My second hostibulization in six weeks!
I got up to go to the bathroom at 3:19AM, 14 June. Got back to bed to catch another half hour resting and curl up under the blankest because I was freezing. Asked Stacie if she was cold, and she said “no, but why is the bed shaking.” Because that’s how hard I was shivering. Bear in mind we have a fancy memory-foam mattress where Stacie can’t tell when I get into or out of bed.
Took my temperature and it was 101 and change. Great. Sound familiar? It should.
But because I’m stupid like that, I decided to try to go to work and jumped in the shower. Made it halfway through and started puking. Hard. Got out, did my teef, put on pitstick, and managed to brush my hair with only sporadic bouts of dry-heaving.
While I did my bandages, Stacie was getting dressed. She was already planning to send me to the ER, while I was considering going to work. By the time I was dressed, she had my assorted hostibule supplies gathered. Then we drove to the ER. I was checked into an exam room by 4:30AM. Cue the usual festivities, a diagnosis of severe sepsis that had migrated to my blood and was in the process of giving me pneumonia, and me zoning out most of the morning. Got to a room around 2PM.
The nurse was the same nurse that had checked me out of the hostibule in May. She got the room ready, then told me two things:
She was requesting a different gown, because the standard gowns are made for someone about 5’6” and I’m 6’2”. In her words “let’s get a gown that doesn’t look like a mini-dress on you.” So that was nice.
And I was getting a special bed because of my leg wounds. As in $44,000 worth of bed (Stacie looked it up). Instead of that thin, creepy plastic-foam mattress, it had a multi-chambered air mattress. It was fully adjustable so you could have a pressure setting that worked for you, and it was half massage chair. Between all the fancy stuff the mattress was doing it kept steady pressure off my legs, so they wouldn’t be as likely to develop pressure injuries. Plus I couldn’t complain about the periodic butt massages. Stacie couldn’t complain either – that’s why she looked up what it cost. It was also a bit wider than the standard bed.
Friday was uneventful. IV vanco, IV fluids, hostibule food with their hateful low-salt diet, lots of resting in bed. And the obligatory strip-search. My night nurse pretty much rocked. I told her I just wanted to sleep and she adjusted my schedule so she had as many tasks all slugged together in as few interruptions as possible. Which was nice. She was also assigned to my room for my entire stay, which was really nice – there’s something to be said for continuity of care.
Saturday was more or less more of the same, with the obvious inclusion of the pincushion treatment for blood draws. And periodically going from shivering cold to sweating out my bed. What fun.
Then Saturday night rolled around. The first few hours were uneventful. Until 2AM. When the nurse came in and woke me up, I was having trouble breathing and my chest hurt from struggling to breath. Which I told her. Cue her doing some quick tests on me, then saying “I’m going to call some more people to your room.” OK, cool. Whatever.
You want a three-ring gangbang orgy of people in your hospital room? Tell the nurse you’re having chest pains. Especially when you’re in there for potentially lethal sepsis. At one point I had a half-dozen extra people it my room, including a team from the ICU downstairs, who were in there almost before the night nurse had requested them.
They ran some more tests and questioned me extensively. And of course my aphasia was going apeshit. I mean, why would it? I was only tired, oxygen-deprived, and under a significant amount of stress considering I’d heard them talking “cardiac” and “heart attack.” So I was stuttering so much it made Porky Pig sound normal. I assume the night nurse had told them about my stroke and the aphasia, since the extra people wouldn’t have read my file, because the one who was asking all the questions waited for me to answer a question, then asked “do you need me to slow down? Can you understand me?” I answered that I could understand perfectly, I just couldn’t talk right. That seemed to satisfy her, and she went back to asking medical questions.
I wound up having an in-bed chest ultrasound, got an EKG attached to me, and an oxygen hose attached to my CPAP machine.
Turned out I wasn’t having a heart attack. I was in borderline respiratory failure. Wound up on 6 liters of oxygen (I don’t know whether that was per hour, per night, or whatever, but it’s apparently bad) delivered through my CPAP machine. And then I repeated the same thing Sunday night.
So if you’re keeping track, I was staring down three potentially lethal situations in as many days. If I hadn’t been in the hostibule, I probably would have dropped dead. For most people, that’s a “holy fuking shit!” situation. For me, it was a weekend that wasn’t much worse than usual.
The rest of the week was pretty much more of the same (except the respiratory failure part), cold, hot, boring. And due to a comedy of errors, I didn’t receive my bandages and stuff to bandage my legs, so my right leg was uncompressed for a few days, and it got ugly. Eventually they got me my stuff and I could bandage it, but by then the damage was done – it took a little over a week at home with my lymphedema pumps to get it to shrink back down. And a double dose of Lasix both in the hostibule and at home.
And then they wanted to stuck a camera down my throat to get a better look at the main pump without my ribs in the way. Which you can’t eat or drink for several hours beforehand, so they cut off my meals and water at midnight. Fair enough.
I asked the day nurse if she had any idea when the procedure was being done. She didn’t know, which I expected. That’s par for the course in hostibules; most of the time you don’t know until the gurney is knocking at your door to take you to wherever. That went on until about 10:30 in the morning, with an added twist: my procedure wasn’t even in the system. So the nurse said to go ahead and order breakfast. I ordered breakfast, it arrived, I took two bites, and she said to hold up because something was happening. So I sat there with my omelette, peaches, yogurt, milk, and tea taunting me for about an hour. And then the doctor came in to inform me that he hadn’t put in the order until fifteen minutes before, and if I could skip breakfast that would be great. Whereupon he spotted my partially-eaten breakfast and half-finished glass of water, and said we would have to reschedule for tomorrow.
So I got that done a day late, and it determined I was more or less normal. So I’ve got that going for me.
Then they installed a PICC line on 18 July. Which wouldn’t have been bad except that they administered Lasix fifteen minutes before the PICC nurse showed up. That’s a procedure that requires you to lie on your back motionless for an hour or so while they snake the tube through a vein in your arm all the way to just shy of the main pump. OK, no problem. I’ve done it before. Oh shit, Lasix. Lasix is a diuretic, and at the dose I was on, it makes me piss like a racehorse every half hour for a few hours after I take it.
So about fifteen minutes into the PICC line procedure, I start to feel it. Another ten and I ask the nurse (she hadn’t quite started to stick it in) if I can go to the bathroom quick. That was a big N-O. I needed to remain motionless. Great. Another fifteen and I was about to piss myself. At that point the PICC nurse got on the horn and requested my nurse. You ever have to have someone help you pee as an adult? It isn’t fun, having a nurse pull your pants down and stick a special bottle on your unit while another nurse threads a tube through your veins, while you have to lie completely motionless. Gah.
Got out 19 June, for a few weeks of IV antibioticals. How many weeks? Nobody quite knows. Originally it was two. Then I had my follow-up on 2 July, Dr Ahmad didn’t like my numbers, and he extended it another week, which I’m still doing. In theory I’m going back 17 July. In practice? Who knows.