7-29-01 Su 10:35 AM

I wrote about the baby's IV nightmare somewhere else. I don't want to think about that horrible night anymore. I'm at Roscoe's. Ada was so dehydrated, her blood vessels had collapsed, and the med techs couldn't get the IV in. It was gut wrenching watching them stab her over and over and over again, but her feeble screams of confusion and anguish at least let me know she was still alive. After they finished mangling the insides of both elbows, they tried to insert the needle in her tiny hand. It took three nurses a dozen tries to get it. When they left the room, we discovered a problem with the IV; the baby was bleeding profusely. I went out into the hallway to try to flag down a nurse. Twenty minutes later, after the baby, her mom, the gurney blankets and I were soaked in blood, a nurse came to redo the IV. We were in the ER for several hours more. Around midnight, ten hours after we'd gotten to the hospital, we were brought up to radiology. The doctors had decided that x-rays and a barium enema might reveal the cause of the Ada's distress. The three stooges administered the procedure. They did not sedate her. We had to hold her down while they ran the tube into her behind. Ugh. It was all fucked up. The barium was leaking out and flooding the table. It smelled bad. They couldn't get it right. My one "comfort" was that they made her angry enough to squirm and yell because she had seemed dead in my arms earlier. Three times they fucked it up. We could see the barium on the x-ray monitor stop inside her at a certain point in the ghost image of her intestine. The "doctor" didn't know if it was her appendix. "I think that's the appendix," he said. Then the genius decided to tilt the table, believing the barium inside her might flow by gravity. I was not confident in the strategy. All they succeeded in doing was having all the barium shit around her from the failed attempts go flooding into her face. It was so awful. They couldn't tell if the barium in the x-ray had stopped because of intussusception or because of all the leaking. They sent us down to a room for the night. Her skin was frighteningly cold to the touch.

I can't think about this anymore right now. I've got a game in Crystal Springs in a couple of hours. That will help take my mind off of it. I'm supposed to go to the Dodger game tonight with Mariachi. I should have heard from him by now. Either his wife went into labor, or his dad went ahead and kicked the bucket. It's Fernando's bobblehead night, and Baldwin's making his debut for the Dodgers, who have just surged into first place. Call me an ass, but I hope he leaves the tickets at will call or something.