Musings from My Hospital Bed - part five

. . . OF five.

Let's bury this dead horse already! Not that the saga isn't continuing  . . . still. But my inspiration around writing about it is somewhat waning and I'm sure you're totally tried of hearing me snivel over it!


Suffice to say, the "rapid dilution" plan worked, as you've no doubt guessed by now. Else how would I be sitting here writing this? After which, how would you be sitting there reading it? Right? Right.

During the course of the night and well into the next day, I offered up so much blood that I began to wonder whether the lab had more of it than I did. We all watched as my sodium level jumped around, finally settling at around 127. Which was acceptable based on where it'd come from. 

Tuesday the nursing staff changed and I was watched over by the lovely, caring team of Tracy and Nikki. Here they are here: 

Fred popped back into my room a few times just to check on me. I heard a couple comments about myself from outside the door. Something about not being your typical ICU patient since, instead of lying there watching T.V., I'd again rearranged the room so that I could sit at the desk and work on my laptap. 


Dr. SP came in a couple times for more "serious" conversations, at one point offering a mildly disguised warning of steering clear of too much on-line reading about my symptoms and such, lest I start thinking I have everything I find. 

I thought . . . wait a minute. You haven't really given me a lot to go on here. Why wouldn't I want to do a little checking on my own? He introduced me to his daughter who is interning there and he told me that sometimes, people just get SIADH for no apparent reason. That was a tad reassuring. 


The Rons came back and spent some more time with me, fooling around with stuff they could find: 

And we all added our own little missive to the board Nikki had penned so neatly for me earlier that day:

Tuesday night I slept sort of okay. But for the few times I had to shuffle out of bed, tilt my heart monitor such that I could drag my leads over to the tiny bathroom and feed them under the door which let me close it to pee in private. The leads were about ten inches shy of allowing me to sit up straight so I sorta had to lean to the left to get-er-done.  

In the wee hours of the morning as I unfurled my leads from the bathroom door and waddle back to bed, I happened to glance up at the monitor. My heart rate was 84! From the excursion of going to the bathroom?! C'mon. What had I become in those short seven days? Some kind of weenie?! I've always had a very low heart rate and this was alarming, to say the least. 

The rest of the morning I spent in meditation, trying to relax my errant aorta, which, for some reason, caused some other doo-dad to go off and sent the night nurse in to check on me. 

"Nope, just trying to get a little OM time," I'd say and she'd leave me alone.

My mind went someplace pretty dark that morning. I suddenly got it into my head that I'd done what I never wanted to do: I'd allowed myself to be a guinea pig for modern medicine. And, by doing so, possibly locked myself into a life of doctors, hospitals, tests and illness. Those of you who know me, know that I do not like doctors. And hospitals. And tests. And especially illness.  

So, at some point that morning, I finally broke down and started to cry. Something I didn't stop doing for the rest of the day. When I cried in front of Ron he told me to stop. 

"There's salt in those tears and you need all of that you can get!" 

I laughed, stop leaking for a while and looked forward to discharge (more than a little!) It was a wonderful feeling! The lovely nurse insisted on taking me out in a wheelchair and then waiting while Ron brought the car around. 

"Are you kidding me!" I said, "I'm walking out of here." And I did: 

After that we went to Walmart for a couple prescriptions then on to LOWES for a few needed items. Going home to the house on the mountain was like being folded up in a soft, warm blanket. I breathed in the air, played with my dogs and then decided to take that much needed shower. 

Now here's a thing . . . I had not been naked in front of a mirror in a week. It was somewhat of a shock to see how much weight I'd dropped just lounging around doing nothing! I got to thinking how my visit very well could have been just an expensive trip to a fat farm . . . not that anyone wants to lose weight that way. But GOSH! 

And when I looked into my face I had to start crying all over again: eyes sunken into my face, and when I tried to smile, well . . . it just looked plain creepy!

That night made up for it though. I slept for nine hours straight and woke without tears, absent the creepy smile and sporting a whole new outlook on things. I was free! Finally! And I had two glorious days to enjoy my two weeks vacation. We spent them slowly and really (REALLY) enjoyed the little time we had left at our lovely mountain home.

And FINALLY: 

Saturday morning we packed up for home, taking our usual two days to drive: 

So ended my glorious Hospital Vacation. It's certainly an episode in my life that I'll never forget! 

Things are still happening now that I'm home and my local doctors are working with me to see if they are side effects or somehow related to what put me there in the first place. Or (heaven forbid) something altogether new!

But, remembering my earlier disclaimer - how I've grown uninspired over writing about it and YOU'VE certainly grown tired of hearing it - I'm ending the continuing saga here.  

Thanks for listening everyone! Have a wonderful, healthy, joyful life! I'm going off to work on that same thing myself. Wish me luck. 

Linda  

Musings from my Hospital Bed - part four

The Mamas and the Papas were famous for a few songs. One of them went “a little” like this:


”Monday Monday, so good to me.
Monday, Monday, it was all I hoped it would be.
Oh Monday morning, Monday morning couldn’t guarantee.
That Monday evening, 
the hospital 
would not kill me.”


