“I won’t leave, I’m here.” The door finally gave. Something on the other side broke. The EMTs came through the refuse and into the kitchen.
“Shiloh?” Lois called. “Don’t leave me!”
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m not leaving. I’ll stay with you.”
The EMTs got Lois onto a stretcher. They were gentle, but she cried the whole time. One of them, an older man, was irritated that they had to take the stretcher down the back steps. “There’s no light back here.”
“The dogs...” Shiloh said.
When they got Lois outside, they asked if Shiloh was family. “That’s my granddaughter,” Lois said.
Shiloh got into the ambulance—they made her sit up front. Shiloh’s mom said she’d leave a note for Lois’s family. Shiloh gave her the keys to the car.
“in ambulance,”Shiloh texted Cary. She had a shitty cell phone; it took forever.
“heading 2 immanuel ER
lois is in pain but awake
will call soon”
Cary texted back immediately.“Standing by for more information. Thank you.”
The EMTs put Lois on more serious oxygen. They were trying to judge her pain, but she was still minimizing everything, even through tears. She told them she’d slipped on a wet spot on the kitchen floor, that it was nothing.
When they got to the hospital, the admissions people wanted Lois’s personal information. Shiloh couldn’t even remember Lois’s last name. She called Cary. “We’re at the hospital,” she said. “Can I hand you over to someone?”
The woman behind the desk gave the phone back to Shiloh a few minutes later. “Your husband says he’s going to call back with her insurance info.”
“Okay,” Shiloh said.
They let her go into the exam room with Lois. Shiloh sat by the bed and held her hand. Lois already had an IV, and they’d started her on pain medication.
It made Shiloh nervous, how urgently they were attending to Lois. Shiloh’s other ER experiences—for the kids, and herself, and Ryan when he had appendicitis—had been a lot of sitting around and waiting.
Cary wanted to talk to his mom, so Shiloh held the phone up to her ear. Then she gave the phone to a nurse, so Cary could give Lois’s patient history.
Shiloh went with Lois to radiology and held her hand on the way back to the exam room.
When the doctor eventually came in to say that Lois had fractured her hip in two places and would need surgery, Lois was asleep. Shiloh called Cary.
“I’ve left messages for my niece,” he said, “and I finally got through to my oldest sister, but she’s in Denver. She might send her kid.”
“I’ll stay as long as I need to,” Shiloh said. “I’ll keep you posted.”
“I told the nurse you were family,” he said.
“So did your mom. It seems fine.”
“I’m sorry for all this, Shiloh.”
“You can thank me,” she said, “but you can’t apologize.”
“All right. Thank you.”
The operation was set for seven thirty that morning, when the surgeon was scheduled to start her shift. Shiloh followed Lois to pre-op and sat with her as long as it was allowed. Then she went to wait in the special room set aside for family. She sent Cary a text.“she just went back”
“Thanks,”he replied.
