I think this is my fave photooo of the day. So, yes, The Commander landed back in the hoosegow yesterday via ambulance. It’s a long story and I’m not going to detail it here but, although things looked rather iffy for a while, she had rallied by last night and today she was pretty much up to all of her usual tricks although she is not quite back to being ambulatory yet. Knock on wood of course and when she gets back around to reading my blahg, she may have her own opinion about all of this and I may be eating my hat or something even more distasteful.

Can I just say how much I appreciate dealing with the local horspittal here. When I was a kid I remember people more or less delighting in the fact that *their* particular exotic problem was way too complicated for the local hospital to handle and they had to go to Petoskey or Traverse City or The Planet Ann Arbor or Canada to have it taken care of. La-di-dah. Yeah, just *try* to go to Canada and back these days… “What do you have to declare?” “Oh just my new heart.” “Pull over so we can check it for explosives.” Roight.

It is still the case that there are people who have issues that the hoosegow here can’t handle. It is a small enough hospital that it can’t hire every single last picky kind of specialist in the medical profession. It’s a similar thing with fancy-schmancy equipment, although there is certainly plenty of high-tech stuff in the rooms and you can get things like a CAT scan or MRI pretty much upon demand (or whatever you want to call it). If you need something really complex — like a heart transplant or maybe your pelvic bone is shattered (my dad…), you will likely be sent to Henry Ford (my dad…) or somewhere.

This small hospital has changed a lot since I had my tonsils out back in 1962, when I actually tried to prevent a rather stern nurse from giving me a shot in the butt (jeesh) in a rather dark dank children’s ward (ugh). I can still remember watching two guys (docs?) fuzz out as I counted backwards from 100 and succumbed to anesthesia at 95 or so. Was it ether? Or was that just the schoolyard scuttlebutt? In the last couple decades or whatever, WMH has been slowly but steadily adding specialists to its staff and equipment to its inventory. The nursing staff? You know that when you are camping out at the hoosegow, the people you interact with the most are nurses of various flavors, rehab therapists, and the housekeeping staff, although we managed to catch three (count ’em) docs today. A trifecta?

I don’t know if I have the words to describe what I appreciate about the care at Siberia’s small but highly rated hoosegow. I just have to say how much I love the nurses and other support folks. They are highly skilled professionals who also manage to interact with us on a personal basis. Even though we all know that there is a business end to our relationship, I always feel well taken care of at WMH, even though I haven’t been a patient there since 1962. And people remember The Comm. We have hung out in the ICU for 24 hours now and I can’t tell you how many folks have visited her, INCLUDING people she has met in other hoosegow scenarios, like Alice the social worker and the pulmonary rehab therapist she met with Thursday morning before the ER visit.

I dunno. Maybe it’s just that The Comm seems to manage to wrap everybody she meets around her little finger…

Back to my fave photoooo… Taken at the Doelle end of the moominbeach late this afternoon. Mr. Golden Sun takes central stage with Dogmomster in a cameo role.

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