Dear Family and Friends,
Monday we had to take Brother White to Tuscaloosa to pay the surgeon the amount of his fee that wasn’t covered by insurance. They insisted that it be paid before he was admitted to the hospital for prep two days before his surgery. I called the office last week to ask if it was really necessary to waste time and resources to do that when we were bringing him there the very next day to admit him. They never answered and never returned my call.
Tuesday was our long day. They decided he should have his Dialysis in Eutaw as he always does instead of the hospital doing it after he was admitted. We got up at 3:50 AM so we could pick him up at 5:00 AM and get him to Eutaw by 5:30 to start Dialysis. He was supposed to be finished at 10:00 AM but didn’t get through until 10:45. Then we headed for the hospital in Tuscaloosa to have him admitted. That was not fun. Last week his surgeon and his kidney doctor each kept telling us that the other one would have all the instructions for us on getting him admitted. We ended up with a sticky note from the nurse at the Dialysis center with the name of the hospitalist doctor we needed to see when we got to the hospital. We went in and the nurse told us they couldn’t just admit him because he had a note from his nurse. She wanted his doctor’s name and surgeon’s name and started calling them. Of course neither one of them were available. After about forty-five minutes waiting, I asked her if she couldn’t just call the hospitalist doctor and ask them (which she never hinted that she was going to do). She acted like I was being very impatient and told me she did call them and they were busy with other patients and had not called her back. I explained that we weren’t being impatient but I wasn’t aware she had tried to contact the doctor. To make a very, very long story short, we finally got him admitted and into a room. Since it was Tuesday, we were actually supposed to be at District Council, and we had scheduled interviews with the Mission President, which we were about an hour and a half late for. We thought we were going to get to the last part of District Council and then we would come back with a Cheeseburger (Brother Whites favorite) and a strawberry milkshake for him and the Elders would help me give him a blessing. President Sainsbury was still conducting interviews when we got there and continued for more than an hour longer and then saw that we were there and interviewed us. We were glad we got to visit with him and Sister Sainsbury. Then, of course, we had our district Council, which is a two hour meeting. We finally got the Elders in the car with us and went for the cheeseburger and shake. Here is where the fun begins. We were sure they had him in a room by then rather than in preadmittance where we left him for testing, so we checked at the desk and, sure enough, they had him assigned on the fifth floor. We went to the fifth floor and were told he wasn’t on that floor, he was still in preadmittance. We got directions to preadmittance and past the receptionist that had steered us to the fifth floor on our way there. When we got to the room (which we recognized from when we left him) a nice security guard asked if he could help us. We told him we were there to see Manuel White. He asked us to follow him. He escorted us out to the outside lobby of the emergency room (where we brought him in the morning to admit him) and asked us to go out the door and come back in past the officer at the security desk. We were carrying the burger and milkshake through all of this. The nice lady at the security desk recognized us from earlier in the morning and just chuckled at us as we emptied our pockets and walked through the scanner. She told us to go to another security guard at the next door and tell him who we were there to see and he would tell us where to go. We did so and he told us to pick up the white phone and tell them who we wanted to see and they would tell us what to do. We did so and they couldn’t help us. So we went back to the guard at the second door and told him. He made a call and had us wait a minute and then let us go through the lobby door into the patient area and pointed to a security guard (the one that escorted us out to the outside door) and said he would take us where we wanted to go. He took us down to the room where we left Brother White that morning and it was empty. We checked with the nurse and she told us they just took him to X-ray and then he would be taken to the fifth floor. So we went back past the first receptionist and mentioned, as we passed by, that he was going to the fifth floor. We took the elevator to the fifth floor and went to his room, which was empty. He was still in X-ray. Of course by then holding the warm milkshake over the AC vent really wasn’t doing a lot of good. After waiting another twenty minutes for him to get finished at X-ray, we finally got to see him again. We left him a little after noon and it was then after 5:00 PM. The Elders had a dinner appointment that evening at 6:00. We just got to visit for a few minutes and we gave him a blessing and had to leave to get the Elders back to their apartment in time to get to their appointment. Then we drove back to Demopolis and stopped for a warm dollar cheeseburger at McDonalds and went home about 7:00 and decided to call it a day.
Monday after we got back from our first trip to Tuscaloosa we went to look at an available apartment that Elder Barfuss found for us to consider moving to. It was really depressing. It was a third floor apartment in the old part of Downtown. It was like taking a step back in time to the 1930s. The fridge was about the size of the microwave we are using in our garage, but the bar sink was actually bigger than the one we are using now. I am sure the range has been there since 1930. We called Brother Barfuss and told him, “No thank you.” We looked at another one on Wednesdaythat a member of the branch had found. It was a little bigger and on the ground floor (actually half of a duplex). It was just as discouraging, after we got inside, as the one we looked at on Monday. It is interesting because we inspect eight apartments for the mission where the elders and sisters live. All of them look like castles compared to our garage. We are not complaining, it is just the way the situation is here in Demopolis. It is quite a depressed area.
