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The last couple of days
Wednesday, 29 March 2006 13:23On Monday morning, Stella phoned to tell me that the two of them had been admitted (at half-past twelve at night, after about two and a half hours of waiting in the hallway) and that Amy would probably be out on Wednesday. She said she was considering getting a phone in her room but that she needed money for that (there was a fee and a deposit). She asked me to get money and visit her in the evening.
At about 6:30 in the evening, the electricity went out in our office building—and, it turned out later, in most of Hamburg south of the Elbe river: a tornado was visiting Harburg and causing damage, including taking roofs off houses, some of which landed on electricity lines, cutting or short-circuiting them. No power meant, of course, no ATMs. However, it also meant that the light rail wasn't running, and everyone who wanted to go to Neugraben was queuing at the 141 bus stop, the bus I wanted to take to the hospital.
After waiting for 20 minutes (the bus was about 10 minutes overdue by now) I thought that even if the bus did arrive, there probably wouldn't be enough room for me with all the others wanting to take the bus, and I didn't know whether I'd be able to go back home again, either (maybe the busses on the way back would all be so full they wouldn't even stop at the hospital), so I just went home. It was getting dark by that time, so there wasn't a lot to do except maybe read by torchlight; I decided to go to bed early.
The next day, I considered visiting Stella that morning instead, but dallied around at home. Around 11, the janitor came and said he wanted to connect our dishwasher if that was OK—something he had meant to do for a week but hadn't found time to do earlier. (He had been there on Monday but nobody was home then.) The problem was that not all units in our block of flats had an attachment for a dishwasher beneath the kitchen sink, so before we could use the one we had upstairs, we needed to get a connector installed.
Anyway, he said that he had some work to do next door but would come over afterwards, so I stayed here for another little while. Meanwhile, Stella had phoned again and said that they'd be released that day, and asked me to bring the stroller over between two and three, when they'd do the release paperwork.
The janitor came back and installed the connector, or at least one of them: now we had water entering the dishwasher, but he couldn't connected the drain to the drain of the sink because the piece he had with him wasn't quite right. Still, we could use the dishwasher as long as we put the drain hose into a bucket or something.
When he was gone, I left for the hospital, where it turned out that a urine sample had shown up two kinds of bacteria that she might have got from the infection, and the doctor wasn't sure whether she needed to be looked at a bit longer (he said that if it had only been one, he would have been fine with letting her go, but two was a bit more cause for concern). So anyway, he had arranged for another urine sample that afternoon, and they were waiting for the results to come back from the lab.
I left the stroller there and headed off to work. A bit later, I got a call that Stella and Amy were home and that they had been discharged after all, about an hour after I had left.
After a couple of hours of work, I felt really fuzzy and called it a day. At home, I measured my temperature in my ears with our infrared thermometer and got 38.8 and 38.9 °C (101.8 and 102.0 °C). No wonder I was feeling under the weather! Also, I had had no appetite for most of the day, quite unusual for me. Even chocolate didn't tempt me.
This morning I don't feel feverish any more, but I still called in sick. Ended up running to the toilet every hour or so, so maybe I got what Amy had.
Just now, Stella made some rice and steamed vegetables and I'll try to see what my stomach says to that. I had only had two cups of broth so far today, and my stomach seemed unsure what to think of food, but rice seems safe enough.
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