling me in the dead of night is not a good thing. He was letting me know my sister was in hospital down in Melbourne and he hadn’t been able to get onto my Mum, who was in Toowoomba for the other brother-in-law’s birthday, so I then had to call her, and so the night went on.

At that point the doctors thought my sister had a ruptured cyst somewhere (because she polycystic kidney disease, which it appears she mutated because there are no traces of it anywhere in the family), but my brother-in-law also mentioned something about fluid around the lungs and heart, which did not sound good. This to me usually means heart failure, and so I was thinking, well she’s been on a gazillion drugs for the last 18 months so if she has heart failure now well then what? However, it would seem that that is not such a big concern now, but she is having an echocardiogram today to make sure the heart is OK, and then might be able to go home. So it's turned out a whole lot better than it sounded in the middle of Saturday night.

Consequently I have stayed home today. I’m going soft. But I didn’t get much sleep Saturday night and just ended up doings things like eating toast, because if you stay awake long enough you get hungry. Then yesterday I just got up and did life and waited for more information (hospitals don’t seem to be particularly functional places on weekends) and went and did the church things. We had a thanksgiving service at church last night and they’d let us know in advance that there would be time to share. I had something in mind to say, but in the end decided I didn’t want to get up there and fall to pieces simply because I hadn’t had enough sleep (I’m sure some of you know what I mean – you could have made me cry about almost anything yesterday), and there were no long pauses and essentially a line-up of people, so I didn’t.

So I’ve just really got out of bed this morning and might go back there. I actually don’t have much to do at work at the moment anyway, so it was a choice of going in and fiddling about or staying home in bed for a while. Don’t tell anybody, but I think I might enjoy the rest of today (so long as there is no further bad news from Melbourne of course).