On Being Not In Control
So, I got by with a lot of help from my friends, and Mark was due home on Friday at 3:00. Believe me, I was counting the hours. He was as anxious to be home as I was to have him home. In many ways that whole week was worse for him than it was for me, since he was so far away. But child number two was now nicely on the mend, the week was behind me and things were looking up.
At about 1:00, the phone rang. I expected it to be Mark, telling me the plane had landed, and hold on just a little longer, baby, because he was on his way home.
It wasn’t Mark.
It was my best girlfriend’s husband. The one I had called earlier this week – quite early, remember?
Like, at 12:45 a.m.
“Oh,” I thought quickly. “He’s returning my call to see how Peggy was doing.” She had had an outpatient procedure early that morning.
No. That’s not why he was calling.
Peggy’s dad had been in a serious accident, he said. He had been airlifted via Lifeflight to Enloe. They didn’t know if he was going to make it. Peggy’s mom was at the hospital, and Peggy’s brother was either there or on his way. Peggy wasn’t meeting the discharge criteria for the surgery yet. Could I go to the hospital to check on Judy? Could I take their kids for the night when they came down? Oh my God, yes, and yes.
So for the second time that week, I called my girlfriends for help. One dropped everything and came over to be with my kids so I could go to the hospital and find Judy, who was doing remarkably well. I waited until some more (wonderful) family friends came, then I got home ten minutes before Mark did. A couple hours later three of our favorite kids in the world were added to our family for the weekend (and a dog), and by nine that night we got to have one of the cousins come stay, too.
So our family of four swelled to a family of eight for a couple of days. It was great, it really was. I felt a bit guilty, actually, that we were having so much fun under circumstances so tragic. It did feel a little bit like an emotional yo-yo, receiving the latest info from the hospital, and reporting to Peggy how the kids were doing, what questions they were asking, and then coming back to party central.
You already know how it ended, from my previous post ("On Being Alive and Well") . But of course, at the time we didn’t know how it was going to end, and there was plenty of emotion to have to deal with. Peggy and her husband decided to try to keep life going as normal as possible for the kids, so our brood shrank back to original size on Sunday afternoon.