The Wrong Side of the Window

My mom liked when I used that phrase the other day and suggested it might be a good title for the book (whenever I get around to reconfiguring it). It does seem to be fitting. A little too fitting, if you ask me.

We went in this morning for platelets, thinking we’d be there for two hours, which was about all we could stand as summer was blooming outside the window before us. But his blood pressure was high, after a few weeks of holding steady in the only-slightly-high range. Soooo … whaddya know, they decided to send us over to the in-patient floor for overnight “observation.”  I convinced them to let us go home first since I hadn’t packed so much as a lunch and there’s little for Austin to eat in the cafeteria (the only low-sodium options are things like bananas and yogurt, both banned from his diet).

We quickly came home, soaked up the sunlight as we ate lunch on the back steps, and packed a bag for our “sleepover.” Austin was extremely pragmatic: “Oh, only one night? That’s not so bad.” Huh, yeah, except it’s one night we weren’t supposed to be there.

But be there we’ll be. Hopefully truly just this one night. They’re adding another blood pressure medicine to his daily repertoire and want to make sure his creatinine doesn’t creep up too high. Oh, this tight rope we walk: medicines that bring things up and knock things down, doing good and bad all at once.

All while we’re stuck watching life from the wrong side of the window.