What could be lonelier than driving home after your third trip to the hospital in day?  Nobody is on the road at this hour of the night, and it is a Friday night.  I didn’t pass one car.  I passed a skunk on my driveway, and he didn’t seem happy about it.  

The town was eerily quiet, except for the sounds of crickets...my sunroof open,  the smokey skies, my husband laying alone in his thought, shivering in the ICU.  Tears well up, I’ve been strong for a week now...and I have one person to let down my guard with, me.  Oh, there are some I call, some who know, or care enough to let me be vulnerable.  

It’s rare I can allow myself the luxury of vulnerability.  You know the kind that want to be picked up and put in a pocket and held close?  Just protected from the hurts...the inevitable searing pain that come with love.  More kleenex, and I need to quit crying...not good to have swollen, red eyes when I see him.

Thirty years is half of my life...spent living with one man.  I didn’t spend thirty years with my family...not even total of my parents and child did I rack up three decades.

Tears roll down my cheeks.  For a week I’ve tried laughing, keeping the mood from slipping into a dark place, but now...tonight I feel the slippery slope of fear.  I’m not used to fear.

Saturday morning--I’m awakened at 6:30...it’s foggy and gray outside, the kind of morning I’d like to sleep in, but can’t...the sinking feeling in my stomach just burst into full blown in-your-gut fear.

I need to go back to the hospital, yet I stretch out my cup of coffee as long as I can.  I had to go back to the hospital last night, to be his advocate.  He is sometimes too polite...if I had not told him what to do, what to demand, I wonder if they would have let him cough and wheeze all night?  But I was there.  I came back.  I demanded they keep monitoring him, give him cough medicine, take his temperature (102º), ice him down, give him tylenol, something to sleep....and his fever was making a retreat.

We have health insurance and we are getting the C team...August is not a good month to get really sick.  Not that any month is.  His regular doctor here is on a family vacation.  His cardiologist in LA is also on vacation.  So we have nobody, who has actually been caring for him and knows his history.  Shit.

I’m listening to healthcare stuff everyday, on television, reading about it on OS, and even in my own blog I wrote something about healthcare, but with an eye to humor.  That was then, this is now, and this is not so funny.  

Time to go shower and drive back, hoping miraculously he will finally have turned the corner towards getting better...day eight.

We do have healthcare, I don't want to imagine what it must be like not to.  We don't just need healthcare for everyone, we need GOOD healthcare.  Bring on the A Team...and hurry.

He just called, things are getting worse.  Please pray, if you believe in it. 

This is why I am not around much.