Monthly Archives: April 2017

My Hospital Stay With a Blood Clot part II

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Hello, it’s me again with part 2 of my post about the blood clot in my lung.  In this post, I will tell you about my experiences in the hospital.  Boy, are they a doozie!

To start out with, they gave me dilaudid, a very powerful narcotic that made me hallucinate (I cannot have morphine because I’m allergic to it).  Every time I looked at someone in the room, I believed they had big, black bugs and birds dive bombing their heads!  I actually told my daughter and her father to watch out, they had bugs and birds flying around their heads!  They looked at me like I was crazy, and I was at the time! How embarrassing.  I did find a way to not embarrass myself again like that – even though I could have sworn I seen these bugs and birds around people’s heads, I just told myself it wasn’t real because if it was they would be jumping and yelling like crazy.  It was hard not to warn them, but I just kept that secret to myself the rest of the time I was on that drug.  I was afraid they were going to send me to the funny farm!

I honestly don’t know which system, the digestive or the respiratory that hurts the worst.  I would get these pains in my back/side that would feel as though something was electrocuting me at that spot with tiny needles.  Then I would also feel as though I was having back spasms in that area.  I also had what they called Pleurisy which is fluid between the layers of the lung itself.  I could not lay on either side of my body, when I did it hurt so bad and I would get anxiety because I would be grasping for air.  I could only lay on my back which was a bummer.

One time there was this CNA who was taking my vitals and I had asked her if she could get someone to help me scoot up in the bed.  She told me that she would help out before she got someone.  She started having me flip on my sides and all the sudden I was in full panic mode!  It hurt so bad when she flipped me on either side of my body and I couldn’t even get in the air to scream!  She ran to get the nurses and they tried to calm me down and breathe and when that didn’t do, the nurses  ran to get a doctor.  I had never felt so much pain and to not be able to breathe was painful too.  Finally, after cranking up my oxygen and giving me some pain meds, I started calming down a bit.  I would not wish that upon anyone.

There was this one night there, I believe the second night I was there that the nurses collected around 5000ml of urine from my catheter.  They told me the next morning that it was equivalent to 10 pounds of fluid!  I lost 10 pounds that one night!  I was for some reason very swollen up the day before.  I also had this weird low grade fever I couldn’t get rid of and they wanted to ship me to the big Barnes in the city.  They told me I was the number 1 person on the waiting list and I begged them to let me stay.  Luckily for me, after all that fluid was released, my vitals started getting better and got off the list!  Oh yeah, the dye from the ct scan in the ER hurt my right kidney and threw me in kidney failure.  Sometimes, I believe if I didn’t have bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all!  So in the midst of all the lung problems, I had to worry about kidney failure.  They were actually talking about putting me on dialysis at one time!

Finally, I was getting a little better after 8 days in the ICU so the nurse taking care of me asked me if I wanted her to do my hair.  She was a hairdresser previously and she knew it would make me feel better if I could do a little something to myself.  I am not the one to turn down any kind of pampering so she washed my hair and after it dried, she french braided it.  I felt like a new person!  The next day I was transferred to a regular room for 4 more days of recovery.  There I was to gather my strength so I could walk and to get off the oxygen.  The first time I walked the hallway, I had a walker and my oxygen tank with me.  I felt like a little old lady!

 

The nurses there were all so nice and pleasant to me, even the doctors, the people who took my vitals and the lunch ladies.  I have never had such great care from all the many hospitals that I have been in.  There was this student nurse that helped take care of me one day.  Her name was Bethany.  She was the nicest person – she would peek her head in every 30 minutes to see if I was okay or needed anything.  When she found out I had an ostomy, she asked if she could watch me drain it and then she had 20 questions afterward.  She told me that she hadn’t come across a person with a bag yet in her internship and she was fascinated with it and giddy.  I wish I could say the same – although I have come to get used to it now.

