Beware the midnight pocket call!

When my throat started hurting Sunday night, I didn't think too much of it. I cough a lot anyway (my pulmonologist says I have bronchioectasis, which apparently translates loosely to "stuff in my lungs that makes me cough a lot"), and I live in a place my general practitioner used to call the allergy capital of the world (changing GPs apparently didn't change that, but the new one doesn't talk about it that way).

So between the general cough and the junk in the back of my throat (which the ear/nose/throat guy insists on calling "post-nasal drip," although in Backwards World, where I live, it seems as if it should be "pre-nasal drip"; that junk is going directly from my sinuses to my throat without ever making it to my nose), a sore throat didn't seem like a big deal. In retrospect, of course, I realize that sore throat is one of the symptoms of the dreaded H1N1 flu going around, so maybe I had a mild case of the flu instead of just a sore throat. Too late now.

At any rate, by the time I woke up Monday morning I was too hoarse to tell the dog to go outside, so I took the day off, took care of the business of logging out of a day's work (including coming up with a solution for missing class that night), and curled up on the couch with a tall glass of tea and a small bottle of antihistamines.

I thought I'd done a pretty good job of taking care of myself, and Number One Son made sure I had a good supper and plenty of liquids once he got home and could pitch in to help out. I watched the usual Monday night lineup on t.v., then dragged myself off to bed to read the paper and try to face Tuesday.

A little before 2 in the morning, my cell phone rang. My initial inclination was to ignore it, but a good friend had been calling regularly about her husband's deteriorating conditions of cancer, and I wanted to be there if she were calling about him.

I dragged myself across the bed, flipped open my phone, and saw my daughter's number. She's quite a mature, independent young lady who had been a bit out of touch lately because the current flame had just moved halfway across the country to be with her, so I was not at all surprised that I hadn't heard from her recently. The vibes I had gotten had been few but positive, so my only thought was that if she were calling in the middle of the night, something must be terribly, horribly wrong.

I hit the dial back button and heard her voicemail message. Well, I sort of heard it; what I really heard was a great deal of background noise broken by what seemed to be a teary, strangled "Mom!" and then more noises muffling what seemed to be a teary "want to come home!" accompanied by more background racket. Then the call shut off.

This was beyond strange; this chick has been out of the nest and on her own for nearly 10 years already, and I couldn't believe she'd be calling me unless something were really, horribly wrong. And if she were calling me instead of one of many friends in Los Angeles who had a chance of getting to her quickly, things must be beyond "out of hand."

Even in my antihistamine-induced stupor, I knew I needed to find out what I could do to help her, so I hit the speed dial and tried to reach her phone. The first three times I called, I got the "not available" message; either her phone was not in her hands or something else was going on that was keeping her from answering, and I was becoming frantic. Had someone grabbed her, taken away her phone (which is sort of like taking out one of her arteries), and continued to do harm to her?

From what I know of the boyfriend, he's a jewel, and even if he were somehow implicated in this, if I could at least get through to him, maybe I could get to the bottom of it. Lord only knows why she would have called me instead of him unless he had gone Jekyll and Hyde on her, but if calling the perp would distract him, well, maybe that was worth a try. I dialed his number.

Antihistamines really do stupid stuff to me, you know?

He didn't answer, but a few seconds later, my phone rang again, and my daughter's number popped up. I answered immediately.

"Hello?" The voice was the BF's, but it was calm and rational, and there was no background noise. This didn't even seem like the same phone that had called me minutes before.

"BF?" I asked. "Is Daughter there?"

"Yes," he said calmly.

"Can I talk to her?"

I couldn't figure out what he was doing calling me on her phone, but it cut out before he could answer. A heartbeat later, he called me back.

"She's here. Just a minute."

"Mom?" The voice was a little shaky, but not teary or scary, and the background noise was still completely gone.

"Are you okay?" I asked her.

"Yes! Are you? It's-2-o'clock-in-the-morning-there! Why-are-you-calling-me?"

"I didn't start this—you called first!"

"Oh my god. I didn't call you. My phone was in my pocket—my pocket called you!"

Two a.m. is no time of day/night for me to try to figure out how in the world her pocket called me, but I had heard her voice, it was fine, and I felt better.

"Okay. I've been sick, and you called me. I thought you were hurt and crying and telling me you wanted to come home."

"Could be that I called you," she said more calmly. "My phone sometimes does that. We're having a party here, and since I haven't talked to you in so long, I was talking about you, and I probably said 'home' and no telling what else you might have heard. But I'm okay."

Several days passed before I had a chance to chat with her, and we both laughed when we found out the other side of the story:

I was too groggy to recognize that probably what I had heard on the voice mail was mostly just gibberish coming from a room full of people in the middle of a weekend football party; she was too horrified to answer my calls when she calculated the time of night it had to be back home in Texas and lord=only-knows what sort of terrible things might have happened to one of her brothers. The party had stopped to be sure everything was fine at home, and I'm still not sure whether it had a chance to fire back up again.

But I learned not to pay too much attention when her cell phone calls me late at night from her bluejeans pocket.