Dad has been home from the hospital for nearly 2 weeks now, and has left the ladybug to her own devices. It eventually turned out that he had to have a somewhat scary procedure, so I hurried to join him and Mom to, well, mill around and appear reasonably competent, just in case something useful to do turned up.

My role proved to be essentially moral support, but in the course of events, Mom performed a rescue. They are a sort of habit of hers. One of her rescues at sea is prominent among our family stories. In that one, though she had no experience with boat engines, she was able to fire up a sailboat's engine in time to rescue Dad and E from a leaking rubber dinghy, and what would have been a dangerously cold bath in Prince William Sound.

Her latest rescue was medical in nature. Dad was sent home from the hospital with five new prescriptions. As soon as he was comfortably settled at home, Mom hustled off to the pharmacy to fill the new prescriptions. We had been told that Dad must not wait a day before beginning all of them. When she returned, we were all dismayed by the array of new pill bottles that were to be added to Dad's existing collection. It seemed like an awful lot of medicine. But as Mom read off what each was supposed to do, the verbage seemed pretty convincing. The doctors knew best, we supposed...

I went home later that day, and called the following day. In the meantime, Mom had pulled out and carefully compared the documentation for each of Dad's existing prescriptions with the documentation for the five new ones. Her careful analysis showed that two of the new prescriptions were actually the same as ones Dad was already taking. For those two cases, one prescription was under a generic name, and the other under a trade name. A third prescription was for high blood pressure, but Dad actually has somewhat low blood pressure these days. They consulted with Dad's regular doctor, who agreed that Dad should not be taking either the duplicate doses or the high blood pressure medicine.

Mom rocks!