First, a heartfelt and sincere thank you to those who sent me encouraging emails and comments and to those of you who didn't comment but included me in your prayers. It is an amazing community of bloggers I've been fortunate enough to come to know.
The doctor sent me home from the hospital this evening. He even said I can go to a nearby sister's house for Thanksgiving dinner. These are good things.
I still have to "take it easy" (which may mean something different to different people and thus may occasion a spirited conversation or two, or three).
The staff at the hospital are very good people. Houston is fortunate to be the "home" of several very good hospital groups. The "big guns" are concentrated in the downtown area, called (and quite aptly)"The Medical Center". I was in one of the affiliated hospitals in Katy Texas... the Katy Memorial Herman. They're about to move into a brand new HUGE (well for a suburb huge) new hospital next month. Now, while I'm glad the hospital is going to be there??? I hope I don't get to stay there. I said so to several of the nurses and they told me they didn't want to see me there either. Nice people.
I was lucky and blessed to have been diagnosed with the pulmonary embolism. Lucky how you ask? Well. Let me lay out the steps for you that brought me to the hospital room.
My left leg's been numb-er than usual for the past couple of weeks. We chalked it down to the radicular neuropathy, and as there's no particularly effective treatment, didn't address it at once. Then I fainted and had trouble breathing. Well, I've got asthma and allergies to stuff that grows north west of here and a good cold front usually makes me wheeze a bit. I used my nebulizer and it did help a bit. The fainting was a little more problematical, and the doctor was afraid that I might have a problem with my heart, so scheduled some tests, and I was to come back on Friday to discuss the results.
Meanwhile, I.....uhmm........had tummy troubles. Livey's described similar troubles, and as she's a little more colorful writer, I'll let you remember some of her past posts. This happens to me every once in a while and it, too, is affected by the radiculopathy (nerve damage). Things get....hung up for a while. This problem caused me to have some very bad cramping pains, and I was still coughing and having trouble breathing and there were some more chest area pains.
The doc examined me last Friday, and decided that it might very well be my gall bladder, as there is a family history factor. When he told me I was going to have to go to the hospital right now, and that I would perhaps have to have surgery to remove my gall bladder, I cried. I had to go to work, I said. I LIKE going to work, I said. My boss really needs ME, I said. My doc is from South Africa. His parents moved to South Africa from China to be missionaries there. He's a little short in height, but his personality is about 9 feet tall and he breathes fire when needs be. And, in his opinion, that's any time one of his patients isn't getting the very best of care. He doesn't usually yell, but he makes the place downright warm and there is the occasional scent of scorched PA's who don't take good notes or listen carefully to his instructions.
As he left to go call the hospital and procure me a room, his nurse was comforting me. I apologized for crying. She said not to worry about it, a lot of people cried in this office. "I know," I wailed, "but most of them work here".
Oh, yah, she laughed.
So, as it had happened, we'd had an 11 am appointment. I hadn't eaten yet that day, as my stomache was hurting too bad for me to want to eat. The doc said something along the lines of that normally not being a good thing, as diabetics should eat regularly, but in this case it was perhaps just as well.
Off to the hospital we went. I'd not exactally prepared anything for such a trip and, to be honest, I was dressed more for comfort than looks. We live 15 miles from the doc's office and in the opposite direction of the hospital.
Later on, I sent 'Pup to Wal-Mart. One of the items I told him to purchase I had to write down for him. After wandering confused in the approximate area of the store I'd sent him to and noting that even the specific directions I'd given him still left a lot of room for decisions to be made, he cornered.. er requested assistance from.. an associate. A lady associate. He just held up the paper with the list, she escorted him to the required items, helped him pick them out and said that he was a very good husband. (Come to think of it, ladies undergarments are a bit overwhelming if one does not have some experience there.)
We got to the hospital and settled in to the room. Then, the blood tests began. The first afternoon I was there they took 8 or 9 vials of blood for tests, I had an abdominal ultra sound and a heart ultra sound. And I was hooked up to a bag of fluids and told not to eat or drink, as I was probably going to be in surgery the next morning.
The tests came back later that evening. The tests were inconclusive. They'd not found any gallstones, but couldn't rule them out because I am...uhmm...well..I prefer to call myself "well rounded". The round part makes getting a good ultra sound difficult. So, they scheduled me for a CAT scan. And they drew 11 more vials of blood. Yes, I said eleven.
The next morning, they looked at the test results and realized that while my gallbladder wasn't working as well as it should, that what they saw from the CAT scan was a pulmonary embolism. Next thing I knew an oxygen tube was being wrapped around my face and another IV line was being put into my right arm. And the nice lady who'd done my abdominal and cardiac ultra sounds had brought up the machine to my room and was doing an ultra sound on both legs.
