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I already mentioned yesterday that the room they had available to transfer Shobhit to from the ER on Tuesday was one designed for people with behavioral issues. I took a couple of photos yesterday to illustrate the oddness of the room: you can see above the kind of "cage" that the mounted TV was inside. I actually went out into the hallway to glance into another couple of rooms and saw that they had mounted TV monitors
not in cages. Clearly the one in Shobhit's room was protected from potential damage from anyone going berzerk in the room.
There's a couple more details in the above photo that you can see with a closer look: all the cabinet doors have locks. The cabinets below the sink were locked, but the cabinet doors that otherwise can close in front of that sink were unlocked and opened. They slid out on tracks to either allow for closing, or being slid flush with the walls of the cabinet on either side.
The door to the room was the bigger mystery to me. Over the course of the few hours I was there yesterday, we must have had brief interactions with seven hospital staff at minimum, four of them in the room itself, but they were always brief enough, and so quick to get to business, I never really had a window to ask about that door. Maybe it will always remain a mystery. I sent these photos to Danielle, who is a nurse, and she told me about similar rooms in hospitals she has worked in but have slightly different designs, such as the bed being bolted to the floor (which was not the case with Shobhit). Even she thought the door was odd. I also sent the photos to Ivan but, unsurprisingly, he could not be bothered to offer any insight.
Anyway. I took an additional 10 photos yesterday, taking the "Shobhit Hospitalization 2026" photo album to a toal of
25 shots. Along with his 2023 appendectomy, I now have
a collection for "Shobhit Hospitalizations." The appendectomy album is part of a larger "
Surgeries (mine & others)" collection, but there was no surgery this week so that doesn't fit in that collection. You see how organized I am? I wonder how many "hospitalization" albums I'll add to
that collection over time. Now that even I'm about to cross the threshold over 50, the likelihood probably goes up. I'm going to be organizing photos on my Flickr account in a nursing home eventually. Flickr better fucking still be in business.
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— पञ्चसहस्राणि नवशतानि नवनवति —
Anyway. The stress test. It happened, and it happened yesterday. Shobhit was staunchly anti-stress test at first, because of the stress-test connection to his father's death in 1990. This being 36 years ago and in India seemed to have no bearing on his thought process; he was terrified of it, in a way the hospital staff had never experienced with another patient. Thankfully, by the time the stress test actually happened, Shobhit had significantly chilled out about it. Still, there were three staff in the room with him for the test, and Shobhit shared his fears with each of them in turn as they arrived. Each of them was basically like, "Totally understandable," but otherwise were just there to get their job done. One of them was a fairly cute young man with deliciously fit, exposed arms.
Shobhit started to turn around on doing the stress test when his brother said maybe he should do it, if that's what the people at the hospital were recommending. At first Shobhit was resistant to doing it yesterday and leaning toward getting out of there and going home, and making an appointment to come back and do it later. Danielle and I together helped, I think, convince him. He eventually texted me himself,
Still thinking about if I should just get it over with now. I reiterated that this was definitely the more efficient opton. I had some separate texts with Danielle, who I think was starting to lose patience with his stubbornness (though she was always very kind to him directly), and she noted that there's a lot more involved with scheduling it as an outpatient procedure. Her position was also that he should just do it.
And so, soon enough, it was scheduled: at first, for 1:45. So then I let Gabby, Noah and Frank know that I would be heading over to Virginia Mason for the afternoon. Shobhit asked if I would be able to come be with him when the test was done, and I had already promised him I would do that.
So, I just worked through my usual lunch break from noon to 12:30, and I left here at 1:15 so I'd be over there by 1:30. I think I was there in even slightly less time than that. I had said in my message to Gabby, Frank and Noah that I may or may not work from there. I never do this, but I did take my work laptop with me when I left work yesterday. It sure does make my backpack heavier. And while I can't say I was ever locked in the way I would be from my desk at work, I did do some work while in the hospital room with Shobhit. Especially when it turned out someone else had a more urgent need to take a stress test, so Shobhit's got bumped to 3:00. So much for getting Shobhit out of the hospital sooner than later. There had been a brief hope that he'd be discharged by late morning, but, nope.
