Take it from me: spending hours in the Emergency Room waiting for help is not the ideal way to start the New Year.

My wife wasn't feel tip top this afternoon and decided to take a nap after lunch. Around 3 pm, in a scared voice, she said "Larry, there's something terribly wrong with my right eye." When I looked at it, I didn't understand what I was seeing. Instead of the cornea's normal curved dome shape, it was sloping inward and was bloodshot around the edges. As calmly as I could muster, I said "that doesn't look good." I immediately called down to my dad that Robin had a medical emergency and that we were leaving for the hospital. We jumped in the car and arrived at East Jefferson Medical Center 5 minutes later.

I drove up the ramp to the Emergency Room and leapt from the car to find someone to help us. I walked into the triage area; there were 40 or so people waiting for help but I saw no hospital staff. A sign on the wall said to fill out an information slip and wait but I thought Robin was in danger of loosing her sight and wasn't going to settle for an impersonal sign for instructions. I walked around the Emergency unit until I found a security guard. The guard confirmed that Triage was the place to go so I went back. Eventually, an attendant came out to call the next patient and I explained the situation to her. She followed me out to the car, looked at my wife's eye and said "Oh God" which was not very encouraging.

The attendant wheeled my wife into the Triage waiting area and said someone would be right out. We waited nervously for over an hour, watching as only 2 or 3 patients were called in for the initial meet and greet with a nurse. Finally, I asked my wife if she knew the telephone number for her Opthamologist. Incredibily, she did! Why hadn't she given it to me already??? (Of course, she was in shock and was doing everything she could to simply keep from crying.) I called the Eye Clinic and left a message with their answer service. Five minutes later, the doctor called back. I explained the situation & he agreed it was potentially very bad; he instructed me to drive to their clinic immediately.

We left the ER and were at the eye clinic in minutes. As we drove up, the doctor's car was the only one in the parking lot and it's headlights were on. He went there just for us! He asked Robin a series of questions and conducted several tests. Around 6:30 pm, we learned that Rob probably had an allergic reaction - possibly due to an allergy to cats that was aggravated by Rob's helping me nurse our cat back to health. By 7:15 pm, we were giddily walking through Walgreen's to get the $90 eye drops prescribed by the doctor. Robin's eye already looked 90% better.

Few posts are as personal or traumatic as this one; however, I wanted to share it to encourage readers to remain calm in an emergency and to appreciate what you have while you have it. Thing can change in an instant without warning no matter how old or young you are.

Labels: 2007