Starts with K

We had a semi-busy weekend, beginning with a full day of medical appointments for my husband at Mayo Clinic in Rochester.

They were planned weeks in advance – unlike our little adventure five days earlier, when we spent a tidy eight hours in the emergency department.

When a loved one has health issues, no matter the type, every little noise and nod take on new meaning.

Russ had an obnoxiously long and unexpected open-heart surgery last April, right on the heels of a pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Ever since, we have had a steady parade of medications filling up what was once a kitchen junk drawer.

Each pill or tablet has its own little party of side-effects, which has provided us with a very fun guessing game.

The light-headedness he’s been experiencing since surgery, though, didn’t seem to have an easy answer – until it did.

Russ passed out that morning as we got ready for church, bonking his head on a door on the way down – then lying to me and telling me he “just laid down here real quick in the hallway.”

I didn’t see it happen, but I heard it. I wasn’t concerned; Russ is a bit of a bang-around kind of guy who shuts cupboards too loudly and drops things from unnecessary heights just to see me jump.

Because Mr. Warfarin Twice A Day hit his head, he agreed to go to the ED – but not until I threatened to tattle on him to his daughters. He doesn’t care for it when we all get in on the nagging game.

I tattled anyway, but joked on the way over that they’d probably tell him he needed to drink more water. That seemed unlikely; he drinks more water in a day than I do in a week.

We miraculously arrived to a nearly deserted waiting room and were quickly taken back to an exam room.

Everyone, it seemed, knew about his “complex medical issues,” and we saw no fewer than 20 doctor-types. He had a CT scan of his head; an echocardiogram of his heart; a chest X-ray; a series of blood draws and multiple other tests; and repeated his story multiple times.

Each conversation began with, “tell me what happened today; what brings you to the hospital?”

Each conversation ended with Russ saying, “then I woke up to Kay interrogating me.”

The female medical professionals would close their eyes, smile and shake their heads.

The men would look at me sadly – some, dare I say, accusingly.

Fun fact about Russ: His father was a world-renowned pediatric cardiologist at the University of Minnesota.

My husband now eats faster than anyone you’ve ever met, and has a wealth of knowledge about the human heart.

“The faster I ate, the sooner I could be excused from the nightly lecture at the dinner table” about some new technique or breakthrough in cardiac care, he told me.

So that day in the ED, he would begin his story by saying, “I’ve been having some orthostatic hypotension …”

There we sat, for eight hours, with various and sundry experts coming in to talk to my dizzy husband and yukking it up about his improving ejection fraction.

And no, I don’t know what that means.

Finally, a whole gaggle of folks crowded into the exam room, where they went over the results of the fleet of tests he’d had. Had they been graded, he would have received all As.

As it turned out, we could have stopped at the kitchen sink on our way out of the house and saved ourselves eight hours.

I had inadvertently correctly diagnosed him eight hours earlier – and my dad wasn’t even a doctor.