A couple of days ago, a dear friend called early in the morning having difficulty breathing and asking us to meet him at the imaging center the doctor advised. The results of the CT-scan had us accompanying our friend to the Emergency Room where we spent nine hours navigating his serious distress with a cellphone that could not send or receive due to all the machinary around, and mixed messsages from the attending staff who, we found out later, had ignored the doctor’s very specific instructions.

Luckily, it all worked out in the end: our friend is stable but still need lots of care and watching over…which we are going to continue to give him…everyday until he is released.

So we’re going to take a short time off — or post sporadically — while we continue to improvise in the hospital on behalf of our friend. Here’s a phone table we made by turning a footstool on its side, so that our friend could easily reach the phone when his tray table was pushed away by doctors and nurses doing their thing in a crowded space.

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We devised this, of course, AFTER we had rearranged the furniture…