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June 01, 2005
Digging In
I feel like I'm about to be put under siege again. I really don't know why I feel this way, I have no current basis for it...yet.
Something is wrong with my husband. It's been a very long time since something was amiss. I know it may be minor. I know it needs to be looked into. The tests have all been done and now we wait to see if anything turns up.
I guess there are some things in life you never really get over.
March 11, 2000 I walked into the hospital where my husband was a patient and I was told by 2 doctors, the HMO PCP assigned to that hospital and the ID doctor covering that weekend, that they didn't think he would live through the day. The ID doctor told me in person. The HMO PCP told me over the phone while I stood at the nurses station, as we also discussed my husband's DNR wishes. I wondered if this was the first time he'd ever had to tell a family member someone wasn't going to make it. Maybe that's why he hid behind a phone line.
It's good that my husband and I had talked about all this when he had a Power of Attorney and a Medical Directive done a few months before. Times like that the mind just doesn't funtion up to par.
He spent the day in and out of lucidity. His family was with us. They had gathered from all parts of the country. About 11 that night, my in-laws drug me out of the hospital, telling me I needed to rest. I remember crying myself to sleep...and around 4 I woke up...crying. I headed back to the hospital and fueled myself with more coffee...I had been living on it recently. I checked on him, but didn't wake him in between refills. I walked back into his room around 8 and he was sitting up bright eyed and bushy tailed. I was stunned! Overjoyed, but stunned. It seems one of the doctors had the idea to give him steriods sometime in the night.
The events leading up to this had begun months before. Little stuff. Then they progressed to bigger things and I got to know the ER doctor's at our local hospital better than I would have liked. Mostly they'd run tests, call our doctor, prescribe something and send him home, telling him to see his doctor.
Then came his first admission. I had once again taken him to our local hospital, they conferred with our doctor and it was decided he needed to be admitted. However our local hospital was not part of my HMO, so he was admitted to a hospital in the city my HMO covers...90 miles from home.
He was there for 2 days. He'd had an allergic reaction to the anti-biotic he had started.
I got him home. He was so weak. Then one afternoon, his whole body just seemed to crash. We went through the whole routine again with the ER and the admission. The ER once again released him so we could take him to the other hospital. My brother drove this time. Rush hour. We crawled. All this time my husband laid in the back seat, looking more dead than alive. We got him to the hospital and up to his room. The nurse took his bp...it was 66 over 20. Too low. At this point the HMO doctor had yet to make his appearance. He had been paged, but the nurse's couldn't do anything.
At this point an angel walked in the room in the guise of an Anesthesiologist. He introduced himself and said he had overheard the nurses talking and would I give consent for him to look at my husband. I said "Of course". The next thing I knew he had that room hoppin' and poppin'. He'd told the one nurse to find the HMO doctor, now! He had the ICU resident called up. He was calling for IV's and medications.
In between all that he was rapid firing medical history questions to me. In another time and place it could have been a game show...how fast and how concise could I answer. Beat the Clock.
It wasn't until our doctor got back in town the following Monday, after all this that I was able to really get any information. I was told he had Pneumonia. The doctor said the good news was it was just a bacterial one and not PCP, that he probably pick-up during his hospital stay shortly before...and that drop in blood pressure might have been due to a stroke, but they really didn't know.
His hospital stay was just about a month. During that time, one thing or another would seem to crop up. They had trouble taking him off the steriods after putting him on. His Potassium levels were almost non-exisitant, etc, etc, etc. Our doctor said when a body was as far gone as my husband's was...any little thing was a major thing.
We had many long months of recovery. We battled OI's. I learned how to set the IV drip for Ganciclovir. I dug out my old BP cuff and got good again at taking BP's. I kept track of a mile long list of medications and when to give them. I watched him like a hawk for any little change. I did that for months.
So, now there's something up. His overall health is better now, then before, which should give me comfort. There's nothing to say there isn't an easy fix to this. But like I said...there are some things in life you just don't get over.
Posted by aster1961 at June 1, 2005 09:03 AM
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