Page Two
It was July 2020. I had been home from the hospital a week and a half after my COVID stay. Twenty-one days on the vent.
Four hospitals. Fifty-four days in all. But I was out. Time for my first follow-up with the family doctor.
When we finished, the nurse asked Vonnie if she could copy the detailed list of medicines I was on.
Those were the papers Bleckley Memorial had handed her at discharge — every dose, every hour.
For ten days Vonnie had followed those instructions to the T. If it said half a pill, I did not get sixty percent of a pill.
If it said every four hours, I was wasting my time asking at three hours and fifty-eight minutes. She was diligent.
The nurse laid the papers on the copier, picked them up, and flipped the page at the staple.
You should have seen Vonnie’s face.
She went white as a ghost, looked over at me, and said, “You mean there was a second page?”
All I could think, right then, was what life-sustaining medicine I had not been getting for ten days, because it was sitting on page two.
Turns out the only thing on page two was Vitamin D.
I still wish y’all could have seen her face.
Moral of the story: you can follow page one perfectly and still miss the chart.
Diligence is not the same as the whole picture. Flip the staple. Ask if there is another page. In a marriage, a business, a city meeting, or a church, the part you can see is not always the part that matters.
Vonnie did everything right with what she had. The scare was not carelessness. It was the page nobody turned.
Check the other side.
Shellyism: She didn’t miss a pill. She missed a staple.
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