exhausted

Just spent from 4pm Sunday getting my friend into the emergency room.
Between getting to her house, an hour and a half's drive and getting her willing to leave for the hospital, we didn't get to the emergency room til almost midnight.
They were great, though, and things were going pretty well, until 3 am, when she stopped breathing in the cat scan.
Completely unconscious, and a really upsetting color.
I thought she was dead.

But an er is a great place to do things like this.
They slammed her back upstairs and did a code on her starting in about 80 seconds flat.
I was waiting outside for all of this, and it was actually almost funny.
The room had two doors, and every doctor and most of the nurses in the place were in and out carting equipment.
And smack into the middle of things come a little old lady in a nightgown and slippers, asking where her doctor went.
There's probably something the matter with my brain that I can be sitting there in tears, and think that is odd at the same time.

The emergency room people were magnificent.
Very good with my friend, who is someone who could write the book on phobias about medical procedures.
Very gentle with me, and good at telling me what was going on.
(And at 5am the triage guy gave me his lunch.)

I'm finally home, noon Monday.
She's up in the ICU.
I stayed with her til they got her settled.
(I'd promised I would be, and I held her hand pretty much as often as they'd let me – though all the ivs were starting to make it difficult.)

What they think happened is this: she'd had to postpone a scheduled sinus operation on the 10th, because she'd had an extreme reaction to a pre-op drug (Cipro, blinding headache).
After that, she just kept getting sicker.
And I don't know why her doctors weren't more on top of things.
But the current diagnosis is meningitis, an infection of the brain spread from the original one in the sinus.
Not the nasty, vacination-available one, they think — that is, a meningitis, not the meningitis which would force me and the whole er staff to go get shots…

So today they keep her knocked out, and keep dripping lots of things into her.
Tomorrow her job is to breathe independently again.
And, because the lord of my particular universe appears to be a malignant joker, tomorrow after my colonoscopy, I'll try to head upstairs to see how she's doing.
Right now, I'm trying to reach her cat sitter again, and then I'm going to go crash.

Edit: Her never-speaking-to-each-other-again sister turned up, which I think may be good for them both.
I hope.
The doctors are operating to drain basically all her sinuses.
They just took her in, and expect it to be about two hours.

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