It has been a long week (she says as she hooks her arm up to the IV). I have been home the whole time. I think it is a record! Thankfully, I am doing okay if you consider the shit I have to deal with everyday an okay way to live. If you can't already tell, I am bitter about this whole no energy, sore all over, tubes and bags hanging off of me thing. Yet no matter how sore and tired I am it is still good to be sleeping in my warm bed, eating real food, wearing a couple of my own outfits (I can't fit into most of my clothes now), being able to go outside and drive around in my car and most of all being with my family. It beats the hell out of being on constant display at the hospital in my backless gown and my morning wakeup call being a big angry woman with a huge needle and the blood drawing skills of a camel. Not to mention the surgical staff's obvious disinterest in anything remotely having to do with fixing me. I have three doctors appointments over the next week and a half and I have absolutely no one to sit with my children. Two of my appointments are on the same day. That will mean an entire afternoon devoted to sitting in the clinic (with children in tow). I don't know what to do about that. My mom went home today. I cried. She has helped me so much. She is supposed to come back sometime. I don't know when yet. It is going to be very hard to do everything by myself. I can barely get from sitting to standing alone. Where is all my strength and willpower now? I don't know either.
Posted by gwendolyn on December 31, 2002 at 08:18 PM
I should state that I have been back in the hospital and out again. I hadn't had a chance to really get back to normal yet before I landed myself a four day weekend packed in ice courtesy of Cleveland Clinic Hospital. I had an infected PICC line. They pulled it out and weird things started to happen to me within seconds. Shakes, chills, teeth chattering, dizziness, hurling. It took me a whole fifteen minutes to go from fine to admitted to the hospital. Fevers of 104.5 are scary. People panic. No one lets you wear clothes or blankets and they shove ice packs in your underwear. Ice can be a very painful torture device. So the infection that was released directly into my blood stream was identified and attacked with the proper medicine and is now hopefully all gone. I am taking home IV antibiotics for the next two weeks. I had to go home with a new PICC line for that. It was a very difficult thing to have to go through to get home for Christmas, but I did it. Not like I had a whole lot of choice. It was that or keep sitting in the hospital. No thanks.
Christmas was good. All of the assorted little monkeys were pleased. Mom was very happy with her gift. I was completely floored by mine. I must have been an extremely good girl this year :)
Posted by gwendolyn on December 27, 2002 at 09:30 AM
I should report that I have been home since Thursday. It has been a hard few days so I have not been able to update. Lots of pain. Lots of getting used to being home. Lots of tiredness. Lots of bill paying and mail to sort through. It hasn't been as easy as I thought it would be. They basically decided that they had done all they could for me there. They can't operate on me until the three month mark is up for the blood clots in my lungs so they sent me home as soon as I could get the pain under control with something besides Morphine. I barely have. There have been hours of torturous unrelenting pain and hysterical crying and momentary discussion of going back in. I just can't do it to my kids. I would rather lay on the floor and die for three months than disappoint them like that. They won't be able to handle it. There have also been times when I start to think everything might be okay. So now there is nothing to do but pump the Percoset into me on a regular schedule and just wait. I am tired. I am hungry. At least I am home. That makes me very happy despite it all.
Posted by gwendolyn on December 16, 2002 at 09:53 PM
I know it seems I have dropped off the face of the Earth. In a lot of ways I have. I am still hanging around the hospital with horrible fuzzy Morphine masked pain and no one wearing a white jacket can seem to agree with any of the other white jackets what to do for me or about me.
They did move me to a very nice coner room at the very end of a very long hallway. One with a wall made of glass so that I can see the staff parking lot, Weston Road, trees and sky,the helecopter pad right next to my room, and the rooftops and treelines of Weston in the distance. I think my complete lack of composure, feelings of self pity, hopelessness and exhaustion prompted one of the nices nurses here to try to do something to lift me up. To a degree it has. I have the windows open the entire six inches they will allow so that I can here the sounds of the rest of the world and feel a breeze. I am sick of hospital smells and sounds. The smell of an alcohol swab makes me cringe now. I would have never thought that would happen. I guess it is all about sensory association. I will never be able to drink another lemon flavored thing in my life thanks to the contrast I so reluctantly drank and then not-so-politely spewed all over the CT Scan room last week.
Posted by gwendolyn on December 10, 2002 at 11:06 AM
I am not going home. I have had a bad night and a bad morning. I would give anything for this pain in my abdomen to go away. I want to sleep. I want to be able to lay down. Everything looks very hopeless again. No one can tell me what is wrong or how I can get better.
Posted by gwendolyn on December 03, 2002 at 11:30 AM
I am taking lots of blood thinner shots and pills. They took away my morphine machine. They put me back on the breathing treatment machine. They think the clots will go away. They think my stomach will eventually stop attacking itself and causing me horrible cramping pain everytime I eat, drink, breathe, or move. They can't be 100% certain though. They put me on Percoset pills that don't really do anything except make me too tired to deal with anything. They think I will go home tomorrow. I hope they are right. I will believe it when I have been home with my babies for more than 24 hours without having to come back.
Posted by gwendolyn on December 02, 2002 at 08:36 AM