Red Sky at Morning

You never know what you get when you shoot the dawn. It didn’t look like the day would be much. And then, well, here is the sun peeping over the horizon, painting the sky an untold number of explicit scarlet hues…

By lunchtime I didn’t feel so well and by 2 there was a rash on my lower left leg. By 4 I was in bed feeling feverish. Slept for 16 hours, sweating and chills, with the electric blanket turned up to 10.

Went to see the doc the next day – she said do not pass go, do not collect your things – go directly to hospital.

Shifted here and there around the Emergency department, managed to score an IV drip and a dose of anitbiotics.

Around 4am they moved me upstairs – another dose of meds. Serious chest pain. EKG. Sweats, nausea. more bloodletting. It passed at last and I slept fitfully – dreaming all sorts of unsatisfying dreams – demands for decisions I couldn’t make.

Chest x-ray, experts – just a reaction, not a cardiac event.

Four more days of drip drip drip as the minutes stretched to hours and the hours to infinities – in a ward with three other women, who came and went. All pleasant. Even the poor Pakistani woman with a bad heart, fluctuating blood pressure and out of control sugar. She had every right to be cranky. But merely dropped her head and wept when the kitchen sent her her first meal after 2 days of nil by mouth – pork chops. My worries were so small…

My time so big. But it did come to an end.

And I have the chance to look at the photos I took that morning.

Red sky at morning – sailor, take warning!