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.