These Men!

The phone rang at 11:30 last night. I was already in bed, but reading, and knew it couldn't be great news. Mr. Moon hadn't called me to tell me good-night but he never calls that late.
It was him, though.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
"Not really," he said.

Oh Lord. He's six hours away and he's admitting to not being all right. Not good.

He was in an ER in Anniston, Alabama after having passed out earlier in the evening. Now, Mr. Moon does this sometimes. I think it's partly, at least, due to his height. It just doesn't take that much to interfere with the blood getting from heart to head sometimes. And down he goes. And when a man who is six-feet-eight, or whatever, goes down, he goes DOWN.

It's scary. For him and everyone around him and last night it was scary for me, six hours away in the middle of the night. He told me that he wanted to leave the ER. He was fine. No chest pain, no arm pain, no abdominal pain, his heart rate was fine.
I pleaded with him to stay, get checked out.
He sighed. No one seemed to be getting helped much in the Anniston, Alabama hospital's emergency department at that hour of the night. One nurse. They had, he said, taken him in and grilled him on fifty different ways they could contact him for their money if need be.

Health care in America. Ain't it great?

Anyway, he finally got seen and had his vitals checked and they were all fine. And then he was determined to leave and go get a room and get some sleep. Where he and our two friends had been planning to spend the night was in a shack on the property they were looking at. A shacky-shack. With bugs and rodents and really low ceilings. And it was hot. And they hadn't eaten since early afternoon. And, and, and...

So. He got a room. I got a text from him this morning and he'd slept well and was planning on sleeping some more.
Good.

And in the middle of all of this last night, as if that wasn't enough, I got a picture and text from Jessie. SHE was in the ER in Asheville with Vergil.

He'd been playing Ultimate Frisbee, came down wrong on his ankle and heard an ominous pop.
Turns out it's not broken but "merely" badly sprained.

Sigh.

Vergil passed out on an airplane once. When they landed, they took him to a hospital, ran every test in the book and let him go. He was fine. He's tall too.

These men! We think of them as being eternally and infinitely strong and whole and well and they are our anchors, our rocks, our big, tall, indestructible fellas.
And when something happens, a fall, a passing-out, we are slapped in the face with the reality that they are human, after all. And it's so scary.

And we women, we fussers, are constantly reminding them to stay hydrated, not to get too hot, remember to eat, take it a little easier...
And do they listen, these men?
No.
Of course not. Because THEY believe they are eternally and infinitely strong and whole and well and indestructible. I swear, on weekends my husband will eat his breakfast and then get completely wrapped up in some manly project in the garage and around three he'll come staggering into the kitchen saying something like, "I don't think I ate lunch."

Drives me insane. Completely insane.

Anyway, I'm sure my husband is fine. But really? How could I tell from six hours away? And just because he's done this before and it meant nothing, what was there to guarantee that this, too, was a simple case of a drop in blood pressure due to...whatever...and how to make him stay in an emergency room when all he really wanted to do was go get something to eat, find a bed in a hotel and put the AC on Frigid?

Life. We can't protect the ones we love every minute of every day. Hell, we can't protect them at all, mostly. One second and everything can change. That's the way of it.

I laid there last night, wondering who in hell I could wake up to drive with me to Anniston, Alabama, if I needed to go. I was literally shaking as I tried to turn the pages of my book in between update phone calls. Mr. Moon kept saying, "Go to sleep. I'm fine. I'll be fine."

Which didn't help.

I finally took one of my squirreled-away Ativans and then I did sleep. There was no use for me to get in a car in the middle of the night and drive up to Alabama. None. But of course, it killed me that I wasn't there to take care of that man.
"Get something to eat," I told him.
"Yeah. I'm hungry."
"Well, get something good."
"I'm thinking a burger would be good."
"I was thinking something like a yogurt!"
And we laughed.

I'm just so glad he spent the night on a real bed in a hotel room rather than in a shack with no air conditioning in the woods in Alabama with mice and bugs running all over the place. And there's part of me that wants to tell him he can't do things like this any more. He can't go off to the woods or out on the ocean far from land and he can't act and do like he did when he was twenty-seven or thirty-seven. Although he's been passing out occasionally since his teens, I think, so that's not really an age thing.

But I can't prevent him from doing anything risky no more than Jessie can prevent her boy from playing  Ultimate Frisbee and we wouldn't really want to either. And we wouldn't want the kind of men who would let us prevent them.

It's a conundrum. We want to keep them safe but we know we can't and we know we shouldn't even try.

Well. Good morning. I think I'll go take a walk before it gets so hot that I PASS OUT. I have never passed out in my life, by the way. There are perks to being short.

Let us all be well today. Let's try and stay out of emergency rooms.

Yours Truly....The Completely Legal and yet Completely Ineffectual When It Gets Right Down To It Ms. Moon, RN