Ol’ Missur Gwumphead – I heard this term when I was about ten years old. I heard it from my four year-old neighbor girl referring to her fourteen year-old brother, otherwise known as Missur Gwumphead. Many, many years have gone by without having the term come to mind, but secretly I was using the term in my head yesterday to refer to my dear husband.

If this were normal, I would not share this, but it is uncharacteristic for him to be grumpy. This was the grumpy cancer patient who refused to go to the ER on Friday night but grudgingly accompanied me there on Saturday. After the staff there reviewed the notes from the conversation of the previous evening they were all very apologetic and entered/exited our room very quickly. I worked hard to smile and answer their questions until they knew that we were actually quite nice people. Eventually Mark caught on and became more of himself.

Alternate titles for this post would be The Importance of Hemoglobin in Our Interpersonal Relationships or Red Blood Cells and the Well-Balanced Life.

As established, Mark was not at all pleased at being summoned to the ER. We had scarcely arrived when they informed us that he definitely needed a blood transfusion, but their blood had to be reserved for trauma cases. We had driven an hour to be there in South Jordan and it would be almost that far again to get to the ER at the University of Utah (which we had tried so hard to avoid). Nevertheless they were able to access his port, take new labs and agreed that he did not have to travel via ambulance. The kind physician even told him that he would be able to go home if his labs (hematocrit and hemoglobin) were either stable or increasing in value.

Not a chance – his numbers were both lower and we were soon headed north again. We carried with us a valuable paper of transfer which proved to almost as good as an ambulance ride for getting him right into a room. Soon after our arrival two nurses mentioned something about maybe going to ICU. Fortunately that did not happen! Instead he was given two units of blood and we were allowed to go home. He was not able to leave until he could prove that he could walk around the unit without fainting. He managed to do so but he was so hungry that he was beginning to feel sick. It was too late for any decent food place to be open, so I ran into a grocery store and got him some chips and apple juice (as per his request) and we were home just after 10:00.

Mr. Gwumphead was gone and my dear husband had returned. The blood was doing the trick. He said he actually didn’t feel different, but something had changed and I learned a valuable lesson. Gwumpiness could be from exhaustion as we had thought, but that exhaustion may be the result of serious health issues which need to be addressed. In fact, when his RBC was low upon last admission, the staff was commenting on him being “less perky.” I will need to be more conscientious.

The whole event took eleven hours… and now for part II:

EMBEDDED

As embedded journalists are attached to a military unit during a conflict, so our daughter Kimberly was embedded with us during this day of conflict as it relates to our battle with cancer. She is only here for the weekend and the four-hour lab draw on Friday had already cut into our time together. When we heard the phone call on Friday night I worried that our Saturday would be a mess also. Kimberly said that she wanted to go with us.

It was interesting to see the day from her eyes. She had planned to spend the afternoon and evening with her siblings, but her plans were canceled. She was so hungry that she felt faint before I was able to leave Mark and take her through the maze of hallways and tunnels to get her to the Bistro at the Hunstman just before they closed. She and I had to flip-flop seats in the ER as a way of dealing with the discomfort. We had planned to work on a computer project together this weekend but right away she realized that there is something about being in the hospital which almost doesn’t allow work to happen.

Canceled plans, unresolved hunger, terrible seating and incomplete projects – I was sorry for her but felt some relief at sharing the experience. I knew she had caught the spirit of the event when, about 30 minutes into the drive home, she exclaimed, “Oh! It feels so good to be free from the hospital!”

I tried to find a quote about “shared experiences” and there are many of them. Here is one that I found to be fitting:

Comedy is a shared experience, and I think it’s great to open that to a wider demographic.

Cancer is no comedy – but the chairs last night… laughable. I was happy to share the comedy of those chairs while we picked away at the pretzels that we had brought along, both of us wishing we were taking part in the plans we had been anticipating. I’ve said before we can choose to laugh or cry – laughing seemed to be the better choice last night. Though we were sore (the ER bed is also not great), we all went home with a smile, even Mr. Gwumphead…