On Friday, November 5, 2004, Ken actually woke up feeling a little stronger. He got dressed and went to sit in the living room. We watched some TV, talked a little and held hands for a while. I don’t remember who got there first, but early that afternoon, Ken’s dad and his mom both came over – not together, of course – they never go anywhere together. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen – they’ve been married and living in the same house for well over fifty years, but they NEVER speak to each other or go places in the same car. So I guess it was just a fluke that they ended up at the house at the same time.
Anyway, we were sitting and talking with Ken’s parents, having a fairly pleasant visit, when Ken called my name. When I looked over at him, he was holding up a tissue stained with bright red blood. Now, he had been coughing up phlegm tinged with a tiny bit of blood for a couple of weeks, but this was pure blood – and a lot of it. It scared me, but I don’t remember panicking. I called Dr. Schlabach’s office and they told me that I should take Ken to the ER. I called Mama and told her I needed her to come. Then I TOLD Ken’s mother (this time, I didn’t ask – I didn’t give her a chance to give me an excuse) that she would have to stay at the house until the boys got home from school and she could leave as soon as my Mama got there. I asked Ken’s dad if he would help me get Ken out to the van. He got the wheelchair and we put Ken in the van. Ken’s dad said he would drive us to Erlanger, so off we went.
When we got to the ER and told them what was going on, they of course, admitted Ken to the oncology floor. Ken got so mad. He always got mad, even though he knew that every time we went to the ER they would end up admitting him. They scheduled him for a chest x-ray and blood work, as usual. Different this time was that Ken had to be put on oxygen because his blood oxygenation level was too low. They told him to take deep breaths, because if his level dropped below 85, the oxygen machine would alarm. He became so worried that the alarm would sound that he almost hyperventilated, trying to keep it above 85. I wish they hadn’t told him about the stupid alarm, because he got all stressed out trying to keep it from going off.
By the time we got all settled, it was dark. The room they put us in that time was one of the smaller rooms and it shared a bathroom with the room next door. A little inconvenient, but nothing we couldn’t work around...or so we thought. Well, the fellow in the adjoining room didn’t have anyone staying with him that night. I don’t know if he was heavily medicated or just plain nuts (or some of both), but every time he would go into the bathroom (which was about once every 15 minutes or so), he would get turned around and come into our room when he finished. That, by itself, was a little unnerving, but what made it CRAZY was that when he came into our room, he was NAKED –NOT A STITCH OF CLOTHING!!!! This happened about four times before Ken got so upset that I called the nurse and asked if they had another room they could move us to. She checked, and to our good fortune, the “Rock-Star” room Ken had been in after his first surgery had just become available. They had us moved within the hour. I got Ken settled in and laid down in my bed to rest.
I was purely exhausted and I guess it got the better of me, because it is one of the few times while Ken was in the hospital that I actually fell asleep. I remember being jolted awake a while later by Ken calling my name with a sense of urgency. I sat straight up and asked him what was wrong. Ken looked at me very wide-eyed and said, “I need you to come and help me pull up in the bed.” It was an unusual request...even though Ken was weak and his back was hurting, he always had enough upper body strength to pull himself up in the bed. But I got up and crossed the room over to his bed. When I got there, he grabbed hold of the front of my shirt and whispered in a frenzied voice, “There is somebody in our bathroom!” Now, I’m thinking that he had either been dreaming or was having a reaction to one of his meds, but he said again, “There is somebody in our bathroom! Go and get the nurse!”
I stepped outside the room and a male nurse was standing beside the nurses’ station. I told him that Ken said someone was in our bathroom and was very upset. I asked him to please come and check it out for us. He looked at me like I was crazy, but came on in the room. He opened the bathroom door and there was NAKED CRAZY MAN, standing in our bathroom, just looking around. The nurse asked him what he was doing. He said, “going to the bathroom”. Nurse replied, “That’s fine, but this isn’t your room, man!” Anyway, he ushered the guy out of our room and back into his own. I asked if there was some way they could either restrain him or at least keep a closer eye on him. They said “no”. So, I pushed the pull-out couch in our room up against the extra door so I would at least hear him if he tried to come back in. Ken told me that the guy had been in our room for at least ten minutes, going into our bathroom, coming out and looking at me, going back into our bathroom, coming out and looking at me. I am not sure if he even realized Ken was there watching the whole thing.
Anyway, the next morning, when I got up and went over to the sink to brush my teeth, I stepped in a big puddle of PEE!!! Evidently NAKED CRAZY MAN had been “going to the bathroom” like he said, only instead of going in the bathroom, he went in our floor. I was SOOOOO mad!!! I guess that’s what I get for actually going to sleep for once!
Now, any time someone I know is in the hospital and says they will be alright staying by themselves and that they don’t need a family member to spend the night in the hospital with them, I tell them my NAKED CRAZY MAN story. People always laugh when I tell it – I guess it is a funny story, now. Not when it was happening, though. When it was happening, it was just one more thing in two solid years of CRAZY!
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