Mr Pug Update

Mr. Pug continues to languish in the hospital, surrounded by books and magazines and with the TV going full-blast-all-the-time. I suppose that's every man's dream, to have full control of the remote and no one to tell him to change the channel or lower the volume. His roomie went home on Friday night as did, apparently, 95% of the other patients in the hospital, and so he's, temporarily at least, The King Of The Remote. (I can't remember--is that what Wendy Johnson calls her SO? If so, I apologize, Wendy. Go knit a sock and let it go--it's only temporary. Once he gets home, I take over!)


Question: So, if they're all gone, why isn't there a visitor chair to be found ... anywhere on the second floor? Did the departing patients all take them with them? Are visitors chairs like every other commodity in the hospital, personalized and disposable? Is there a locked bin somewhere in the alley, chock full of visitor chairs that were contaminated by previous visitors?


Anyway, to update, he's stuck there waiting for a procedure on Monday (a heart catheterization, to be exact). 


In fact, we got to watch a video about this procedure yesterday because apparently that's how medical education works in hospitals these days. I asked for more information about the procedure (because Mr. Pug had told me they were doing "a heart thing") and here's what happened:

• Nurse's aide -- "oh, no, I don't know nuthin about that ... I'll get the nurse" (Okay, I'm fine with this--she's not paid to dispense medical information.)
• Nurse -- "I've got this video right here. Oh, and this brightly colored, double-sided handout with a colorful drawing of your loved one's innermost organs."
• Doctor X -- "I'm Doctor [fill in the incomprehensible foreign name] and I understand you have a question. I can't tell you anything because I'm the hospital doctor, not the cardiologist. Nice to meet you." (And ... you do ... what?)
• Nurse -- "I'll just turn on this video and let you watch it."
• [Cue to 5 minute video seemingly designed to explain a relatively complex medical procedure in which your heart could spontaneously combust to a five-year-old who's accustomed to getting her information from The Wiggles. Apparently, the loved one's innermost parts DO resemble a cartoon and are, in fact, animated.]
• Nurse -- "They use this wonderful local anesthesia that keeps you awake and participating and it's really wonderful and I don't know if I can stress how wonderful it is."
• Me -- "Oh, yeah, Pug, we've had that before. That's the same one you had when you had the endoscopy and the one that killed Michael Jackson."
• Nurse -- [leaves room]
• Doctor Y -- I'm Doctor Young-and-Charming and I work with the cardio group. Everything okay? [Not waiting for an answer...] Hey, not to worry -- it'll be fine except if it isn't and then we'll tell you on Monday. Okay? Cool! See you later. Oh, and by the way, we're doing this really cool study with Johns Hopkins but we're not actually cleared to do ... uh ... bypasses ... so we usually don't. Unless we do. But not to worry. We'll send you somewhere good [within our corporate infrastructure of mega-hospitals] if we need to. But we probably won't. But if we do ... well, we'll see on Monday.

Thank God for Google!