Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Not quite a foxhole

There is pretty good movie that came out a few years ago called In Good Comapny. In this movie a young kid asks for advice on finding the right woman:

'Dan, you seem to have the perfect marriage. How do you do it?'

'You just pick the right one to be in the foxhole with, and then when you're outside of the foxhole you keep your dick in your pants. '

'That's poetic.'

For the past few months I have been realizing that I have been incredibly lucky to have Abby in this foxhole with me. Day in and day out, Lyme disease or none, she is there kicking ass and doing everything that needs to get done for our girl. She doesn't take shit from anyone and does it all with a smile.

Even after all of this crap, we still make each other laugh every day, usually with some low quality scatalogical humor, but hey, we have Gut Girl in the room, poop jokes are always ripe for the picking.

I told her before we got married that I would be happy in a steel box without a door as long as we were there with a deck of cards or could just talk to each other and play 20 questions.

Well today we got to put that one to the test.

Two words: New Elevator.

The story goes something like this.

Children's had four patient elevators when we got here in April. Patient is a good name for them since they are very, very slow and at least one of the four has been out of service at any given time during our stay. I have joked with other parents that I don't care if they are slow or make extra stops as long as the stops are on floors and not between them.

To remedy the long waits, the hospital installed two new, shiny elevators this spring and they opened for business this morning. In fact I was on the first car of the day as I came upstairs with my morning Globe. Gotta love that new elevator smell.

This evening Ellie, Abby and I went for our evening tour of the hospital and were on our way back up we hopped on the new elevators, Abby holding Ellie and me pushing the stroller.

Halfway between the 7th and 8th floor I decided to step over to see Ellie and make faces at her. I guess my 225 pounds upset the tender elevator because just like that the elevator stopped.

Dead in the water.

An hour later, when the repairman finally opened the door, I really think that we shocked him. Instead of hysterical passengers who rushed to the door, he found Abby and I, laughing at the latest addition to our list of movies and TV shows with bad elevator scenes and the horrible ways that people die in elevator accidents in the movies.

Ellie's TPN was due to be hooked up so we quickly handed Ellie to her nurse before getting us out. As she walked away she told another nurse 'thank God it was the Brogans who this happened to. I don't think other parents could have handled that." It amde us feel good to know that we aren't pain in the ass parents, at least.

Even stranger was the look on the repairman's face as we talked to my sister who is Ellie's guardian about whether she would adopt Ellie if we met our unfortunate ends in a tragic elevator accident.

If you go that way, it's just your time to go.

We're not sure who we pissed off to have the string of luck that we have had, but Abby is starting to look for Hurley's numbers from Lost. We also think that we have found a way to absorb the shock of a falling elevator to protect Ellie if we need to.

Just another day in the foxhole.

2 comments:

Adam Hurtubise said...

Gib, Abby--

Keep kicking ass. Don't bother taking names.

Gib, I read that entry and it brought me back to a night a couple of years ago when you interrupted drinks and ran off to find Abby at the train station and then we all went out for dinner.

Every time Abby said something smart or funny (which was all night long), you got this really content smile on your face and you said, "I'm with her."

Ellie's lucky to have you guys.

Adam

Abby Brogan said...

Gib did a great job at telling the story I just wish we had a picture of me laying on the floor of the elevator to hand Ellie out the two foot opening to the 7th floor. It had to look great from a passerbye's perspective, an open elevator shaft, gibs feet and a baby being handed out with blue lips to boot! I never knew they could manually move an elevator, but now I know they don't want babies on board when they do. Thanks also to Ellie's uncle Fred to kept her company for the last 15 minutes while Gib and I were still in the steel box.