Just My Luck: Cleared Thinking

I flew out of bed at my sister's knock, to find my 91-year old mom on the floor of her room with a huge knot on her forehead from a fall.


The 911 crew based down the street arrived in no-time to assess and transport her to the hospital where she stayed in the E.R. overnight only to be admitted to ICU with a small bleeder in her brain--a danger for anyone on prescribed blood thinners.


Sis had followed the ambulance last night but work demanded I go in for awhile as my 3 peers were scheduled late or gone, and it was 1pm-ish before I raced to the downtown hospital Mom requested from paramedics.

She was tubed-up amid sounds of whirring flow regulators for plasma, oxygen, I.V. meds, electrodes, housed with small flashing red and green lights, and her aged frailty looked as if it had taken the brunt of a Louisville Slugger to her left cheek, eye, and forehead.


She wasn't in pain, but the trauma's toll showed as did my sleepless semi-conscious grogginess until I got jolted by both my bladders and kidneys sending me out of ICU in search of a men's room with dam-bursting panic-speed.


I stood over the urinal thinking of too many things at once, mind racing yet mud-bogged with fatigue, what-if and to-do scenarios as I pulled the flush handle almost instantaneously feeling my shoe-tops awash in the urinal's overflow, unjamming the overwhelmed circuits of my brain and suddenly seeing the schematic of an orderly sequence commencing tomorrow.