Meanwhile Back at the Back-story

Back to the back-story: Though I wasn't there when Paul fell off his bike, I was able to catch a ride with him in the ambulance to the hospital. It was surreal. Paul in the back, the EMT kept asking him questions and he always answered with his name, Paul. About a block into the ride the guy in the back said to the driver "lets take him to trauma". That was a decision made due to Paul's quality of consciousness, which wasn't very good. I couldn't believe how calm the driver was, she explained every move to me. Like, why the sirens weren't on while driving down the freeway( something I'd never really noticed before) and how they don't drive too fast and what made them decide on the trauma hospital. 

At the emergency room the doctors aids calmly took Paul out on his gurney and whisked him off to another room. I sat in the waiting room answering questions about our health insurance in a daze (Paul had just received his first Kaiser card in the mail two days earlier). Presently the neighbor that had ran up and fetched me when Paul took his fall, arrived and sat with me in the emergency waiting room. She was an astrologer, but a compassionate one. She asked Paul's birthdate and did some quick calculations. Apparently there was a planet that made a transition of some sort that day, April 15th, tax day, and it was a game changer for some people, like Paul.  

The good news was there was no for-see-able death knell. 

When the brain doctor came in a few hours later to tell me the results of the MRI I thought I was ready. He started the conversation with "sit down". That's always a bad sign. The good news was he would live. The big question was, what kind of life could he live. They wouldn't know until the brain surgery.  He asked if I felt faint. No, but I was having heart palpitations, I had to bend over. He had me sit on the floor and proceeded to tell me how they have to take precautions with loved ones as heart attacks are known to happen. That was unnecessary information. He would send a Companion Volunteer in to see me so I'd have someone to talk to. 

Now I had to wait. Of course at this point I got on the phone to everyone I knew that was close to Paul. It was one of those old wall phones and you had to have coins or a phone card. I called his ex wife first, then his oldest son, then my band members. Hours later, who knew what time it was- I was in that Las Vegas Casino land of timelessness, several of my friends came by and stayed with me that night. 

The compassionate astrologer had left hours back. I saw her only once after that, she moved away by the time Paul and I were back at the apartments almost a month after the accident. A day or two later when I was waiting to see Paul in ICU, the waiting room TV sputtered acres of footage of the Oklahoma bombing and then another day Christopher Reeds spinal injury from the fall off of his hunt horse. It must have been that bad bad planetary transition.