Graffiti on the buildings along the driveway to our indoor parking garage
One of the great things about our place is that we have indoor parking, so our car isn’t broken-into (as much). Here is a look at the graffiti on the way in.
Pickles took these photos, and I rather like them. :)
There’s a white truck at the end of the driveway in the second photo, and periodically, when Pickles takes the van out for a drive, he has pulled up in front of the doorway. So she has to go out and find the driver and yell at him to move. And in the time this has happened, the garage door closes, locking her out of the building, with the van running inside.
It’s not a perfect system, but it’s better than getting broken-into. Something that we haven’t totally avoided either.
Here is what a passenger-side window looks like when it's broken
Sunday was, without qualification, a bad day.
For a few days in a row this week, Pickles has been waking up with a fever, which goes away by the afternoon. It got as high as 104.7ºF on Saturday and so that night, we decided that if she had a fever the next morning, we would skip church and go to the Emergency Room at Montréal General Hospital instead.
When we first arrived at the Emergency room on Sunday morning around 9h30, it wasn’t too busy, but after a few hours, there were a few more people there to wait along with us. The nurses took some of Pickles’ blood, and put an IV in her with saline. Then when that was empty, another nurse eventually changed the bag for one with some sugar in it. A doctor came to see her, and ordered a CT scan of her bowels, to see what’s going on in there.
While we were waiting, I periodically went out to the car to put more money into the parking meter. I was parked right outside the hospital, within view of the hospital doors. Sometime between 14h15 and 15h35 someone came and smashed the passenger-side window, rifled through our glove compartment, and took our GPS. I know it happened during that time because the parking meter prints out tickets that indicate when exactly you pay and how long it lasts for.
Back in the hospital, a doctor finally came to see Pickles again, to follow up her CT scan. I guess they forgot to call Pickles for her CT scan, or perhaps they didn’t tell the CT scan people about it, because Pickles hadn’t had one yet, which was surprising for the doctor. Pickles went to radiology, where I found her, and told her about the car.
I called the police, who told me to take the van into the police station. This was something of an adventure, as we had become very reliant on the GPS to tell us how to get anywhere. Fortunately, the thief hadn’t stolen our trusty map of Montréal. I only went the wrong way on a one-way street for about thirty seconds. After filling out a report, I went home and vacuumed the shards of glass out of the passenger seat, making it much safer even for me to drive in. This way, I don’t have to worry about pieces of glass going flying every time I make a turn or stop too quickly.
Pickles' elbow, after a long day at the hospital
Pickles phoned me to tell me that they wanted her to stay overnight. “For observation,” they told us. What that means is that she had to stay in the hospital, and they took her temperature in the morning. I packed a backpack with a blanket, her toothbrush and some clothes for Monday morning and brought it to her. A GI doctor came by in the morning when I came to pick her up.
The only thing that gave the doctor any hesitation about releasing Pickles was that he said they really ought to have done some blood cultures, considering that she came in complaining about a fever. What was strange about that is that the nurse did take Pickles’ blood for a blood culture earlier. As proof, Pickles pulled up the sleeve of her shirt and described the pop-bottle shaped vials that they put her blood into when they took her blood.
The doctor went to a computer to try to find out where the blood went, to no avail. It’s still a mystery, but fortunately the doctor let us go anyway. After a 25-hour visit to the hospital, I took Pickles home and we had a nap for much of the morning. Sunday had been an extremely stressful day.
On the upside, while we were waiting in the Emergency Room, I got to re-read the first 130 pages of Hursthouse’s On Virtue Ethics, which is helping me to clarify my thoughts on some of the bioethical issues that I expect to face this year.
