Mom and I scrambled to get back to the truck stop room, grab a few quick items for the trip, and get back to Freeman, passing the ambulance with Dad departing as we were returning. I made a U-turn and followed the ambulance transporting Dad, keeping it within view until the van we were driving very nearly ran out of fuel a half hour or so outside of St. Louis.
After fueling up with the speed of a pit crew, we got back on course, and managed to arrive at Barnes not long after the ambulance. Barnes at 2am was a very strange place....the ER entrance had all manner of big city trauma and medical business going on, and after negotiating temporary parking, and getting Mom in a wheelchair up to the ICU, we were notified that Dad's bed had been filled by multiple cardiac arrest patients, and Dad had been moved to "89-ICU" on the other side of the Barnes campus. The ambulance crew and Dad and all of the life-sustaining equipment had already arrived and been turned away from the same spot we were. Still trying to understand why a hospital was being referred to as a "campus", I wheeled Mom back downstairs and wondered what in blazes I had gotten us into. Dad had apparently come all of this way to be sent to some sort of 'overflow' I.C.U. or something in who-knows-where in a vast hospital "campus"!!!
After getting some directions, arrival in the new location seemed even weirder...the area that I would find out later to be the prestigious Center for Advanced Medicine at that 2am hour seemed more like a vacant lunar landscape...with the only evidence of our successful arrival being the parked ambulance that we had followed from Joplin. A lone security guard gave Mom and me some hand-written name tag stickers and what seemed like complicated directions down a windy hallway, up some elevators to the extremely arbitrary-sounding 8th floor....
Once there, we wandered unrestricted into some open doors of what seemed like an empty I.C.U. of sorts...with most of the lights off and apparently nobody there to greet us or keep us out, other than the ambulance crew that were packing up their gear. We thanked them for getting Dad up there so quickly, and they stated that he remained mostly stable during the trip ("Mostly?!! No wonder they drove so fast!"). We then wandered down the hallway and found the room Dad was being moved into and found two nurses that politely but hastily asked us to wait outside in the waiting room back near the elevator. What kind of a place was this???!!!
Before we left Freeman, I had spoken with one of Dad's best lifelong friends and Navy flight buddies, A.B. Shuman to give an update on Dad's status....I asked for cartoon ideas, since Abey had always had a brilliant wit that cracked Dad up unceasingly, I was sure he would be good for a cartoon or two or three to lift Dad's spirits. One of the first things he suggested was a sort of unofficial logo that Dad and his flight crew had....the "Flying Eyeball" a popular motorcycle emblem that had become popular on American roadways after somebody invented it. Cars, Motorcycles, and Tattoos were probably the 1960's version of going "viral" and Dad's flight crew related to it quite naturally, since they were engaged in Anti-Submarine Warfare operations and fancied themselves as an "eye in the sky" of sorts.
The cartoon I chose for the Dad's transfer day signified a change in theme....moving to Barnes kicked up the stakes, and "upped the anty" of our efforts to get Dad off that vent...we weren't messing around...and it was time to go from drawings of Dad as different superheroes....to drawings of how Dad actually WAS a superhero!
The Flying Eyeball was the first such drawing...a symbol of Dad's flight squadron time, the bonds he made with his squadron brothers, and of one heck of a fast drive we all did on I-44 from Joplin to St. Louis to get Dad to a higher level of care....I truly believe it would have made any rebel-biker or hot-rod maniac proud...!!!!
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