This is The Reason

I thought I'd bubble this back up to the top. It's the reason why I chose LSquared as my blogger site.

I didn’t always answer to the acronym LL.

In the beginning I was LC. Then I spent a few years as LD., back to LC for a while before finally acquiring the L. Squared tag.

It didn’t come naturally, though. It was bestowed upon me through the union of marriage and that funky custom where the woman forfeits her own name for that of her husband’s. Maybe not such a bad thing, considering that she’d probably gotten her original surname from her father. Certainly not from her mother who probably had to forfeit her own name when she married, albeit that too was her father’s - and back and back like that through a long line of men’s names. But I’m digressing, aren’t I? Where was I? Ah - yes, square one.

Anyway, while I was ecstatic about my upcoming nuptials, I wasn’t too enamored with the name change, (and not due to the aforementioned reason.) It was the name itself that gave me cause for concern - I didn’t like how it had sort of a sing-song sound to it. And to add insult to injury, I soon learned that, not only would I wear the sing-song name for the rest of my life, but I also had to share it with my future husband’s cousin. Seems she’d been LL her whole life (even had the same middle name as me) and while she thought it was amusing that I’d be joining her in the ranks of L. Squared, I did not.

And yet, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d been involved in name hijacking. The first time was back when I was a teenager, traipsing about as the only LC in the small farm town where I grew up. I was around sixteen when my older brother married an L. She too shared my exact name right down to the spelling and pronunciation of the middle name. And since the newlyweds were straight out of high school without a penny between them or a place to live, our father (the guy with the name), let them move in with us. It made for some interesting mail sorting. Not to mention the screening of inbound phone calls - conversations that went something like this:

“Hello, is L there?”

“Which one?"

“LC”

“Which one?”

“L A C”

“Yeah, which one?”

“Huh?”

So again, I found myself poised to share my name with someone else. But I realized the other LL didn’t seem any worse for wear having spent her life singing her name. So I eventually got over feeling odd about it and I actually learned to love it. In fact, when I begun my writing “career” (one that has yet to take off), I was contemplating a pen name, something catchy, something people might remember something . . . sing songy! But as it turned out, I already had one! And besides, it's kind of fun having a bit of alliteration in my everyday life.

Musings from my hospital bed - part 6 of 5

You're probably thinking, "Part six? of five? You can't have one of those!"


Ah, but what would life be without all it's lovely little surprises? And besides, I recently learned that part five wasn't the end of the story after all. 


Remember my little sodium issue? Turns out it was like a white rabbit, leading Dr. Salt Pounder (bless his tenacious little heart) away from the actual target. Oh sure, I still had it, along with SIADH. And it has continued to baffle the doctors here too.


But long about three weeks after my Hospital Vacation, I started feeling about the same as right before . . . only worse. I managed to snag a Friday morning appointment with my GI who ordered blood work and a CAT scan for Monday. At the time I didn't know that both he and his nurse would be out on vacation that week! There was a prescription for GERD that never got filled (it needed communication between the Dr. and my health insurance). To top it off, I had insomnia for the first time in my life. 


Three to four fitful hours a night is all I got. Couldn't breathe for the angry stomach now digging its widening shoulder blades into my chest. Couldn't eat much of anything either. Needless to say, not my best week!


And my brain! It would not shut the heck up! Going over worst case scenarios while I waited to hear back. You know how everything is larger than life when you wake in the middle of the night to mull it over detail by minute detail? Without sleep, the entire week had become the middle of the night.

A bevy of bouncing emotions replaced all of that when my G.I. doctor called Thursday around noon. 


"Gall stones," he said. "One plugging the duct to your liver. Liver enzymes elevated and infection in your gall bladder." 


"Cool!" I thought. Something to go on. 


Back to emergency I headed where the lovely Nurse Jennifer gave me the first of a few doses of morphine. I'd never had the stuff before but decided that I LOVE Jennifer!