You can check it out here if you want.





You might notice the tiny change in lyrics I made. In truth, kill might be a little strong. It was more like, neurologically alter. But that would sort of mess with the tempo of the song and . . . well, I’ve already TALKED ABOUT THAT!


Back to my Monday. While it started out good, it went horrible awry around 6:00 pm-ish. Remember how they’d hooked me into the red pill? The one that had been dripping into my arm since noon. Well, 6ish is when the really nice nurse with the cute hair and the cute clothes came roaring into my room (where I’d been finally able to catch a bit of sleep), woke me up and unplugged the Conivaptin.


“We’re cutting this off!” she said with a smile.


“Why?” I asked with a frown.


“Because you’re at 133!” And she left.


Now I’m not really good at math but I counted on my fingers really fast and figured out that the difference between 133 and 116 is a tad beyond the safe escalation rate. What freaked me out the most was the case study I’d read earlier on-line about a woman whose sodium had been escalated 7 points in a 4 hour period. Ten days later, she was back in the hospital with little of her former self left.


Needless to say, news of my impending “death” came as a bit of a shock. 


Not one to take bad news alone, I called my husband who, along with my son, were on their way for a visit anyway.


“I think they just killed me,” I said (expletive omitted).


They were there when Dr. Salt Pounder (bless his tenacious little heart) came in for the second time, saying things like “uncharted territories” and “wasn’t suppose to do that” He defended his orders to the nurses, even showed his hand-written notes to my husband. How a 2 hour blood draw was ordered . . . and missed. My first draw had been 4 hours after the drip started and then it took another 1 1/2 hours to get the results back.


Hence the need for panic. 


I have to tell you that, when the doctor is a little freaked out, it’s not very reassuring for the patient. Dr. SP went away to devise a plan, leaving the three of us to laugh at the absurdity of it (me) or cry at the severity of it (okay, me again). The Ron Squared held up pretty good and were completely supportive while we waited for a plan.


And a plan there was! I was admitted to ICU for two nights and a treatment of rapid dilution.


My first nurse was wonderful. Here he is, Nurse Fred whom I came to adore over the next couple days as he took wonderful, gentle care of me.

Our first experience together was of him asking me to change out of my lovely clothes (damn it . . I sort of liked being dressed!) and dawn the sexy gown again. So I took my gown, my re-installed drip line, my skinny pole on wheels and myself into the tiny bathroom and tried to maneuver my way out of my tank top. It went over my head just fine. After that though, it just hung there, limp from my drip line. Then there was the gown - I couldn’t put my arm through the arm hole because of the drip line so I had to unsnap the shoulder and then try to re-snap it with one hand. Which wasn’t working at all.


Fred knocked. “Is everything okay in there?”


“Well I’m having a little bit of trouble.”


Fred’s seen worse, I’m sure and he saved me right away, got me plugged into the heart monitor (annoying thing that hated the way I’d keep rolling over and unplugging a line). And then we all begun what I like to call the pincushion effect. I had blood drawn every hour for the first 6 hours and then every 2 hours, reduced down to 4 hours by the time I was released. I had one young phlebotomist who told me that he just had to come up and see me.

“When I saw the order come through, I thought, who is this poor woman.”


Meanwhile, in an attempt to dilute my wildly askew sodium, clear water dripped into me at a very rapid rate.


Settling into the next leg of the journey all I could think was how this was where I wanted to be:

While this was where I really was:

More to follow. 

Oh, yes. It does continue. 

Musings from my Hospital Bed - part three

Did I mention how hard it was to sleep in that place? You get these little plastic boots that wrap around your legs from ankle to thigh and velcro on (tightly if you’re lucky). They plug into a thingie that’s hooked to the back of your bed. The thingie blows air into pads, first massaging the right leg and then the left, deflating one leg as it moves to the next. It’s actually a very good thing - designed to avoid blood clots as you lazy around in your hospital bed. It’s very methodical and dedicated to its task. You tend to lay there, awake from the noise down the halls seeping into your room through the thin walls, and you time the progress of the thingie . . . fifteen seconds on leg one -  rest a bit - fifteen seconds on leg two - rest. Etc, etc...


The thingie has a little brain too. It knows when you’ve been unplugged from it for too long. It starts complaining and won’t shut up. At first I called the nurse.


“I took too long to pee and now my thingie won’t shut up.” 


Then I learned that you only have to turn your thingie off before you unplug your legs. Only then are you free to shuffle around the cabin in your plastic boots. 




But that’s not all. There’s a very popular patient in the room on the other side of the wall. Of course, it’s the wall by the head of your bed. This person is so popular that his/her visitors never want to leave. They love their popular patient and they stay late. And they talk loudly. And they laugh often. And they never go away. And you never sleep.


