Whoa!

Momma slept a whole 5 hours last night. Who could sleep with this sort of excitement going on?

So I got up at 4AM sharp thanks to the flatulent canine. I put her outside and started my morning. I was out the door by 5:30. Bang zoom!

I show up in Mark's room and he's a mess. He was admitted with hyperkalemia. Apparently, the doctors were using some little known voodoo to lower his potassium (K+) levels. It involved giving my non-diabetic husband insulin.

Procedure:
Infuse calcium gluconate, sodium barcarbonate, a beta-2-agonist, and then crash the whole mutha with insulin. Patient's blood glucose gets lower than a snake's belly. Patient sweats profusely, gets cold, lies sleepless in bed all night. K+ returns to safer levels.

Then give the patient (read: quivering bowl of jelly) some glucose to bring him back from the brink of diabetic shock.

Nurses followed this news with surgery postponement. Five more organs became available over night. And these surgeries usually cannot wait. They have a short window in which to get resources together and examine the incoming pancreii (?) and such.

Shark did sleep a total of four hours. With drugs.

Just as I get off the phone with MIL letting her know the news, orderlies arrive to take the boys to the previously delayed surgery! Whiplash. It's ON NOW!

Remember when you were kids and you pushed together two chairs from the dining room and put a sofa cushion over them to serve as a roof? Well The Atrium, the surgical waiting area, is the gap between two previously disconnected buildings over which they slapped a "sofa cushion" roof. Here's my view from The Atrium:

p.s. For those who asked,
Shark is the nom de nick of Mark Darling. It's been his nickname as long as I've known him. It's sorta ironic because he's a big pussycat. Plus I think it stuck because it distinguishes him nicely from my Mark.