After the night in the emergency room, and a mere 2 hours sleep the next day turned out to be hectic.
I left Stephanie in bed and went down to have some breakfast. Today’s special was biscuits sandwiching fried chicken with country gravy. I have to say I looked at the combination with slight scepticism, but actually it was jolly good.
I’d never had country gravy before so I asked the chef what was in it and he said it was pork (which I would never have guessed). On further investigation later in the day, a lady who was buying it in the supermarket said “you don’t want to know” and on further pressing she told me it was chicken fat thickened with flour. Sounded horrible. Linda then explained that it’s made by cooking your meat in a pan, removing the meat and stirring flour into the remaining fat. Then you add milk and seasoning. So basically it’s just your standard béchamel with the butter replaced by meat fat.
The next task of the day was to get Stephanie’s prescriptions filled and I accomplished this (and gained some more supermarket loyalty points) with my first visit of the day to King Sooper.
Once back, Stephanie had made it out of bed and was hungry. She wasn’t completely overjoyed that I stuck rigidly to the nurse’s instructions and would only let her have water and Powerade post exercise replenishment drink (Gatorade was the alternative allowed drink, but it wasn’t so luridly coloured, so I couldn’t find it on the shelves).
The nurse also said that very weak tea – dunk the bag only 5 or 6 times and drink every 6 hours – cures diarrhoea, and they used to give it to intensive care patients for that very purpose. But Stephanie prefers her tea builder style, so she gave that a miss.
The next item on the agenda was to move rooms. We’d extended the booking here until Friday, otherwise our time on Colorado would have mainly been spent staring at the 4 walls of our hotel room – And worse than that we’d have flown nearly 5000 miles to see Linda for a mere 2 hours!
The new room is great, it’s a disabled room, so everything is slightly bigger for a wheelchair and there are extra rails and the sink is slightly lowered. And it has the most magnificent panoramic view of the Rockies. Amy, the wonderfully helpful customer services manager, shuffled the bookings round so we could have the good room which was lovely of her. The only slight downside is that I’ve discovered that the toilet cistern is leaking onto the floor. No matter, Amy will get it sorted out tomorrow.
Then there was the nightmare of Direct Line to deal with, but that’s a whole other story!
So now after my third trip to the supermarket today the staff have now taken to greeting me personally. I’ve racked up $2.00 extra credit on my American mobile (wonder if it’ll work in England) and $0.12 discount per gallon of petrol.
On nurse Carrie’s advice I have chicken broth and wild rice soup for Stephanie for dinner, but she’s asleep at the moment and there’s no way I’m waking her up if I can avoid it. She has a raging headache now as well – probably lack of food and lack of sleep, so she’s best off asleep. I also have a headache, but am quite enjoying the respite, now she has anti-sickness stuff and anti-cramping medicine I can relax a bit more. As Stephanie would say, I don’t do sick people, so the last few days have been quite stressful for both of us.
I’m looking forward to getting on with the rest of the holiday.
