Thank goodness for Wi-fi

I've been seeking some healthy vibes for my family lately. My son had been sick with what appeared to be a mild case of Hand-Foot-Mouth disease, only to get a runny nose and cough right at the tail end of that. Then, my husband has been feeling ill for the last 3+ weeks, only to go in the the ER yesterday and get admitted into the hospital. No one knows what's going on and we get some best case and worst case scenarios. Gotta love those. Ironically, a year ago yesterday, my dad suffered a stroke that sent him to the ER and this morning (V-Day) a year ago he passed away. :*(

We originally got put into a shared room. For the largest part of last night until the early hours of today, the speckled curtains separated our side with our neighbor's side. We could see no one, but we could hear all. Next to us was, it seemed, an older man. I imagined a wrinkly old man with no family. He sounded much like my father did when he had had his amputation surgery back in 1999 (or was it 2000? I can't remember anymore...) and he was on morphine drip to ease the pain. Morphine drip causes the patient to hallucinate. My father would see spiders down the wall and he would act as if he were giving communion (he was a former priest). Well, our neighbor spent most of the night between a seemingly uneasy sleep and crying out random phrases and names, with "Abui" and other names being the ones I remember most. He had a nurse with him at all times, and quite frankly, he was down-right rude at times. But I don't think he knew what he was saying/doing. This morning, out of nowhere, we hear: "Hey, why are you sitting next to that ugly man?" to which the nurse replied, "Papi, you're in the hospital." Needless to say, we didn't sleep much.

In one of the bathroom breaks, the curtain was pulled back some, and to my surprise, the sounds coming from our neighbor were not those of a seventy- or eighty-something-year-old man but of a younger man, probably in his early forties or late thirties. He must have been in some serious pain because of the pain killers, but from the myriad of conversations, we caught that he was on dialysis, that he lived with an aunt, and that he had a wife and child. The few moments he was semi-coherent, we could tell he spoke Spanish and English, but most of the time we could barely decipher the language. It made me sad.

But back to this post's title: thank goodness for wi-fi! Last night, while my mom stayed home with my munchkin, I schlepped my bag with papers to grade, laptop, and some sweaters and miscellaneous gadgets to keep my husband company at the hospital. As it turns out, the hospital now has free wi-fi, so I've been able to keep in contact with you guys via email, and I've been able to go through all the blogs. I've also been able to check my emails and google the various medical terms that have come up during our stay.

So that's about it. It's been a tiring week and it looks like it's going to be a tiring weekend. Is it spring break yet?