...or "Emory Midtown Has Got to Be Kidding!"

Wednesday afternoon I cooked up five pounds of chicken, half plain roast, half cacciatore, in preparation for DragonCon. But we had one last obstacle to go before our way was clear. You'll remember James had a bout with chest pain several weeks ago that necessitated our going to Urgent Care, and then a followup visit to James' cardiologist. He wanted James to have a stress test and a PET scan. We both knew that if he had one smidgen of pain or distress during the stress test, DragonCon was a no-go. We might even have to face the fact that they would advise that he needed to go to the catherization lab immediately.

Since I began working at CDC and got Kaiser Permanente as health insurance, we have been going to Northside Hospital; it's been thirty (yikes!) years. We've come to love Northside Hospital and their marvelous staff, and even the parking is easy. Last fall, however, Kaiser switched their hospital affiliation because Northside no longer was large enough to accommodate their patient load. So we are now with Emory. Supposedly if we get hospitalized we can go to Emory St. Joseph, which is next to Northside, but for this particular PET scan we had to go to Emory Midtown (formerly Crawford Long Hospital, the place which had almost killed our friend Daniel Taylor after he had a heart attack and they gave him too much warfarin). Despite at least three friends telling us that Emory Midtown was a good place, we weren't reassured.

The hospital was, frankly, a fat pain in the butt to get to on a Thursday afternoon. Midtown is always choked with traffic anyway, and even though Waze took us the back way, once we got to Peachtree Street it was a confusing mess. The hospital does nothing to make this any better: the Emergency entrance, the patient drop off and pick up, the valet parking, and the regular parking are all accessed by the same two-lane driveway. It is a holy mess! We basically did valet parking and they were very nice about it (although when we came out we were afraid they had lost the truck—it took them fifteen to twenty minutes to get it back for us). The foyer itself is huge, like some big Fifth Avenue New York City-type skyscraper foyer, and there are different elevators depending on which floors you are on. We had to go wide to the left to get up to the testing floor on 4. Thankfully we were early and they took James back before his appointment time while I sat in the waiting room and ate my lunch. From the waiting room window I could see the Hyatt and the Marriott and I started getting homesick for DragonCon all over again.

(We were so close! We'd already paid $10 to park, and we were less than a mile from the Sheraton. If it hadn't been so doggone hot I would have suggested walking to registration. Except it was hellishly hot, and Facebook reports said the wait for registration was 2 1/2 hours and we didn't have our blue registration cards. But believe me the want was there.)

So after waiting forever for valet parking to find the truck, and having to get them to help another lady in a wheelchair who was waiting longer than we were, we got the hell out of there. We had to stop by Lidl to get fresh bread, and we spent early Thursday evening making sandwiches, and then packing up the backpacks and making sure the precious blue cards and the parking printouts were with us, and printing out James' emergency QR code for the back of his badge.

Labels: DragonCon, food, health, sickness, weather

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:53:00 PM

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