The Daddy Diary 2: Elite Status

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like spending the night in a shared room of the ICU in a children’s hospital, just imagine taking a nap inside a pinball machine.  It’s a lot of beeping, clanging, whirring and constant commotion.  It’s quite relaxing.  I figure I got a solid 12 minutes of sleep last night broken up into 16 individual 45-second blocks. REM sleep is vastly overrated. 

While perusing our hospital account statement, it occurs to me that based on our total nights stayed and total dollars spent, we should qualify for elite status.  It only takes 50 nights in a calendar year to hit Platinum at Marriott.  Heck, we blew passed that marker in under 3 months.  Where’s the discounted parking?  Where’s the complimentary upgrade?  They could at least throw me a free slice of crappy pizza. (I mean, seriously, whom did they hire as head chef here?  The guy in charge of the food challenges on Fear Factor)?

And yet we are still here in the ghetto wing of the ICU.  We have seen four roommates come and go while we wait.  This is like the Friends episode when Rachel was having her baby.   If they roll Janice and her family in here next, we are leaving, discharged or not.

To pour lemon juice on the cut, we technically don’t have to be in the ICU anymore.  In the ICU, they have a chart for each patient with a heading “Overall trajectory.” You hold your breath the entire time your child is the red. Audrey spent the last few weeks in yellow. This week, her chart shows green for the first time in her life. I think green might be my new favorite color. And do you see anything missing in the picture?  That’s right.  My little girl is breathing on her own now.