My good doc came later and told me what was going on. I was scheduled for another scan, this one using a radioactive isotope and a very large machine. The surgeon came to "explain" it to me. He told me that they would be injecting some dye into my arm, but it wasn't really a dye, and that then I would be laying down and they would take pictures of me. I felt like biting the patronizing twit. Some of that must have shown on my face as he stepped back and suddenly had to leave.
They came for me at 11 am. I had to hold myself as still as possible for 2 hours. It ended up taking 3 hours. I think I may have slept through some of it as it didn't seem that long. I wasn't comfortable enough to sleep, but I can go into my head and think very hard about other things, and the time passed. I was brought back to the room and allowed only the "clear fluids", as they weren't sure that they might not have to still perform some form of surgery.
All the while... my tummy hurt. A lot. So the surgeon (that twit) who would have done the gall bladder surgery decided I needed a little chemical help to...uhmm... resolve the difficulty. I really hate the taste of magnesium citrate, but I was a good girl and chugged it down.
It's really the only way to get it down... before you can taste it. One of the nurses asked what it tasted like. I told her. It tastes rather like semi flat diet sprite with extra syrup, and then liberally salted. If it is gulped ice cold, then you can get through it only gagging a little. Sipping it? Feh. Uh uh, nooooo, not going to happen. So, down it went. Through a straw and taking as large gulps as possible I managed to get most of the first bottle down in four large chugs.
In retrospect this might not have been the wisest thing to do, 'cause shortly thereafter things started to rumble, cramp and hurtverymuchmakeitstopdangit!! The nurse brought over a bedside toilet as it was plain I wasn't going to make it to the bathroom, and even if I had, there wasn't enough room there for the nurse to monitor me. I had a feeling this wasn't going to be fun, and I was right.
Then, my roomie's son came to visit. And stayed. And stayed. All the while, I was not a happy camper, and was straining and moaning and hurting something fierce. I kept wishing he would get the heck out of the room so I could at least have some last, tenuous grasp on my dignity. He stayed right to the very end. And the end...wasn't pleasant. Serves him right for sticking around so long.
From then on, I was jet propelled. I finally had the privacy to make it to the bathroom and made several trips there through out the night. And I still couldn't have anything to drink.
On Sunday, the surgeon finally gave up on my gall bladder. It wasn't functioning, and someday it will have to come out, but the heparine drip made surgery an unwise proposition. They finally allowed me to eat...a clear liquid diet. Broth, (nasty, but warm and wet), lime jello, and a cup of grape juice and one of apple juice. Y'all. Apple juice, orange juice and grape juice are things a diabetic simply can NOT have even singly. In conjunction with one another, they'd have spiked my blood sugar and then dropped me like a stone.
The next morning, they tried again. I sent the juices back again, and was firm when telling the nursing staff WHY I couldn't have the juice. This was to set a pattern. Grumble grumble. I kept having to send the trays back half uneaten. Then they stopped allowing any salt. Y'all. My usual BP is about 117/70. It was even lower with me being in bed. Why I was on sodium restriction I couldn't figure out.
When I wrote a note on my lunch tray on Monday (I'd graduated to a 1600 calorie ADA/cardiac diet), the dietician came to see me, apparently ready to educate me on the proper diabetic diet. After a little discussion, she agreed to have another "meat" on my plate, and less carbs. This only half happened. Sigh. The nurses kept marveling at how low my blood sugar levels were without insulin or any other meds. Not eating has a way of doing that. My roomie, an older woman, always seemed to have very high readings. No wonder, as she was eating all of the food sent up.
Lovely lady, my roomie. She was a little confused while I was there. All the while, the nurses and doctors and therapists would come in and assess her cognitively. One question came up again and again. "Do you know what the date is?" One time, she answered 1996. The doctor gently corrected her and told her that it was actually 2006. My dear roomie said, "Well. No wonder I'm so tired, traveling all that time at once." I wish I could have seen her doctor's face.
Meanwhile, they kept drawing more blood for tests, 'till finally they were down to one at a time to test the INR (how quickly/slowly my blood would clot). They also started me on coumadin. I'm not an easy person to establish an IV on, nor is it easy to find a good spot to draw enough blood. I have very colorful arms right now.
It seems I have a genetic predisposition to clot quickly. This hasn't been a problem, as I'm usually a fairly active person. Lately, with the pain? Not so much. So the clot happened.
All in all, I was lucky. My embolisms were small, and things hadn't progressed too far. It's too early to tell for sure, but I am afraid I may have lost a little of my lung capacity. On the other hand, I'm alive.
And that's a good thing.
The lavender lantana is going to be marvelous this spring.
