Lessons of the Fall: A Way into Friendly Woods

A short, short time ago, in a six by nine foot room an old woman sat without one shoe. She had so many feverish aches and spots, she didn’t know what to do!

She awoke five o’clock and couldn’t shut her eyes. Her lungs heaved each breath slow and deep like Donkey Eeyore’s sighs. She swallowed her sixteenth anti-germs pill; odd, it didn’t make her feel any less ill.

It was seven o’clock when she finally dared to call her home nurse who declared, “An awful LUNG GERM is going around. Please contact your doctors here in town.”

The old woman waited one hour until the doctor’s offices opened. She'd share how she struggled to breathe oxygen.

She called her primary doctor’s nurse who told her to talk with her bone doctor first.

So the old woman all shaking and frail told the bone doctor nurse her achy tale. “This office only handles leg bones, not blood, dear. You must call your first doctor. Do be sincere!”

The old woman called back but did not tarry as she spilled all her aches to the secretary. 

The nurse called back for the doctor in his back room.  He wanted his patient to go--not to him--but to the Emergency Room!

“What??” The woman hung up quite distraught. “What??” her husband at work also thought. 

Why travel to a place so crowded and sick? Why not go to the Urgent Care Center, a mile from home, so quick?

Eleven O’clock, her husband wheeled her back into the Urgent exam room painted sky blue. On the canvas of blue a muralist painted the Hundred Acre Woods' Friends of Pooh.

 A donkey named Eeyore is his friend, and Kanga and little Roo/

 There’s Rabbit and Piglet, And there’s owl, But most of all Winnie the Pooh.

While the woman wrapped in a blanket shivered so grim, she noticed Tigger bounced in to wink and grin. Providence, a technician, nurses, and Dr. J.O also bounced quickly to meet her needs. The way into friendly woods was well worth it indeed.

Prologue:    In fact this was the very staff who helped me that first evening in September. Twenty-nine days later they recalled the armoire and me. The Doctor gave me tissues and time to hear out my issues, plus clearly share them with My beloved Hubby. One nurse helped me stand for an x-ray. And the blood CBC extraction and cortisone shot were gentle pricks. As for my antibiotic, it was only a prophylactic, just in case I had an infection. But I didn’t. I'm done with all sulfa drugs. I am exhausted but feeling younger by the hour.