Moving Hospitals

Thursday morning dawned with both of us having had little sleep.  The social workers hand been in and out all night keeping us posted on the progress of finding a bed at Stanford for us to transfer to.  As of 8 AM they still had no word.  This is not a good thing in hospital realms.  They said that they usually hear back immediately whether a hospital has a bed or not so the speculation was that maybe there was no bed to be had.  Willie and I didn't talk about it that day, but separately we had each spent some time praying about where we should go and we both felt confident that Stanford would work out.  Somewhere in the middle of the sleepless night I did some Internet research on Stanford and discovered that they have an extremely high cure rate for Willie's form of cancer which is referred to as AML.  They have a world renowned cancer center and offered detailed information on treatments and options on their website.  I knew this was where we needed to go.  By 10 AM we still had heard nothing.  A friend of ours who works at the hospital came to visit us and we asked her if she could do a bit of followup on the transfer situation.  She went to talk to the nurses and the ball got rolling again.  By noon we were informed that Stanford was requesting insurance information from us in order to proceed.  This was good news because that meant they had a bed!  The bad news: we have no proof of insurance...
I got busy, making phone calls and getting paperwork faxed to the appropriate people.  Willie is Native American and has coverage through the clinic.  We worked with the woman from the Native American clinic who contacted Stanford and got things sorted out for coverage.  By 4PM a nurse at Enloe came in to congratulate us and inform us that we had got a bed at Stanford.  She said that Stanford said they had never seen information arrive as quickly as it had from all of our sources.  We are so grateful for the hard work that people put in for us to make the transfer possible. 
The next step was the actual transfer.  We were told Willie would be moved by helicopter and it threw us both into an anxious state.  We had been planning for him to be moved by ambulance and I would follow behind in our car.  The helicopter scenario would put him there hours before me and the thought was too much for both of us.  We requested that both of us get to fly on the helicopter or go with the other plan using an ambulance.  In the end the ambulance was chosen.
We sat together as we waited for the ambulance to arrive.
"This is really happening" Willie said with a mixture of disbelief and acceptance. 
It was a sentence that held the weight of a thousand meanings.  Indeed, it was really happening.  He did really have cancer.  We were really about to leave our lives behind and put his health in the hand of strangers who lived 4 hours away.  It was really happening.

Off to Stanford

At 10:30PM two ambulance drivers showed up and put Willie on the stretcher.  The drivers were two guys about Willie's age who turned out to have a mutual friend in common.  It really is a small world!  Willie left in the ambulance and I was a few minutes behind them.  It felt like the longest drive of all time.  This was the first time in days that I had been apart from him and the distance between us gave me anxiety.  I wondered if I will ever let him out of my sight again! 
We arrived at Stanford Medical Center at 2:30 AM on Friday May 17, 2012.  Then the real fun began...