Six Letter Word [Kaylor]

December 2016 (Part 1)

Getting home from radiation, I was much more in the Christmas spirit than I had been when I woke up. Karlie put on Christmas music, and even as we worked she would occasionally stop what she was doing to pull me in for a dance. She did the heavy lifting, carrying the tubs of decorations from storage, and climbing up the ladders to hang things up high, while I mostly pulled the different decorations out of tubs and directed her where to put them. She explained that she'd sent Sean and Jeff to go get a tree from some farm in Jersey. She'd thought about taking me out there, knowing I grew up on a Christmas tree farm, but decided it was too cold for us to spend that much time outside, and as much as I hated to admit it, she was probably right. Getting cold doesn't actually make you get sick, but it can lower your immune system and dry out your mucus membranes, making your more susceptible to germs, and with my immune system already down, it wouldn't have been a smart decision.

She was up on the ladder in the living room trying to hang some lights up high when she sent me into the kitchen to get more command hooks and adhesive. I had my head deep in the cabinet under the kitchen sink trying to find the size she asked for when I heard a startled yelp from the other room, followed by a loud thump, a metallic clatter and Karlie's voice yelling 'FUCK!' I raced into the living room to find my wife lying on her back on the living room floor, pushing the ladder off herself.

"Jesus, Karlie, you're bleeding," I exclaimed, surveying the scene. There was a fairly large gash on her forehead, a trickle of blood aiming for her eyebrow.

"Am I?" she queried, bringing her left hand up to her forehead, making a face when she saw the blood on her fingertips as she pulled them away. "Shit. I wasn't even paying attention to that, because I hurt my wrist when I fell."

Up until that moment, I'd been most concerned about her head. It wasn't until then that I consciously realized that she wouldn't have used her left hand for anything she'd done since I'd come in if her right was okay. I pulled the ladder off the rest of her and helped her sit up, finally turning my attention to her right wrist. It was just slightly swollen compared to the left, and didn't seem too oddly shaped, but when I asked if she could move her fingers, she could barely manage a flutter, accompanied by a sharp hiss of pain. I hated to see my wife in pain, but letting her drip blood everywhere wasn't going to help anything, so I ran back into the kitchen to get a clean towel for her head and a bag of frozen veggies for her wrist. I held the towel to her head, trying to see if I could get the bleeding to stop, but it became clear very quickly that it wasn't going to happen. I had a moment of panic when I realized that security was somewhere on a tree farm in Jersey, but Karlie assured me they'd left the Highlander in the garage, though they'd left it in case we needed it for me, not her.

It wasn't easy getting her down to the car, which I knew I was going to have to drive, since she had her hands full not bleeding all over the car and keeping her wrist as still as possible. It was a good thing we'd left a box of masks in the car, because I didn't even think about it until we pulled up to the valet line, a blessing since I've never actually had to worry about what to do with the car at the hospital before. I've always had security drive us, so what they did after that, I didn't really know. But the ED has valet parking so you don't have to worry about it, you can just take care of whoever is having the emergency. As we approached the front of the line, I grabbed a mask out of the box, looping it over my ears. I was still wearing a santa hat, and I realized that somehow Karlie's antlers had stayed on through all the drama, though slightly askew. An orderly with a wheelchair met us at the line, though he looked confused as to which of us to wheel in, with Kar the slightly bloody reindeer and me the obvious cancer patient santa. Kar had been doing pretty well, not too much pain on the way over, only grunting a bit at the bumps. But getting her out of the car proved more difficult than getting her in. The orderly was gentle though, and once he discovered I was there as the wife and not the patient, he led us directly to the orthopedic treatment area and a relatively private treatment bay so I would be kept apart from all the germs. He even hung a sign on the curtain requesting that any doctors or nurses coming to see Karlie follow infectious disease control protocol so I would be able to take my mask off, it would be them who had to wash up and wear masks, gowns and gloves to protect me. I'd done that plenty of times to keep patients I was visiting in the hospital safe. Now it was my turn to be protected.