(Yes, I know it's Wednesday night. It's been a busy week)
I drove down to Las Cruces Saturday. It was Amateur Radio Field Day where radio clubs pack their equipment out to a field and have 24 hours to make as many contacts as possible. I participated in this two years ago and had a lot of fun. Last year, needless to say, other things took precedence.
This year, unfortunately, was a bust. The bands were dead during sun-up Saturday. The guys operating CW (continuous wave = Morse code) were banging out contacts left and right, and a station soley for people who have never operated ham radio before was also doing OK, but all the other bands were dead.
So I headed off around 5pm to hit Coas Books and get to my aunt's.
My aunt had a problem. About a week earlier she scraped her arm against the door, said abrasion became infected. She went to her doctor, got a tetanus booster. She'd been putting an anti-biotic cream on it at night and wrapping it, but it was still hurting her. We shut down the house at 9pm, I'm intending on getting up early and heading back out to the radio club. I was considering going out later that night since it's a 24 hour operation.
I go into my room and I hear my aunt crying in pain in her room.
I go in and she's lying on the bed, almost curled into a ball. The pain in her arm had become unbearable. So I grab my shoes, help her out to my car, and off to the hospital.
Fortunately Las Cruces is a realtively small town, and since school was out, Saturday night at the emergency room wasn't a difficult proposition. Odella want back with the triage nurse for vitals while I collected the paperwork from admissions, then we went straight into an ER exam room. ER doctor ordered blood tests, urine test, EKG, and a chest x-ray. I spoke with him outside of the room and he said that he didn't think it was the arm wound, but he ordered it to be cleaned and re-dressed.
So tests are done, samples are drawn, and a nurse comes in to clean the wound. The pain must have been absolutely horrible, but he did it quickly so at least that was a small blessing. Odella began feeling better pretty quickly after that, I think that maybe the surface tension of the wound, which was now about 4" long but not disgusting/oozing/anything, was making the entire arm sensitive.
Well, all the tests came back negative, except for one -- the urine test. She had a bladder infection. My guess is that the pain in the arm was masking the pain of the bladder infection. Anyway, they gave her an anti-nausea shot (she was kind of dizzy/woozy), a dose of Cipro, and a prescription for an anti-biotic and sent us home.
We didn't get home until well after 1am, and I was simply not sufficiently functional to go back to the field day. I sent an email to a guy in the club, he said that the bands opened up after sundown when the D-layer of the atmosphere ionized and skip started working. (tells ya a lot, don't it?)
I headed back to Cloudcroft Sunday afternoon. Skirted the edge of a major dust storm in the White Sands area. Pretty impressive.
I just remembered that I have not yet called Odella to make sure she's gotten the script filled, gotta do that tomorrow!
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