Good news-Sad news

In the good news department, my friend Karen is out of intensive care and in a room on the floor. Turns out she had a fractured skull in addition to the broken tibia. She was starting to sound like her old self, though, when I called her on Friday. She was complaining that her hair was all sticky-uppy. She had asked the nurses if she could put some water on it or something to smooth it down, but they said no, she had too many stitches back there.

She must be feeling better if she is worrying about things like that.

As we talked, she told me the story of how she wound up in the hospital, but she had the day wrong. She told me it happened on Tuesday and of course it was Monday. So, she is a little scrambled, but that’s OK. It sounds like she will come back from all this.

More good news: my friend Bob who rolled past me on the sidewalk on a gurney bound for the hospital on Tuesday is doing fine. He was chafing at being in the hospital, since the last time he had that experience was when he was born. They ran all sorts of tests on him and discovered he had two blocked arteries. He now has stents holding them open, so he will be OK too.

The remarkable thing is that the ER nurse who happened to be in church when he fainted saved his life by insisting that he wait for the ambulance. You see, Bob officiates at high school football games. He would have been dead within a week or two of a massive heart attack , running up and down the field, if he hadn’t been treated so quickly.

The sad news is that our son’s divorce papers arrived this week. He let us read them, and they include phrases like, “the parties will go their own way, without encumbrance “ and live separate lives. He has been looking forward to this for over a year, so he is pleased. To us, though, it just seems so …desolate.