Mrs. T’s discharge was a wholly unexpected development that caught us both off guard, so much so that I had to spend all of Friday scrambling to get her back home. On the other hand, there was no longer any reason for her to remain in the hospital, which is not an easy place to sleep, so it was clearly for the best that she be sprung as soon as was practical. Fortunately, she’s now recovered sufficiently to be able to use home oxygen instead of the high-flow hospital-only kind.
So why is Mrs. T in Connecticut instead of our apartment in Upper Manhattan, a stone’s throw from the hospital? For bureaucratic reasons too labyrinthine to summarize intelligibly, she has to receive her outpatient antibiotic infusions there. In addition, she must also pay a number of visits to the University of Connecticut Health Center (where her pulmonary-hypertension doctors are based—New York-Presbyterian is the home of her transplant team). Once the infusions are complete and her UConn appointments wrapped up, though, she’ll return to New York—preferably not by helicopter—and sit tight until we finally get the Big Call.
Alas, I’d already locked in a long list of work-related travel plans when we found out that Mrs. T was going home on Friday (we’d previously had good reason to expect her to be staying in New York indefinitely). As a result, I had to drive back to New York on Saturday night and spend Sunday and Monday reviewing an off-Broadway show and getting ready to hit the road yet again, while Mrs. T’s father and nephew looked after her in Connecticut.
This “break” turned out to be timely, though, because I’m far beyond exhausted: I’ve been on near-nonstop duty ever since I called an ambulance for Mrs. T on June 8, and I’ve never been so tired in my life. That’s why I’m going to depart New York later today for a caregiver’s holiday, something of which I am in urgent need, after which I’ll return to New York and get back to work. I’ll tell you more about where I’m going once I get there. Then I’ll pay my annual visit to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, from which I return to Connecticut on July 6, there to start preparations for the complicated process of moving us back to Manhattan.
Mrs. T wants you to know that she has been keeping up with your warm messages of support here and elsewhere. She doesn’t yet have the steam to respond to them, but please believe me when I tell you that she is grateful beyond words—literally—to know how many of you care so much.
