Coming Back

Okay, so it's been a year or so since my last post here. Bad on me. But I felt compelled to start this up again after finding myself in hospital again suffering from the same affliction that landed me there last year.

July 31st, I was starting to feeling crummy. I thought that I had a case of the flu coming on, so didn't think much of it. But, then I started to get the chills, and suddenly I had this horrible feeling that things were progressing the same way they did last year. We waited it out Sunday evening before panicing, but when Monday morning rolled around, it was quite clear that there was something serious going on. I was week, and I could feeling my thoughts becoming clouded, and my speech was becoming labored. We went directly to the emergency room.

I remember getting admitted, and getting onto the bed in the ER. Many nurses and doctors came through, but sometime an hour or so into the ordeal, I begin to loose coherent memories of the events. The next clear thing that I remember is being wheeled into the ICU and transferring over to the ICU bed, which, it turns out, was the exact same bed that I used when I was hospital last year.

My memories are very incoherent in ICU. At one point I woke up, and I had was I later found out was an ice blanket on, because my temperature was 107 degrees! I remember waking up and seeing that a nurse was just finishing up putting a PICC line into my arm, a procedure that I went through at least 3 times last year, and something that I wouldn't think I would be able to sleep through. I have a vague memory of our good friends Brendan and Emmily coming into the room to see how I was doing. It's a jumble. Like someone took a picture album and tore all of the pictures out, scattered them on the floor, and lost half of them.

More to come...

Pet Therapy

I want to take a brief break from my account of my hospital stay to expound on pet therapy.

While I was staying in the skilled nursing department, about twice a month, a volunteer would come around with a dog on a leash. The dog that was there most of the time was a large labradoodle, which is a cross between a labrador retriever and a poodle. This was a bit of an odd looking dog, but the sweetest animal. Petting him gave me a very calming feeling, and really put a smile on my face, which considering the situation, was quite an accomplishment.

Being in the skilled wing, I was able to have one of our cats come and visit me in the room. We chose Hershey because she is the most outgoing and the least skittish of our two cats. The first visit consisted of Hershey exploring the room and basically ignoring me. But at that time I hadn't seen her in almost three months, so just having her in the room was great. Subsequent visits went better, although she never got totally comfortable with the room.

After one of the visits, the nurse came in and took my blood pressure. It was about 20 points lower than it usually was! This occurred after a subsequent visit, and I had the same result. It was amazing the calming effect that Hershey had on me. Even now, as I continue to recover at home, our cats continue to create an aura of calm around the house... unless they are tearing around playing with each other. Then all you can do is make sure your feet stay clear of the trajectory!

Beginning Anew, Part 2

After the surgery, I was taken to the ICU to recover. I was out for a week, as my family and friends and the doctors all waited to see if I would respond to the antibiotics. Soon, my fever broke. After this I woke up, although I have no memories of the first week. I was basically just responding to different stimuli in the room. I was focusing in the direction of voices in the room. I seemed to respond when they turned the television on and Star Wars was playing.

When I finally became consciously aware of things, I remember being very confused. I didn't know where I was, or what time or date it was. I spent a lot of time drifting in and our of sleep. I remember thinking to myself at one point that I must be at the University of Iowa Hospitals in Iowa City for some reason. My brothers, their wives, and my nephew flew in soon after they learned that I was in the hospital. I do remember them coming in and saying goodbye. Of course, this entire time I've been intubated so I was unable to speak. So all I could do was smile, nod, and point.

It was about this time that I became fully aware of my surroundings. I saw a note that had been left for the staff that I liked the Disney Channel and the SciFi Channel on the television. I looked at the calendar across the room, and came to a startling realization. As far as I had know up to this point, I had been in the hospital for a couple of days. But, when I saw the days marked off on the calendar, I realized that I had been in the hospital for a week!

I also became aware of something that would completely change my view of the world. I was unable to move my legs, and my arms were nearly useless. And on top of that, I could not feel my feet. I don't remember really saying anything about it, but it definitely scared me.

A couple of days after I woke up, the decision was made to remove the breathing tube from my mouth and do a tracheotomy. This is basically a breathing tube in the throat that allows you to breath with the help of a ventilator, but also be able to do things like eating and drinking. This was my first surgery that I was aware of. I was apprehensive, but came through with flying colors.

Soon after I became aware of the world around me, I experienced my first bout with dialysis. During this whole ordeal, my kidneys had shut down, which meant there was nothing to remove the impurities from my blood. The doctors were also using the process to remove excess fluid from my body. In an attempt to bring my blood pressure up to a level that they could at least measure, they pumped my full of fluids. Apparently, I look unbelievably bloated after this process. Needless to say, there was a lot of excess fluid to remove.

