A funny thing happened on the way to Tara

As those of you who follow me in the social media may already know, Mrs. T spent Saturday night in the emergency room of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, her transplant center. Our original plan had been to spend the evening at home, watching Gone With the Wind on TCM. Instead, Mrs. T unexpectedly developed acute respiratory difficulties related to pulmonary hypertension, the chronic illness for which she is awaiting a double lung transplant. We called 911, and an ambulance rushed her to the hospital minutes later. Twenty-four hours after that, she was finally transferred from the ER to the intensive-care unit, that being how long it took for an ICU bed to open up. Moral: try not to have a respiratory crisis in upper Manhattan on a Saturday night the week before Christmas!

Mrs. T is still in the ICU as I write these words. The doctors there are endeavoring to figure out exactly what went wrong with her, get it under control, and decide what relevance this current crisis has to her long-term problems. The good news is that her condition now appears to be fairly stable, at least for the present. Earlier this morning she was successfully connected to an ECMO machine, a newish device not unlike a heart-lung machine that oxygenates her blood directly. She is now resting more or less comfortably while we wait for the next step, whatever it may be—perhaps even the transplant that she so desperately needs.

I’ve spent most of the past two days at Mrs. T’s bedside, and can report that while the chairs in the New York-Presbyterian ER are comprehensively uncomfortable, the doctors and nurses there and in the ICU are as good as it gets. Likewise the EMT technicians who transported Mrs. T from our living-room couch to the ER in nothing flat. We are overflowing with gratitude in all possible directions.

Needless to say, things are still up in the air, and I will keep you posted. In the meantime, our thanks to all of you who have reached out on Facebook and Twitter to wish Mrs. T well. I’ve been passing on your messages of love and hope, and they have warmed both of our hearts.