However, sometimes you get so tired, you think that you’ll be able to push through all that and finally catch some much needed shut eye. And you’re anxious to get back to that great fantasy you’ve been reading. So you velcro up your boots, plug them into your thingie, you lean way over to turn your thingie on. You make sure you can reach the strap that shuts the light on and off. You push the button that raises or lowers your bed into a comfortable position. You pull your table over onto your lap where your book awaits. Then you realize that your glasses are on the table . . . way the heck over there where you cannot possibly reach then. Uff! . . . Maybe you should just forget about trying to read yourself to sleep. But you really like the book and want to fall asleep in that “fantastical place” rather than the one you’re really in.


Sure you could call the nurse to come fetch your glasses. But who wants to be one of those kinds of patients? So you push the button that lowers your bed, you roll the desk off your lap, lean over to unplug your legs. You’re pretty sure you can get to the table and back before the thingie knows your gone so you leave it switched on. You manage to snag your glasses, plug yourself back in, pull the table back over your lap and crank your bed back up into a comfortable position. You read for about five minutes and then realize that . . . yep, you have to pee again.


And that says nothing about trying to manipulate the mobile pole that you’ve been attached to for days via an IV drip.


Anyway, that was how Saturday and Sunday night’s “sleep” went. Pretty non-existent. And when the Rons came that morning for a visit, I learned that they’d done about the same thing (absent the thingie and the pole that is). They were still with me when the doctor came for his morning visit. He told us the Conivaptan stuff would be there at noon and that’s when they’d plug me back into the Matrix and feed me the red pill.


“Okay,” I told him, “But I have one little requirement first.”


He gave me a suspicious eyeball. “What’s that?” he asked.


“Let me out of here for a little while.”


See, the hospital regulation is that patients are not allowed off the floor of their confinement. I had come to the mountains to taste the sweet, clear air and I’d not had the pleasure of its touch for four days. I was not about to take no for an answer.


But the doctor agreed! So, with my sweatshirt on to cover up my IV drip line -- lest I get stopped by security for escaping -- I wandered the grounds for a blessed 45 minutes! It was amazing how weak I felt. But it was wonderful.

When my 45 minutes were up, the Ron Squared delivered me back to my room and they left, planning to come back in the evening once the drip had been dripping for a while. The doctor gave orders to start drawing blood every two hours to check the progress of my errant sodium.


And that . . . was the end . . . of sanity for a while.


There'll be another leg of this epic journey. I’m not sure what I’ll call it. Maybe "When life gives you lemons" Or "Hey! . . . that wasn’t supposed to happen!" Or maybe even "Linda’s body does it’s own thing . . . again" 

Musings from my Hospital Bed - part two

Also known as . . . My Vicarious Vacation. 


I forgot to mention that my Brother and Sister in Law came down from Pittsburgh for the weekend. They almost didn’t make it. When they learned about my hospital vacation, they considered staying home instead. But I’m glad they stuck to the game plan and came. It gave everyone something else to do besides worry about me.


So John and Peg drove down Friday and stayed till Monday morning. They stopped in to say howdy when they got there then the four of them went out for dinner. Waynesville has this great little restaurant called The Sagebrush Steakhouse and we always make it there at least once. Saturday, while I was hanging out, happy to be unhooked from salt water, they went rafting down the fresh kind! It had been our plan all along. Of course, normally I would have been with them but, well . . . you know.


Now, my son (the newly hatched Eagle scout) has been rafting a lot. He even went on some Level Fives in Colorado with the Scouts a while back. He always has fun but I think he enjoys going with family the most. They all stayed in the boat, had a blast (in spite of a wayward oar handle that no one will fess up to and an ensuing nasty bruise or two). And when Ron brought me my Talapia dinner that night, he also brought these:

Sunday rolled around and, since I had NOTHING to do, I wandered around the hospital, taking more pictures:  Not sure what the cage was all about!

And I elbowed my way into the boat, setting everything RIGHT! 

Sunday was also the day Dr. Salt Pounder (bless his tenacious little heart) told us they’d finally got the results back from the test they had to send out. I had somehow developed a thing called SIADH (not to be confused with the other kind of ADH). Given that I had all kinds of spare time on my hands, I’d already done a little bit of internet reading about it. Enough to know that it’s a hormonal imbalance that makes the body think it doesn’t need all that nasty old sodium so it all gets flushed down the toilet (literally). So THAT’S what my body had been doing with it! Pretty cool that they found something wrong with me though. It explained why my sodium level wouldn’t stick in spite of all the doctor’s efforts.

With good news came bad. The hospital pharmacy did not have the medicine used to treat SIADH. It would be available the following day and had to be administered via drip (oh, Yay! the skinny pole attachment again.) And it had to be dripped over a 24 hour period (oh Yay! I’ll be here till Tuesday).

In spite of all that, I felt pretty good the rest of the day until I really started reading more about SIADH. I learned that it’s a SYMPTOM disorder usually brought on by things that are even more nasty than itself. Like brain tumors, liver or kidney failure, lung cancer, heart disease. But I didn’t have any of those things! So what the heck was up with that?

It would become yet another in a series of serious conversations with my doctor . . . 

Serious conversations are all we had after the next turn of “interesting” events.