Tuesday: Charlottetown, PEI. Oh gods, why do you hate us so much?
Morning, we get up and have a leisurely breakfast in our temp cabin. Karen is heading out with K&J for a geo-caching adventure later. Since they cannot tell how long it is, and my feet are *still* hurting, I decide to stay in. We just finish up eating and are having a cup of tea when we hear over the loudspeaker “Stretcher team to cabin 118.” M&N’s room. Shit! We both thought the same thing, since so many people have insisted on telling us that people come on cruises to die, that N is dead. Karen tears out to get up there, I gather a few things for Karen and head up there. N had not eaten or drank hardly anything and could not keep it down. When she stood up her blood pressure dropped into the floor and she followed. The doctor tried to get her BP, but it was registering 60/nothing. The Doc started an IV and decided that she was going to the hospital. Marty was going. Karen and Kim. Joe. Okay, someone needed to stay behind so that was me. They all head down to medical, ambulance comes and takes M&N off. K&J and Karen are told the Holland America port agent Shelley will meet them and arrange a taxi. No Shelley. So they just grabbed a taxi and headed off to the hospital. It was only 15 minutes away. At this point I will condense the next several hours into a few lines. Doctors at the ER were nice, took 1.5 hours to admit her, other docs were too busy to properly attend her, new doc came on shift and she was wonderful. Karen had a talk with her, changed meds and turned the IV up so she could hydrate. Nancy started feeling immediately better. But a decision time was coming. Will they be getting back on board the ship or not. All aboard was 4:30, ship was leaving at 5:00. At 3:00 the decision was no, they were not going to come back aboard. So we had about 1.5 hours to pack up. Joe comes back and packs K&J. I head to our cabin to pack….it looks like a bomb went off. Johann could not fix it, would require 2 days in port, so they had left it with the wall pulled down, hull exposed, beds and platforms and night tables stacked all over, dust, dirt, screws and nails. Okay, I get through this and even manage to get a shower in, since I felt so disgusting afterwards. 4:00 comes and Kim and Karen head back to the ship to finish the packing of M&N’s room. All the while we keep being assured by the front desk that Shelley is taking care of things before I finally snapped at them. We have not seen this Shelly. Shelley has never contacted us, spoken to us, spoken to a doctor, arranged a cab, nothing. They called and it turns out Shelley had not picked up her email. Her one job and she decided to skip out on it that day. Anyway, we get all the luggage onto the dock and finally Shelley shows up. She decided in her wisdom (not!) to put us into a Best Western. She calls a single cab for the four of us and all our luggage (the cabbie then calls the second cab that is needed). She calls the Best Western and asks if there are 3 rooms. She does not try to reserve them, block them out, give names, nothing. She just says okay and hangs up, watches the cabbie pack us up and walks away. That was what she deemed the end of her duties. The Best Western…oh gods, I will just say that it was really bad, that it apparently started as a roadside motel and grew organically without the use of a level or right angles, and was hot. I will devote a later post to the Best Western. We got there checked in, got all our luggage sorted to the correct rooms, then Karen and Kim went to the hospital to pick up M&N. When they came back we knew N was still drugged up and loopy when she said about the hotel “This is nice.” **shudder** We saw them into their room, then Karen and I went on an epic journey to find a drugstore for some meds and juice for N, liquor store to get scotch for M, Diet Coke for us. After a long trek, where we noticed that the ship was still sitting there at 7:00, we finally found it, got the stuff and headed back (side note, a few hours later we found a drugstore 2 blocks away from the motel). On the way we saw a lobster roll shop and decided to get one for M, when who should we see inside…? Shelley. Getting her lobster roll. Ugh. She dropped us off at the liquor store, saving us a few blocks walk, then took off, not even offering us a lift to the hotel. She assured us this was the best place to get lobster rolls. It was not. Meds, juice and lobster roll were deposited with M&N and the rest of us headed out to dinner at a local place where we had some decent food in ungodly huge amounts. Apparently the locals really did eat here, and we even got to see some of Canada’s finest Navy. Back at the hotel, Kim and Karen kept up a running dialog with the Holland America, travel agency, insurance and contractors dealing with medical emergencies trying to get a flight out of PEI for M&N. We were encouraged strongly by Shelley to somehow get to Halifax, our next stop, and meet the ship, but N was wisely done with the trip, and there was no way Kim was getting back onboard. Truthfully, we were all done at this point. So eventually we went to bed in a mattress so lumpy it resembled the Alps, in a room that was very warm. We sort of dozed on and off all night.
Love to you all. Heading to Houston on Friday. Anyone there?