20120728 Seattle Cool, Cloudy, Clearing later
What a day this turned out to be.
Dolores had minor abdominal pain yesterday afternoon, followed by diarrhea this morning and increasing pain. So we waited around the condo to see how things went.
Finally, she said that it felt like a diverticulitis attack, like the one she had last year in Jacksonville. She thought an Emergency Care place might be able to handle it, so we went to lower Queen Anne and checked into one. An hour later, she was seen and told they couldn’t handle it. Wasted time. They did give us directions to the Virginia Mason Hospital ER.
We found the ER all right about 1615. She was admitted for diagnosis. Into a treatment room. Doctor and resident came in to hear her tale of woe. A CT scan was scheduled, as soon as blood could be drawn and urine analyzed. It took a while to get blood (it always does). The CT people took her an hour and a half after entry and brought her back quickly.
I had to go put more money in the parking machine. When I came back, the resident was telling Dolores that there was indeed inflammation that indicates diverticulitis. Dolores dressed and prepared for release. Then she was told there is also a tumor, very likely benign, on her adrenal gland. This has to be investigated when we return home because it could (1%) be a metastatic growth from some other part of the body - there’s nothing in the abdomen to indicate any source. Yippee. We have to add that VM’s care could not have been better, and the people were really nice.
So we left VM’s ER about 1810. We walked to the pharmacy and found it closed. People there gave us directions to a 24-hour pharmacy in (guess where) lower Queen Anne. We tried to go downhill toward First Avenue and ran into the Seafair marathon. We turned north and tried to get around it. We made a mistake and got into a road-closed area where all we could do was to enter US-99 south. The exit down to the waterfront from it was closed, so we had to continue all the way to Royal Brougham, where traffic was stopped again. We did see the last person in the marathon walking northward on US-99. Seems there is also a night baseball game that is clogging this end of downtown. There were pedestrians and cars everywhere.
We decided to go to the condo rather than the 24-hour pharmacy so we could care for the cats and finally fought our way through to Alaskan Way and the condo, arriving there at 1940 - an hour and a half to go a mile.
We found two hungry cats wondering who would come care for them. We fed them and reassured them. They took their period outside, then came in and settled back down.
I left Dolores and drove to the pharmacy, which turned out to be a few doors from the Emergency Care place we visited earlier. I’m getting to know the 1st & Mercer area fairly well. They took the prescriptions. I bought Tylenol for Dolores and wine for me. Then I picked up the prescriptions, which everyone behind the counter came to see. It turned out the insurance database computer was down. Therefore, the bill for the prescriptions was $235. I gasped, then paid with credit card. They told me to come back tomorrow so they could re-run the input to the computer and get me a credit card refund.
Now I had to return in the dark to the condo. I missed Wall Street and got to the condo via a very roundabout way, but got there.
So now it’s 2030 as I finish these notes. Only one picture today.
