No Escape From the Theme

So Wednesday night my wife spent eight hours in the emergency room with her mother, who needed an emergency nephrostomy, and then she spent the entire following day in the hospital, conferring with doctors and and keeping her mom company . . . and by Thursday afternoon things finally started looking up (her mom's creatinine levels went down) and so my wife and I took a break the hospital (and our kids, who were at my parent's house) and went to Coco-- our favorite Thai/Malaysian place-- for some much needed food and beer; we were hoping to take a deep breath and relax, but this was not to be, we had barely dug into our papaya salad, when an older guy sitting at the table next to us slumped forward in his seat . . . we saw his eyes roll back into his skull and drool run down his chin, and the woman with him explained that he had a heart problem, so they laid him out on the floor and put a jacket under his head and some lady who seemed to know what she was doing checked his pulse and cleared his mouth (she turned out to be a nurse) and he was still out cold, so I figured I should use my CPR training, though I had never executed it on a real human, and so I knelt down next to him-- he definitely wasn't responding-- and so I put my hand on his chest and measured the proper distance from the sternum and just as I was about to start doing the compressions (to the beat of Stayin' Alive, of course) the guy came to . . . I think he may have had a small stroke or maybe he fainted-- who knows-- but in a moment he was fairly coherent, groggy, but able to talk-- so we went back to our "relaxing" meal-- and this guy was especially lucky that it wasn't a life-threatening emergency, as the waiter who called 911 must not have been very clear on the phone . . . the police took an inordinate amount of time to show up, and the ambulance took even longer-- because the police didn't realize it was a medical emergency and instead thought it was a customer dispute . . . so though we tried to take a break from the stress of the hospital, the medical crisis came to us, and remained there on the floor the entire length of our dinner, and the moral of the story is this: if you're at an authentic Asian restaurant and you're having a medical emergency, make sure someone who can speak fluent English makes the 911 call.