My husband and I are TUTS season-ticket holders, and on the night of May 15, 2015, we had tickets for “The Music Man.” We had an extra set of tickets for our close friends, Mike and Rhoda. At 5:09 P.M., they wouldn’t arrive for another 45 minutes, so I decided to call my parents to see how my father was doing. To see how (or if) their stories matched, I called my father first and he seemed to think that everything was going well and that he’d be leaving soon. He wasn’t wearing his hearing aids, so the conversation was a bit challenging. At 5:16 P.M. I called my mother to get her side of the story. When she answered I asked how the patient was doing. She responded by saying, “We’re just having so many problems with engineering.” At first I thought that either I had misunderstood or she had, but our conversation continued in the same confusing vein, and some of her responses seemed straight out of “Harry Potter.” I handed the phone to my husband and told him to ask her about my father. He seemed to have a nice conversation with her, but when he handed the phone back to me he said that he couldn’t understand a word she said.
The challenge of living three hours from your loved ones is that you can’t just run down the street to check on them. I needed eyes on my mother, so at 5:27 P.M. I called the neighbor who lives across the street, explained that I was having difficulty understanding Mom, and asked if he could go over and ask my mother about my father’s condition. He called back 15 minutes later and said that he couldn’t understand her either. At 5:50 P.M., I called my father and told him that I thought that Mom was in some sort of trouble and that I wanted to call 9-1-1. He said that he would call her himself. For future reference, having a hearing-impaired person without his hearing aids call someone who’s speaking gibberish is pretty much a waste of time. He had no trouble understanding what he thought she said.
I called my mother again and told her that I was calling an ambulance for her and they would take her to the hospital. It was another confusing conversation and I don’t know if she got the gist of what I was saying or planning to do because I couldn’t understand anything she said. As I was telling her good-bye, she finally said something that I could understand; she told me that she “loved me to bits.”
At 6:23 P.M. I called 9-1-1. When asked about the nature of my emergency, I told the Harris county 9-1-1 operator that I needed to be transferred to a 9-1-1 operator in Bell County. She said, “I don’t even have a phone number that I can give you.” My husband, who was busily searching for Bell County phone numbers on his iPad, gave me the number for the Bell County Sheriff’s office. My call was answered with, “If this is an emergency, hang up and dial 9-1-1.” OMG! I knew that she would eventually end up at Scott & White Hospital, so I called the main number and told the operator of my plight. The very helpful operator said that she would transfer me to someone who could help me. I wish I had made a note of that department because I was greeted with another recording of, “If this is an emergency, hang up and dial 9-1-1.”
Now it’s almost 6:30 P.M. Our theater-going friends brought us sandwiches, turned in our tickets at the box office, and went to the show themselves. In desperation, I called my parents’ neighbor again and asked if he could call 9-1-1 for me. He did, but he had a difficult time convincing them that my mother was in need of assistance. They eventually agreed to send an ambulance to the house. Before he hung up, our friend provided the 9-1-1 operator with my mother’s name and my name and phone number. I was relieved that help was on the way. I started gathering clothes and my work computer so that I could leave as soon as I heard from the hospital. That wait took much longer than I expected.
Call me crazy, but it seems like the State of Texas could have a web page (maybe a wiki) that contains the 254 phone numbers of 9-1-1 operators. At the very least, the 9-1-1 operator who answered my call should have have been able to say, “I can’t transfer you, but you can call 254-555-5555.” I was lucky that I was able to snag a neighbor to make the call. The elapsed time from my first call to 9-1-1 to the time that our friend placed the call was nine minutes. In an emergency, nine minutes can be the difference between life and death.
My husband suffers from 
Unbelievably, the waiting room was empty. Two nurses triaged me and took me right to an examination room. Although this might seem like standard operating procedure (SOP), in my experience with this ED, triage was followed by 
And then the woman with the traveling laptop entered the room to resolve my bill. After handing her my insurance card, she told me that I had a very good insurance plan for emergency care. My bill had come to $6,000.00 (approximately $1,000/hour), but my out-of-pocket portion was only $2,000.00 (gag). She started to say that if I were to be admitted, there would be some other process, but stopped midsentence and said that I would be admitted. When I asked why, she said that the doctor would return soon and she would tell me. After all of these tests and the pending admittance to the hospital, I wondered what the heck was wrong with me. When the doctor returned, she said that she was admitting me because I had pneumonia. I had spent a lot of time with someone who had had pneumonia twice during the past year, and I was pretty certain that I didn’t have a single symptom that would warrant that diagnosis.
The good news was that they were going to give me a nice IV cocktail of concoctions that would make my headache go away. Although I was grateful to get rid of the pain, I was not convinced that it wouldn’t return after all of the good drugs wore off. When I asked her if she had any idea what caused the pain, all she said that she doubted my assertion that I didn’t get headaches, which was hugely annoying.
June 2. Fortunately, I had the prescriptions from the urgent care center, which we filled after breakfast. Because my pain had started in my head and extended down my back, the urgent care doctor had prescribed one medication to address the backache and another for the headache.
While Stan and Dad spent the day on outdoor activities, I kept running through my Pilates routines and noticed that my headache and back pain had diminished significantly.
That day I also accompanied Mom to see the neurologist. For the past month, our lives had revolved around my father, and it was easy to forget that 
Mom and Chris stayed home after lunch and tended to my parents’ vegetable garden, which seemed to be exploding with tomatoes and cucumbers. During the early afternoon, Dad had his CT scan, which showed that his right chest cavity still held excess fluid. The doctor said that he might need another chest tube to clear it. Later that afternoon, Dad and I watched “Jeopardy,” which was one of the few normal activities that we had shared in a long time. Today we were fortunate to have two separate visits from pastors Tom and Don. Dad always seemed to brighten up after visiting with them. As if to underscore the good feelings of the day, Michelle, another of our favorite nurses, stopped in for just a moment to tell Dad how good he looked. When we returned to see him after dinner, Dad was back on CPAP. His oxygen levels had dropped some and he would receive full oxygen support during the night.
Dad’s cardiologist stopped by and performed a 
During my five days in Temple I had been living in a sort of surreal and parallel universe. When I arrived on May 15, I had assumed that my father’s discharge was imminent. My big unknown was about what was in store for my mother. I had not anticipated that my mother would be discharged first. Now, in addition to figuring out how to care for my recently independent and active parents, I had to start thinking about my job and living away from my husband. It was a daunting juggling act—one I hoped would be over soon.
Shortly thereafter, a steady stream of doctors, fellows, residents, therapists, aides, and who knows who came through my mother’s door. My California-born mother sometimes has a difficult time understanding some of her native Texas friends. This teaching hospital is teeming with personnel from across the globe, most of whom speak rapidly and are very polite and soft spoken. I finally asked them to let me translate all of their requests. While testing her cognitive impairment, they asked her to spell “world” backwards. After two hours of sleep that followed almost 24 hours awake, I was pretty sure that I couldn’t spell it myself, and would probably fail their tests.
With this new information, I called Scott & White ED again and asked about the status of my mother. Again they told me that they had no such patient. I informed her that neighbors witnessed a Scott & White ambulance drive off with my mother on board. Because my parents’ house was less than five miles from the hospital, I assumed that it was her destination. It was then that she asked me about her symptoms, and as I started to explain, she said, “We have a Jane…” I interrupted her and asked if she was saying that my mother was a Jane Doe. She said that my mother had not been able to identify herself and she was admitted as Trauma Patient Ohio.
Tale of Two Parents 