At the time it seemed like forever…or at least two hours.  But in reality, I believe it was approximately 45 minutes.  Time and time again Mara would vomit, and I would suction the food from her mouth and trache hole.  I couldn’t be sure if she was conscious or not, so in between calling for help I tried to soothingly talk to her, letting her know it was going to be okay.  Her eyes would open every once in a while and stare vacantly.  I noticed her skin was becoming clammy, and her forehead was hot.  I could only assume her fever was returning.

Finally, one of the duty nurses came into the room.  Surprisingly, her initial reaction was one of annoyance, which I figure was because she assumed I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing.  But once she surveyed the situation and realized what was going on, she called for a few other nurses to assist her and took charge of the chaos.

I stood to the side, while the nurses tried to keep me out of the way.  As numb as I felt, I was still very irritated, as I found myself with the attitude of “I’m the one who kept her alive for the last 45 minutes, and now you’re going to tell me that you know what you’re doing?”  But I watched as they pulled the feeding tube out (at last), kept her airway clear, lowered her body to level, and looked to get an IV into her arm.

The one thing I *didn’t* see them doing was calling a doctor…and that really pissed me off.  Obviously, they were trying to protect themselves and hoped to rectify this situation before I (or anyone else) was able to draw attention to their complete failure to do their job properly.  Not that I was likely to forget, but if “no harm was done,” they wouldn’t be open to much criticism…and I’d be regarded as an overprotective, overemotional husband.

The problem was Mara continued to vomit.  I could see the nurses were still trying to get the IV in, and then I imagine they’d inject some strong anti-nausea medication to get that under control.  Unfortunately, Mara had always had very deep and elusive veins.  So they’d jabbed her a number of times, and even thought they had succeeded, but so far the nurses were unable to get Mara stabilized.  I continued to ask that a doctor be called, until finally one of the nurses on the sidelines took it upon herself to quietly slip from the room and call for additional assistance.

When the resident arrived in the room a few minutes later, he had a look of complete shock on his face.  I am sure he realized that he should have been called in much sooner, as the whole room had been turned upside down, vomit was all over the place, there were close to ten nurses running around like circus clowns climbing in and out of a Volkswagen, and there I was backed up near the windows looking white as a ghost and terrified of what I’d been watching.

Immediately he took command, getting her vitals and realizing the situation was not good.  He grabbed the IV needle from the nurse, screaming “We don’t have time to find a vein there” before inserting it into a vein in Mara’s foot.  I never would have thought of that, and obviously the nurses hadn’t either.  Within a couple of minutes the vomiting stopped, and the doctor had been joined by another doctor and two orderlies as they transferred Mara to a stretcher and wheeled her out of the room, on the way back to the ICU.

Obviously Mara hospitalization didn’t end there – she spent another two months between the ICU, hospital, and a respiratory rehabilitation facility before coming home…and that was a story in and of itself.  But despite all the miserable moments, beginning with the phone call from Mara’s mother, none left as deep and lasting a scar in my memory as those long, terrifying, Twilight Zone minutes I spent desperately trying to keep Mara from choking to death.  In a Hollywood movie, I suppose that would have been the turning point in Mara’s life – her true rock bottom, as it were.  Unfortunately, while there would be numerous ups and downs in the years to come, in the end the bottoms were destined to sink deeper and deeper.