Finally after 12 days I was released from the hospital.  The weekend before I was released, my daughter Bella spent the night with me.  We had a girl’s night in room 435 that night and I loved every bit of it!  The doctors believe the clot came from the catheter that I had replaced back in February.  They believe a clot may have formed there, then was knocked loose somehow and it traveled to my lung where it grew larger and cut off my blood circulation and part of my lung died.  I don’t think I will get this one replaced ever again..I am now on a blood thinner for at least 9 months, maybe more.

I want to thank everyone who prayed for me.  I really needed all that I could get that night and throughout my hospital stay.  I would love it if you could continue praying for me, I obviously need all I can get. I still have the clot in my lung, it’s just dissolving slowly and will be absorbed in my system.  I’m not dare going to ask what’s next, I don’t want to know!  I’m just going to take one day at a time, as I still get winded walking inclines or up the stairs.  Right now I’m taking the elevator until I can get myself built back up.  Thank you again for all your prayers and thoughts.

Chow for now!

My Recent Trip to the ER (Why Me?) part I

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Hello everyone, I hope everything is going well your way.  I have had an interesting couple of weeks to say the least.  Sit back and let me tell you a story..

Well, just when I thought nothing else could go wrong..it did.  For the past month I have been feeling very fatigued – I mean I was fighting to get through the day.  Of course this is a big symptom of having Crohn’s Disease so I didn’t think much of it when it happened.  My next symptom was my aching chest and back (I tried so hard to get my daughter or my husband to rub my back but they declined; it turned out to be a blessing in disguise).  I also developed a low grade fever with all this.  It was then that I thought I could have pneumonia, as I have had this so many times and I thought I knew the symptoms well.  Boy, was I wrong on this one – there is another culprit out there with the same symptoms that I had..I will tell you the story now.

On March 29th, all the symptoms that I have been feeling started to come together and escalate. I had a low grade fever, my chest and back was aching and I felt like poop.  I told my husband that I was going to call the doctor the next day.  I called my doctor first thing in the morning and got an appointment to see her later that day.  She knows that I have had pneumonia a few times and therefore she knows what my symptoms are and listens to me when I tell her that it feels like I have it again.  She told me that she heard cackling in my back so she prescribes me a z-pac and sends me to the hospital to get an x-ray.  I was surprised when she emailed me later telling me the x-ray was clear, no pneumonia.

That night, my back on the right side was really aching badly so I put a heating pad on it.  It felt better temporarily but the pain would come back.  Later, around midnight I had gotten up to go to the bathroom and all was fine.  However, when I got up at 3:00 am to go to the bathroom, I could not make it to the bathroom without running out of breath.  I started gasping for air and began panicking!  Somehow I managed to unhook myself from my TPN nutrients and flip on the bedroom light to tell Mark to get up, we were going to the ER.  I stayed in my pajamas and just pulled my hair back in a ponytail and we took off.

 

When we arrived, thank Heavens we were the only people in the ER at that time.  They took my blood and an x-ray was performed.  The x-ray came back negative so they ordered a ct scan to be performed.  By this time, I had 2 IV’s going in both arms!  The ER doctor came back to our room and he looked a little worried (okay a lot)!  He preceded to tell us what was found on the ct scan.  They had found a large blood clot with several smaller ones in the right side of my lung. It had lodged itself near the bottom of my lung therefore cutting off the blood circulation and killing off that part of my lung.  This is called a pulmonary embolism with infarction. Immediately they gave me oxygen and started filling my IV with Heparin to thin my blood and start dissolving the clot.  The doctor told me that they were taking me to the ICU from the ER and I had strict orders not to get out of the bed for anything! They didn’t want the clot to move. This all happened so fast it was like a blur to me.  Before I knew it I had some very good drugs and a catheter in me.  They weren’t kidding when they said I wasn’t to get out of the bed!

I’m going to stop here and make this story a part 2.  I believe people, including me, tend to get bored when the post is too long.  In the next post, I will tell you about my stay and my experiences in the hospital.  Oh yeah, by the way, they said if I had gotten that massage I was sooo begging for, it could have dislodged the clot and the clot could have traveled to my brain giving me a stroke or my heart giving me a heart attack.  You won’t catch me asking for another!!

Chow for now!