I’ve often heard that many things, both good and bad, tend to come in groups of three. In my case this seems to be three members of my immediate family afflicted with varying degrees of illness.
    What makes this even more distressful is the commonly adopted attitude in my family of not relaying any information until the crisis has passed.
    Last Saturday my mother called and told me she had spent the night in the hospital because she thought she was having a heart attack. A heart attack! It turns out the problem wasn’t her heart at all, but rather her gall bladder.
    Nevertheless she did not call me, nor anyone else for that matter, until she was safely home the next day.
    “I didn’t want to worry anyone,” she said.
    I don’t know about you, but I like to know what’s going on right away, even if it’s the middle of the night, even if I live 800 miles away. And, if we all know what’s going on, then the entire family can worry together.
    Case in point.
    This weekend I was relaxing on Saturday night when I received a phone call from my brother in Ohio.
    His weakened voice came through the receiver and he told me he had been in the hospital for three days due to a serious infection from a bite he received from a brown recluse spider. Apparently he went to the emergency room Wednesday with a boil on his arm the size of a golf ball. The attending physician wanted to admit him right away, but my stubborn bother went home and reported for work the next day.
    His boss took one look at his discolored arm and the large wound and sent him straight back to the hospital where he immediately got both a room and an appointment with a hand surgeon.
    The infection was so bad the doctors wanted to prepare him for the possibility he might lose his hand. Might lose his hand! And still, there was no phone call from anyone in my family. My mom said they wanted to be sure of the diagnosis before calling anyone.
    After three days of hardcore intravenous antibiotics he was sent home with cleaning instructions and a warning from my mother about getting his apartment treated. My brother lives above a restaurant that was once both a brothel and a speakeasy. So it goes without saying the building is very old. His front stairs are all but collapsed and full of dust and cobwebs, and the rest of the apartment looks like it is held together with duct tape. But hey the price was right and it’s close to his work, which is right downstairs.
    This is apparently the perfect breeding ground for spiders, including the one that almost cost him his arm at the age of 28. Now, I’m getting ahead of myself here, I was talking about things coming in packages of three. After I bid my brother goodnight over the phone while he settled into his hospital bed for the evening, I decided to call other members of my family to inform them of my brother’s condition.
    After a few rings I reached my father on his cell phone in an Arizona emergency room.
    “You’re in the hospital too?” I practically shouted as he informed me he was having some stomach problems. I told my dad about my brother, then immediately hung up and called my brother back to tell him about our dad, then I tried to reach my mother to make sure she too hadn’t been admitted to the hospital.
    I finally reached her the next day. She is fine and my brother, she told me, has been released. She described his arm as the, “worst thing I have ever seen” and admitted to almost passing out as she watched him pull gauze out of the wound and redress it. Then came a call from my father, he had been admitted for some tests.
    By Sunday afternoon I was exhausted from all the phone tag and crazy dialogue with my family, but I now know that two out of three of them will be OK. They say good things come in threes, right? I hope to round out my threesome with good news about my dad.
    I’m sure he’ll let me know when it all blows over.  — Brandi Neal