Santa Rosa tomorrow, Stephanie, Stitches East; my life suddenly played Fifty-Two Pickup on me in the late afternoon today, everything thrown in the air. I have never been so glad to hear that child of mine on the line. She sounded like I felt: a small voice, hesitating, “Mom??…!!”
And then we threw our arms around each other across the phone lines.
I wrote a blog draft during the two+ hours I waited to hear, two. long. hours. that were longer than being in labor, needing desperately to do something and dealing with it by addressing it sideways, talking about how, when a kid turns 18, they’re not covered under the family health insurance anymore unless they’re a full-time student, and if they get sick enough to be forced to drop out, then what the heck do you do? They can’t get employer-funded coverage themselves if they’re too sick to work, and even then, as grad students, once they hit 23 they are dropped from the family coverage by the insurers: yours, mine, anyone’s. I wrote that that’s part of why I’m voting for the man who wants to offer to all Americans the same health insurance plan that members of Congress get. Go Obama.
All that doesn’t really matter so much to me right now, and I’m debating deleting that part entirely from this post. No arguments, please, not today. All that matters to me is that my daughter was able to pick up that phone herself and call home and talk to me. After a few minutes, relaxing, she put on her best Monty Python imitation and joked, “I’m not dead yet!” And she told me how grateful she was to her brother and sister-in-law for taking care of her. I am so glad they’re at the same university.
The on-campus student health center had sent her to the hospital, fast, thinking she had a blood clot in her lungs. What Ruth Schooley died of. We have known for the past year that there was a risk of that. Turns out it wasn’t that; the CT scan indicated a virus inflaming her lungs. But there were those hours this evening where I’d gotten the simple message from my son of, I’m taking my sister to the hospital for a pulmonary embolism, more later.  And all I could do was wait and pray hard.
She’s okay.
And he had dropped everything on the spot to help her be okay, despite the fact that he’s taking the LSAT tomorrow.