DRAMA!...film at eleven

Well.

Well.

This has been a helluva week thus far, lemme-tell-you.

So the husband had his diverticulitis (which I still can’t pronounce reliably) attack, right? And it got really bad, and I took him to the doctor Monday afternoon.

I sat there for about two hours knitting (almost finished the hat, too!), and then they fetched me into the back and said, “OK, so! We’re going to shoot some morphine into him, and then we want you to pour him into your car and drive him over to the hospital, ‘kay?”

You know…it’s funny how you just kind of go, “Um…OK…” like some kind of idiot pull-string doll under these circumstances.

So they gave him a shot of morphine and we poured him into the car and I drove him over to the hospital where they whisked him into a room and did a CT scan and put him on an IV and then the last two days were kind of a blur.

He’s feeling great now, but still trapped in the hospital on the IV antibiotics with a big yellow sign that says “THIS PATIENT IS NPO” on his door – which translates to “Not To Be Fed Anything But Ice Chips.”

He is not a happy camper. The antibiotics have worked their magic and he feels fine, dammit and he wants to go home, and eat something…not necessarily in that order.

It’s really good to see him so feisty. Sunday and Monday he was not a bit feisty, which is so abnormal for him I was having a lot of trouble holding things together. My role in life, alas, is not the “dissolves into tears and clings to people squealing, ‘Make it all better!’” gig. I’ve been cast as the “competent, together one who gets her She-Ra on and makes things work out somehow and if she’s got to cry, she’ll go hide in a closet and do it” type.

So I was all briskly “handling things” and trying to work from home yesterday as if nothing was happening, la la la.

I am not billing a single second of the time I was working because I wasn’t working or even “working”…I was answering or making non-stop phone calls and filling out paperwork and the hospital dredged up this invoice where they thought they hadn’t been paid for his last trip way back in February and oh yes you were too and there were Proofs of Payment and thus did I spend the entire day Tuesday with my laptop on and not a lick of Actual Work being accomplished.

I got to the end of the day, said some very rude words indeed, and shut the thing down with a big old goose egg in my daily time sheet.

I’m not above billing for fifteen minutes I spent at the water cooler gossiping. I’m not even above billing a half an hour “annoyance surcharge” when somebody calls me after hours with a stupid, non-urgent question about something that doesn’t matter or isn’t my call to make anyway and makes me talk for fifteen minutes or go log into my laptop so I can definitively say that there’s nothing we can do about That right now.

But I just can’t wriggle my morals around enough to bill a client for time I spent doing them absolutely no good whatsoever because I was busy with other things.

This morning, I went over to the hospital confident I would be collecting my boy and bringing him home.

But no.

He’s still got the big yellow card over the door and the IV thing and no doctor in sight to release him. Damn.

So, I’m working from home again and waiting for calls and I am not wearing my happy face right now.

In point of fact, She-Ra has been making some very testy, rather Yuppie-sounding calls this morning demanding to know what kind of operation they are running and well, where IS the good doctor because he NEEDS to blah blah blah. (They love it when you tell them what they NEED to be doing. The only thing they like more is if you throw in some veiled threats of lawsuits and maybe say they’ll be hearing from your attorney…like I have one of those…)

It sounds like the problem is that two different doctors each thought the other guy was stopping in to provide Orders.

So neither of them did.

Sigh.

Cooks…kitchen…salting the broth…left hand, right hand…double sigh…

YA KNOW…we don’t usually have Drama like this.

We have Chaos, and plenty of it – but not Drama.

I don’t like Drama.

It makes me edgy, pissy, and prone to doing things like telling other people what they NEED to do and stomping my feet and worst of all, getting all teary in {ugh!} public.

SO not my kind of role.

That’s it. I’m calling my agent. Get me a latte! Have my people call their people! I want lunch! I’ll be in my trailer! Drinking Evian and updating my Twitter…

…oh wait, I don’t have a Twitter…(twit, I’ve got, loads of twit…)