PART VII:  COLLEEN'S ICU INTERLUDE
I didn't see Dr. Tottenham again. Her shift in MICU, I knew, ended at 7 AM. I'm not sure whether Colleen had even met her. I'll have to ask if she remembers. Three days later I caught a glimpse of Dr. Tottenham on the 9th Floor in her white coat, not a shiny dark hair out of place, no expression on her pretty young face, glancing neither left nor right as she passed by, her glacial exterior intact. If she saw me too, she gave no indication.

Beginning at daybreak on Tuesday morning, other doctors, obviously pulmonary, began coming in and out of Colleen's room to check on her. Each time they told her, "We're going to take the tube out today."

I started reading another magazine article to Colleen to pass the time. Although not as frequently as the night before, she continued to ask for pain medication for her hurting throat. The nurses complied, but not as liberally as the night before. "In order to extubate, we need you and your lungs as awake as possible," they said.

Having gotten a few hours sleep at their hotel, Leslie and Pat returned around 9:00. Colleen's daughter Chelsea and son Ben drove down from New Jersey, arriving early afternoon, around 1:00. Now there were five us standing by with Colleen in expectation of the tube coming out. We waited together, one anxious hour after another, talking, not talking, reading aloud Colleen's occasional notes. Her initial scrawls were becoming more legible.

Would the doctors be successful in removing it? Would they need to re-intubate? The prospect of reintubation was unthinkable to us. It had not been presented to Colleen, at all, as a possibility. She deserved full protection from the fear that prospect would have induced.

Leslie and Pat had persuaded me to pop back to the hotel for a hot shower and change of clothes, Leslie driving me there after a mildly frenzied search to find her car in the Hopkins parking garage. It may have been around 2 PM by then. 

I had been inside the hotel only minutes, standing at the front desk getting the key card to my room re-charged, when my cell rang. Pat was calling to say they were going to remove the breathing tube within the hour.

Immediately, I phone Leslie to come back to pick me up. Even though only five minutes or thereabouts had gone by since dropping me off, she'd driven straight down Lombard Street, going she knew not where to pass the time. So it took her a while to navigate back to the hotel, which was located within a maze of one-way streets.

I stood on the corner of Lombard and Calvert, waiting, waiting. How far could she have gone, I worried and wondered. I stare at each and every passing gold-hued SUV thinking it's her. And then, bam, she's stopped directly in front of me, in a silver-hued SUV, vigorously trying to get my attention. We speed off back to Hopkins, two miles away.

Leslie generously drops me off back at the entrance to the parking garage. She'll park and be right behind me, she says. I fast-walk across the street to the Main Entrance of the hospital, take the elevator up to the 10th floor, take an immediate left to the double-doors of 10E, take another immediately left and then a right to Colleen's MICU room. Pat, Ben, and Chelsea are standing outside Colleen's door. They tell me that Colleen asked for everyone to leave the room during the extubation except for the doctors and nurses, who now surrounded her bedside. I tried getting a glimpse of Colleen through the doorway but all the working bodies blocked a view.

How long we waited is uncertain. A half-hour perhaps? Forty-five minutes? Was it like waiting for a baby to be born? Waiting for that first alive cry?

And then it was over. We were allowed in. Colleen smiled at us.

By 4:30 or so, Pat and Leslie, Chelsea and Ben, had left the hospital to drive back to New Jersey. It was just me and Colleen again, sharing the quiet of enormous relief, of being on the other side of danger.

Colleen began urging me to go back to the hotel, take a hot shower, and get some sleep. Eventually, around 7:00, still light outside, I did.

In the morning I woke up to an email from her. Sometime after midnight, she'd been transferred out of MICU back to a room on the 9th Floor, where she'd been prior to the procedure three days before. It felt like three weeks.

THE END