During dialysis, your blood is cycled through a machine that basically performs the function of the kidneys. This process is very tiring, and can make you sick to your stomach, especially if they are also pulling massive amounts of fluids off of your body. There are a number of restrictions that go along with this process. They put you on a fluid restriction. You do not realize just how thirsty you can get until you can't have anything to drink. The nurses did a good job of regulating my liquids so that I didn't use everything up early in the day. But there was a lot of eating ice chips in the meantime.

There are also restrictions on the diet. I was not able to eat foods with a lot of potassium or phosphorus. This removed pretty much all dairy from my diet, and for someone who loves milk and cheese, this was a huge deal. So, I had to put non-dairy creamer on my cereal in the morning, and I was unable to have any milk to drink. No grilled cheese sandwiches, no cheese burgers, no pizza. If dialysis did not bring my kidneys back to life, I wasn't sure how I was going to survive with such a limited diet.

More later...

Beginning Anew

Well, here I am, back again. I keep coming back to this blog, wanting something to say, something to share with everyone. I've had many ideas in the past, but nothing seemed right. That was before 2010. This has been a year of change, a year of struggle, and a year of hope. Now, if you will indulge me, I want to share my experiences from the past half year. A year that started with a lovely Christmas celebration, and quickly degraded into a life-or-death struggle with an organism that I had no idea had taken up residence in my body.

January 10th was just like any other Sunday. We returned from celebrating Christmas with my family in Pennsylvania, and headed to bed, looking forward to a Monday off from work. Monday came, and I started to feel as though I had caught a touch of the flu. I remember having dinner with my wife that night. Because my stomach wasn't feeling well, I thought that a nice turkey sandwich from Panera would hit the spot.

Things are a bit fuzzy until bedtime, when I started to shiver uncontrollably. We piled the blankets on as I tried desperately to get warm, but nothing seemed to be working. It was then that I remembered we had a fan with a heating element in the bathroom, so I went into the bathroom and turned the heating fan on. I then asked Emily to get me some hot tea. As I sat getting warm, drinking hot tea and bottled water, it occurred to me that perhaps I was dehydrated, since the symptoms seemed to fit. So I continued to take in fluids like mad, something that, in retrospect, was probably a bad idea. I don't remember a lot after this.

I have vague memories of waking up the next morning, and telling Emily that I had called my boss at work to tell him that I wouldn't be in (although I hadn't). I don't remember the following events, but Emily and my parents have related bits and pieces to me. Apparently, the next few hours consisted of me traveling between the bathroom and the bedroom, all the while telling Emily that I was okay. Emily had since asked her parents (who live here in Dubuque) to come over because she was worried about how I was acting, telling my wife at one point, apparently, that I had a tumor. All I can think of when I hear this is Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Kindergarten Cop" telling the children "it's not a tumor!" As I slipped further into delirium, my father-in-law called my parents (who live about 90 minutes away) and asked them to come down. Soon after they arrived, I was to the point where I was talking incoherently. At that point, my father made the decision to call 911.

Apparently it was quite the scene outside of our house in our quiet little subdivision. For, when you make a 911 call, regardless of the emergency, you will receive the following emergency vehicles: a police cruiser, a fire rescue truck, and an ambulance. I'm a big guy, and I was bigger when this happened, so it took quite a few of the responders to get me on the gurney and out to the ambulance. I have what I can only imagine is a false memory of being dropped before reaching the ambulance. The next memory is being slid into the ambulance. I then have a brief memory of the ambulance garage at Mercy Hospital, as they took me out of the ambulance and rushed me to the emergency room. Jump to one of the examination rooms in the ER, and my memory of trying to get up off of the examination table, telling people that "I have to leave." Emily said that I was very out of it at this point, and not making a lot of sense at all.

At this point, my memories stop. The rest is from accounts from friends and family. I was taken to surgery so that they could determine why my body's systems were failing. The surgeon told my family that I had a 10 percent chance of surviving the surgery, but a 1 percent chance of surviving without the surgery. Quite possibly the hardest thing that my wife had to do at that time was to sign the consent form giving the doctors permission to perform surgery, a surgery that I may not return from. The staff then began to wheel me down to the operating room. As they pulled me into the waiting elevator, one of the wheels took a bad turn and became lodged between the elevator and the main floor. Unfortunately, all of the staff members helping were at that point in the elevator, behind the bed. My father-in-law, in a moment of fast thinking and super-human strength, lifted the bed by himself and got it into the elevator.

I came out of surgery with three deep wounds in my right leg, where the surgeon had removed skin in an attempt to determine what had happened. By this time, the only system in my body that hadn't shut down was my circulatory system, and as it was, my blood pressure was not high enough to register on the equipment. I had a fever somewhere over 105 F. And I was out cold. The doctors basically told my family that all we could do was wait at this point and hope that the fluids and antibiotics would do their job.

To be continued (of course)...