MAKING PROGRESS... of sorts (Part 172gg)

MAKING PROGRESS… of sorts (Part 172gg)

Driving up to the garage I could hear the ‘rumble’ of the engine without even stopping the car. I’d really wanted to be there when it cranked over but knowing that it was running would have to do. I was told that Robob had showed up about mid afternoon and Cliffy, anxious to get the motor running, put the headers on and started it up. I couldn’t tell the difference in sound between the Ford and the Chevy engines. All I knew was that it sounded powerful. It had been almost a month since an engine of ours had been running and from the looks on the faces of the others it made them happy. I sure was. Before leaving I heard Cliffy say his plan was to just get some laps on the motor and wasn’t planning on ‘pushing’ it. Since we’d missed three weeks we’d have to start in the back anyway. I thought it was good plan. Cliffy could get an idea of just what he had for power without putting the car at risk. Even with that knowledge I was disappointed that I wasn’t going to be there.

In anticipation for Elle coming home sometime Saturday she’d given me a list of things to get from the grocery store. She’d been told to take it easy when she got there and decided on TV dinners for a few days until she felt stronger. So, Saturday morning I headed for the supermarket. Food shopping was not for me and I struggled. Back at home I called Elle’s mother to see if she couldn’t help out. I was surprised she hadn’t offered but… She did say she’d cook something up for us to eat that night which took a little pressure off me. I told her I’d let her know when I got Elle home. The plan from the night before was that her doctor would stop by in the morning and if everything was in order she’d sign her out. The guess was it would be around 11am or so. On my way I stopped at the garage to wish Cliffy and the guys good luck. They’d already loaded the car and it looked good to see it up on the back of the hauler again. At the hospital I asked if there was anything I had to do like papers to sign for Elle’s release. The person at the desk perused a clipboard and then looked at me and said she wasn’t going anywhere. The shock of hearing that sort of took my breath away. I headed up the stairs, two at a time, arriving in the doorway of her room to see her bed empty. Now I was really concerned. I found the floor nurse who calmed me down telling me she was having some blood work done. Right from the time she’d arrived it seemed like they were always drawing blood. My mind, with no medical background, couldn’t fathom why they were still doing blood work. When she walked into the room she was till connected to the IV bag. It was the first time I’d seen her up since she arrived at the hospital and it was also the first time I’d seen the catheter bag as well. Not an encouraging sight.

She was able to explain her situation in lay terms which certainly helped. Just before our youngest, Kaye, had been born she had a major operation that removed most of her thyroid gland. She’d been put on medication to replace the function of the thyroid and had seemed to be doing OK. However, once she became pregnant, the demands on her thyroid function had increased and the basic cause of her always being tired was that she wasn’t getting enough of the drug that replaced the missing thyroid. Her doctor knew about the missing thyroid but in the four years she’d been treating Elle there hadn’t been a problem. When Elle didn’t recover quickly from the miscarriage, she contacted the doctor who’d operated on her and was a semi-specialist on thyroid problems. He told her to run a couple of tests that hadn’t been run to see if that wasn’t the root cause… and that was where they were at that moment. In the meantime, the other doctor told her to put her on additional thyroid medication and to monitor her for a couple of days. End result… she wasn’t going home.

Elle was, as you can probably imagine, deeply disappointed that she’d have to stay in the hospital until Monday. It was my job to point out the positives to it and I truthfully did with the main one being that if the medication change was the solution she’d be able to be as active as she had been in the past. I’d listened to her complain about being tired right from the time she woke up until she went to bed. The focus on her health and not the loss of the baby made her a lot more positive and I set out to keep it that way. I, of course, made the call to Elle’s mother which gave Elle a chance to talk to the kids. I also called my mother. She’d been after me to find out if she could come to visit Elle. I’d put her off telling her that she spent most of her time asleep but, with Elle’s permission, I encouraged her to come either that afternoon or evening. She chose the evening as she and my father were going out to eat at a restaurant less than 5 minutes from the hospital. It was while this was being ’negotiated’ that it came to me that there was now a possibility for me to go to the races. I’ve mentioned how restrictive the rules for hospital visitations were back in those days. In a semi private room you were only allowed two people at a time and visiting hours were limited to four hours a day… at least at the two hospitals that served our area. When it was agreed that would happen I asked Elle if she would be OK without me being there. When she had no problem with it she asked what I wanted to do. When I hesitated she sort of smiled and told me I better be back there when visiting hours started on Sunday. Without asking she knew where I was headed and her agreeing to it without complaining told me she was well on her way to recovery.

By the time I arrived at the track the practice session was over and the preliminary races for the lower division cars were under way. I caught up with Robob first and asked how the engine performed. He made a sour face which scared me at first but quickly explained that there was a problem with the rod that connected the accelerator pedal to the carburetor. Even though they’d been running the motor at the garage they hadn’t tried to open the throttle all the way until the car went out onto the track. It was too short and a simple problem to fix but it cost Cliffy all our practice time. We knew we’d be starting in the back and he told me we’d start eleventh in a twelve car field of cars. When I caught up to the others I had to explain how I’d managed to get to go to the races. After doing so it was time for the car to go on the track. As explained earlier, Cliffy had no intention to try and qualify through the heat race. He just wanted to log some laps on the motor. He knew he’d get more laps in the non qualifiers race. The results weren’t what he’d hoped for as he felt the Chevy motor didn’t have as much power as the Ford motor we’d been running. When the races were over he spent time talking with some of the other drivers trying to find out what he could do to boost the power. Almost all the answers he got entailed spending more money… not what we wanted to hear.

To be continued…