RIVER CITY JOURNAL: AND ON THE LEFT ARE THE ENDOSOPIES, SO HAVE YOUR CAMERAS READY

You can travel by planes, trains and automobiles, but short ambulance trips are a safe bet in some cases.

After planning for several weeks and adjusting our schedules to be away for a few days, my wife and I finally got away from the house early Saturday morning.

As it turned out, Marge went by ambulance and I followed in our car. Instead of the log cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains we had rented, we wound up in one of our local hospitals.

One of the things you look forward to when you go on vacation is the opportunity to try different kinds of food. Marge enjoyed a few days of what looked like Gatorade dripping through an IV. For dessert she got several units of blood.

The view from the hospital room was of treetops starting to show their fall foliage. My attempts to convince Marge that a pretty tree in Cape Girardeau is as good as a pretty tree in the Smoky Mountains didn't work.

The first hours of our vacation were spent in a hospital emergency room. This is where the doctors and nurses and technicians all become travel agents trying to decide where you will go next: surgery, intensive care, a regular room, x-rays.

In her case, she got the full tour except for surgery and intensive care. Instead, she took the scenic side trip to a G-I lab where the scenery isn't so hot. The local folks looked inside her stomach and took pictures of a bleeding ulcer spurting like one of those fountains in Rome -- except we weren't even near Rome.

This would explain why the fire department's EMTs who responded to my 911 call for an ambulance couldn't find her blood pressure. Turns out she didn't have enough blood left to pressurize. (I'm not sure this is entirely the same lingo they use at the hospitals, but you get my drift.)

The ER doctor said he sees a lot of patients who are ready to leave on vacation. He speculated that the tension of getting ready to go has enough impact on your heart or stomach or whatever to send you to the hospital too often.

Marge is home now, nursing sore legs from falls caused by dizziness due to low blood pressure and trying to build her own blood back up to an acceptable level.

Thanks to the wonderful treatment she received -- from absolutely everybody she encountered at the hospital -- she is well on her way to a full recovery.

It doesn't matter which hospital, in case you're wondering. We've seen enough of the insides of our hospitals and have known friends who have been treated at both to know that Marge would have received the best of care regardless.

Here's one thing I learned while passing away several tense hours inside a hospital: When your wife's life is at stake, you really don't have a strong position on topics like hospital mergers and modern-day insurance plans and doctors who dabble in things other than treating patients. All you want is someone -- anyone -- to come up to you in some official capacity and say those magic words: "She's going to be all right."

What we discovered on our autumn vacation trip to the hospital was that most of the people who work there don't spend a lot of time thinking about whether a merger is good or not. They are busy providing professional care based on years and years of training and experience. How comforting it was to see them in action, doing what they know how to do best, giving assurances whenever little doubts arose, keeping the focus on the task at hand.

How do you say thank you to so many wonderful people?

I know.

Let's try this.

Thank you.

I think that about covers it. Don't you?

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.