They still hadn't come to get him when 3:00 rolled around. They did within about 15 minutes after that, though. Shobhit had to sit in a rolling chair and get pushed to the elevator, down a floor, and to the "Echo Tasting Area," presumably so he can't trip and break a leg and sue them or something. He was perfectly capable of walking. The guy who transported (pushed) him was named Ivan. Preumably his actual birth name in this case (Ivan who just visited us, that's a name he chose for himself).
Shobhit had hoped I could be in the actual room, but I was only able to sit in there until the stress test on the treadmill was about to happen. There was too much meticulous timing needed and I couldn't be in there as a potential distraction, which was understandable, though I worried a little about how that might affect Shobhit. I did get to sit in there while a woman took heart readings from an ultrasound, though, which I even took a brief video clip of.
I had thought at first that I could stand right outside
the doorway, but the cute nurse guy escorted me across the hall from there, through the door marked "Echo Testing Area," and to
a small waiting area with chairs a bit down another hallway.
It was only a few minutes for the actual test, and the cute nurse pushed Shobhit in the chair again, back out to me, and gave me a thumbs-up. So I stood up and we all just went to the elevator. There were results from the stress test within minutes, and it confirmed, as had everything else, that there had been no heart damage. That seems to have been the purpose of all things done with Shobhit since he was taken to the ER: confirming there was no heart damage.
What had caused the chest pains, or the difficulty breathing, or the spike in blood pressure, no one seems to know yet. I shared a bunch of this stuff with Cathryn at work this morning and she said she once thought she was having a heart attack and it was actually an anxiety attack—a possibility no one at the hospital ever brought up. Whatever the case, he was discharged—finally—at about 6:00 yesterday evening, about 31 hours after first being taken there in an ambulance. He was given a lot of instructions, probably the most pertinent of which was to make an appointment with his doctor within the next week, to determine with him what the next steps are. I suspect more tests are in his near future.
I had booked a movie yesterday at 5:00, the one I was originally going to see on Monday but I postponed because that was Ivan's last night here. I postponed it again yesterday, and will be seeing it after work today now.
Shobhit really seemed to appreciate my being there with him yesterday. I had made sure he was okay with it when I went back to work on Tuesday and still met Laney for our BYOB Happy Hour after work, and he really was. But his anxiety over this stress test was a different thing altogether, and he was really glad I was there yesterday afternoon, even though I wasn't able to stay in the room for the test. He's said "I love you" several times over the past couple of days, a clear indication of what a difference it made for me to be there with him. He said it when we went to sleep last night. He said it again when I kissed him goodbye and left for work this morning.
It's a little bit frustrating that we still don't know exactly what
did happen—only that there was no heart damage. Hopefully they'll get to the bottom of it soon with our doctor. He managed to book an appoitnment this morning, with Dr. Means, set for April 1. So that's Wednesday next week. They told him at first that Dr. Means was booked through June, but there was some urgency to this, so they opened up a spot for him next week. I don't suppose there will be any further updates to all of this until then, unless he has some kind of episode again. Hopefully not. Shobhit had four cups of coffee before this all went down on Tuesday, and he's laying off the coffee and chai for now. Probably for the best.
I had some sample PCC private label ravioli at home in the freezer, so I mixed up some pasta sauce and sauteed vegetables to have with that for dinner as we watched this week's episode of
Paradise. It was so good Shobhit had three helpings. In his defense, somewhat, he'd had to fast all day until the test. They said they do that only to prevent people doing the test from vomiting. They were even concerned that Shobhit had drank some water, but in the end they decided that was okay. Well, he didn't puke, so there's that.
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[posted 12:32pm]