More stuff happened . . . tests, more tests. And more. One of them was done at 10:30 that night. Something called a MRCP sort of like an MRI of all the innards at once. I was 45 minutes in the tube and by this time, so tired I kept having lucid hallucinations, wondering why other people were in the tube with me or why, at one point, I was on the outside looking in at myself! So weird. I couldn't fall asleep because the nice voice kept telling me when to breathe and when not to. So I kept fading in and out, making stuff up in my mind. 


That done, I went back to my room for another night of no sleep. The next day I had my infected gall bladder removed followed by a scope to rid my liver duct of it's little blockage. 

However - and she says this with a frown - remember my little sodium issue? Well, it reared it's ugly head again. I was put on what they call NPO (nothing by mouth) because, apparently, one cure for low sodium is dehydration . . . see, it shrivels everything up (and I DO mean everything) to raisin size, leaving only the salt behind. And, because my GI didn't want me eating either, I had 72 hours of forced NOTHING! 

Now, here I have to take a brief diversion into what my sister and I have had going on since March. She and I decided to lose some weight and we'd help each other out, albeit remotely, by keeping in touch via e-mail. We'd weigh in every week and bounce our progress off one another. Her comment to me? 


"Gee Linda, I knew you were competitive, but this is ridiculous." 


Sunday they finally fed me and my GI was happy with the things he'd found both inside and out. Sunday I also got news that - are you kidding me? this is happening again! - they would not release me until my sodium count was up.  


So the saga continued. I stayed and stayed and gave up more pounds of flesh while they moved me off and on the NPO status. In the meanwhile a new concern cropped up . . . my white count was not coming down in spite of the fact that they had removed the nasty old gall bladder.  Oh, and did I mention my belly button? Probably not... it looked like they blew a hole through it with a cannon. 


More craziness. Followed by more. I learned that there are many, many ways to work through the process of having just lost one's gall bladder. I will NOT be sharing the fine details with you about all that! Suffice to say, I'm pretty happy to have that behind me. 


The best part about being in the hospital this time was GETTING OUT! It was on a Friday . . . a Friday that my wonderful husband had bought us tickets to see KOOZA performed via the Cirque du Soleil. 

Front row seats he had bought months earlier. And me stuck in the hospital! The original plan was to gather up with my son, his girlfriend and a dear couple whom we do this kind of stuff with whenever we do this kind of stuff. Friday morning it looked like I was not going to be released in time though. 


"Start giving away our tickets," I told Ron.


Then Low AND Behold . . . my PCP came in at 10:30am saying that I would be able to get out if one of the other doctors signed off on me (which basically meant any other nasty stuff they had planned could be done as out-patient).


"Stop giving away the tickets!" I texted Ron as soon as the PCP had left. He'd already learned that our dear friends would not be able to join us after all. So it was down to just our two tickets to keep or to give away. 


And then I waited. And waited. And waited for the final doctor to come give me the thumbs up. Meanwhile Ron, Ronnie and his girlfriend Bethany came to see me. There was talk of stealing me away for a while . . . sort of like the ending to THE BIG FISH (sans the river and all the ending drama.) It sounded more like just checking me out for a couple hours then sneaking me back in again!  


But the kids eventually left to get ready for the show and Ron and I stayed. And stayed. And stayed! 


Around 5:00 (show started at 7:00), just when we'd both decided to start giving away the tickets again, in walks the final doctor! With her thumb held high! YAY! 


Next was getting the PCP to send in the discharge papers and the head nurse to unplug my final two drip lines, fill out my prescriptions and finalize my discharge. And she did it! Just in time! I drug my bag of bones body straight from the hospital to the front row seat! In the clothes that I had checked myself in with eight days earlier. 


Life again . . . . beyond the sexy hospital gown. Was it worth the total exhaustion I felt both during and after the show? 


Oh hell yes! 


Is there a possibility of part seven of five? Well, if you're open to life's little surprises then . . . maybe there is. Maybe there is. We'll just have to wait and see. 


Meanwhile, I leave you with this tiny bit of awesomeness!

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"