We promised Brother White that we would be there when he got out of surgery Thursday. He was supposed to be out between 10:00 and 11:00 AM. We got there about 10:30 and he was still in surgery. He finally came out and went to recovery and they wouldn’t tell us anything because we weren’t family. Our ministerial certificates that are supposed to carry so much weight really didn’t do us any good. He had no family there. We explained that we brought him and would be bringing him home and he had no one else, but they just said they were sorry. They told us they would let us know when he came out of recovery. So all we did Thursday was get to know the volunteer on duty in the surgery waiting room. At shift change she came in and fell against the desk (moving it about a foot) and broke her nose. She told everyone she was fine and stayed and worked her shift. Sister Owens was one of the ones that went to help her when she fell and kept checking on her from time to time (there was nothing else to do). They became pretty well acquainted. After we had been there for so long she started checking on things for us and did all she could but we still never got in to see Brother White. She finally left at the end of her shift with a big bruised and swollen nose. She said she hoped she wouldn’t see us when she comes back again next Thursday. We hoped not as well, but we all thought it would be good to see each other at Walmart or something. At 5:30 they told us that a room had opened up in ICU and they had to clean it out before they could move him in and then we could see him. They were sure it would be at least 6:00 before he would be ready. We had to be in Demopolis at 6:30 so we had to leave and could only leave a note for him.
We just were sure we would be able to see him the next day so we got up and drove straight there Friday, instead of calling and checking on his status. When we got to his room the nurses were there working with him. They told us we would have to wait a few minutes before we could go in. Then one came out and said he is really groggy from all the medication he is on and he told her he doesn’t want any visitors. We asked her to tell him who we were and she did and came back and said he opened his eyes and said to have us come in. We went in and talked to him for about five minutes and he opened his eyes twice. Then we came home. We stopped on the way home for gas and they had a sign on the door that they had hot boiled peanuts. We decided it was time to try them and bought a pint of them. We both thought they were quite tasty, but we weren’t crazy about how they affected us about six hours later. Lets just say it is a really good food to eat when you are getting ready for a colonoscopy.
We stayed home Saturday to do our P-day stuff so we didn’t get to see Brother White. He called us this morning at 5:50 and it was really good to hear him. I told him we were going to go today and take the sacrament to him. By the time Branch Council was over and we got started, we realized we were going to get there right at their shift change when they don’t let any visitors in for an hour. We were there eight minutes before the shift change so we went straight to his floor and when we got off the elevator, the nurses were waiting for our elevator with a patient in a bed that they were transferring. It was Brother White so I asked them where they were going with him. The nurse just looked at me like, “You can’t ask me a question like that,” and didn’t say anything. I said, “Really, we are here to see him, where are you taking him?” Then she told me they were moving him to the fifth floor. I almost thought, “Here we go again.” President and Sister James were driving to Tuscaloosa to pick up their son from YSA and said they would come to help us administer the Sacrament to Brother White. We went up to the fifth floor and sat down in the waiting room and I called President James to let him know we were there and that they were moving him. He said they were there as well and were siting in the second floor waiting room. They were waiting because they checked and were told they couldn’t see him because of shift change. So they came up and sat with us and we got to see Brother White about ten minutes later. He told us that he got a call from his brother about his baby sister that had surgery there the same day he did in a different wing of the Hospital. He said she got to go home Friday but she fell after she got home and had to go back to the hospital and that she died. He will be in the hospital at least two or three more days, so probably won’t get to go to the funeral or anything. It almost seems they have been an oppressed people for so long that death is just something they take in stride. I know he is hurt but he can’t do anything about it and he just deals with it.
We don’t seem to be ending on very happy notes lately. We will have to try to change that. A couple from Layton, Utah visited today that served here twelve years ago. They cried as they bore their testimonies in Sacrament meeting. They said they were jealous of us. Sister Owens told them it is our turn. Cedric has his baptism planned for this coming Saturday. We hope it is going to happen. We will have to let you know next week. We have to get this sent and get to bed. We are driving to Tuscaloosa tomorrow (gee, we haven’t been there for a while). I have a doctor appointment at 8:30 in the morning.
The attachment is what I think is the most interesting wildlife we have seen since we got here. It was waiting to greet us one day on our door when we came home for lunch.
Keep the commandments and read your Book of Mormon!!
We Love Y’all,
Elder and Sister Owens
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