On Call

The month of May ends in a similar state of mind with which it began: being on call, on call, waiting for phone messages, e-mails, texts.

On call started May 2 when my phone rang during a union delegate assembly meeting. It was my sister.

I silenced the phone, and sent her a text: "In a meeting. Is this urgent?"

My sisters and I don't usually just call each other out of the blue. We talk via e-mail and Facebook, and usually if we're going to talk, arrange for a convenient time to call.

"Nothing real urgent," my sister texted back. "Mom's in the hospital. Doctor sent her in."

That felt urgent. Our mother had had a planned surgery a couple of months earlier, which she was healing well from. But she had been suffering flu-like symptoms for the past week or so. Still, the flu is the flu. A hospital check-in seemed to create a state of high alert.

Of the three of us, this particular sister lived the closest to my parents. She could drive up in two and a half hours.

"Are you going up?"

"No, and I don't really know what to do," she replied. "I can drop everything and go with a moment's notice. But when do I do that? When do I make that choice?"

"I think when you're asked," I replied. "At their age, it seems to make sense of all of us to be on call."

And so the waiting began. The three of us called our parents repeatedly on Saturday and Sunday, and text-messaged each other, as well.

Things seemed stable but uncertain.

Early Monday morning, my sister called again. "I just spoke to mom. There's an infection that's spread to her stomach. She asked me to come. I'm leaving now."

My husband and I quickly made plans to go, as soon as we were asked. We did some hasty texting and made arrangements for someone to take care of our farm animals and house chickens, if necessary.

An emergency surgery took place, followed by a few days in intensive care. My sister and my father were there, as were several close friends of the family.

The phone calls, e-mails, and text-messages continued. "Would you like me to come?" "For how long?" "When?"

The answers were always affirmative and non-committal. "Yes, when she gets home." "She will need help." But when and what kind of help were unknown.

I canceled commitments, and then rescheduled them. I tried to continue with life, as normal. But I was "on call" now, and prepared to drop everything.

Friends and colleagues were solicitous, supportive, and kind. A whole universe of people -- some who were very close to my mother as well as some who had never met her because they barely knew me -- began sending her prayers, healing energies, and other well wishes for a speedy recovery.

Other friends set up cooking and visit schedules to ensure that both she and my father were cared for. They helped reassure my sisters and me that my father was holding up okay and was being taken care of, and that there wasn't much anyone outside of the medical team could do for my mother until she left the hospital. Their logic made sense, and as the days stretched into first one and then two and then nearly three weeks, the sense of alert eased. We were still on call, but with less urgency than before.

With the end of May looming and summer plans and decisions to make facing us, my sisters and I compared schedules and notes and made a plan. One of us would go around the time she was expected to be released from the hospital. I would go for eleven days in early June, in between a conference and a work commitment, and the third one -- the one who lived closest -- would fill in the gaps, as needed. Our plans ended up coinciding with my mother's recovery fairly well. She left the hospital on the second to last Thursday in May and the first sister arrived the next day.

Now, it is the last day of May, and I am on my way. I have come to realize that I am not traveling alone. I am traveling with the stress and tension of being on call, and I am realizing that that stress has been cutting into my energy reserves. While my sister was with my parents last week, I did not call home quite as often. I did not call on the day she left or the day after.

Last night, as I was preparing for bed, I saw that I had received a voice mail. From my father. He sounded tired. He wanted to know how I was doing.

I sent back a text saying I was find, had come home from the conference and would call in the morning.