My week in Solitary!

-          

Hello Everyone, 

As some of you know this week was a bit of an adventure for Steve and I. Friday evening I was admitted to hospital with a fever and no immune system. I apologize for the delay in posting. I seem to be struggling to write anything coherent lately and this is my third go at writing a post. Anyways here is my best account of events from this week. 

Wednesday I was feeling a bit “off” and had a fever but had taken a Tylenol so I didn't really know what my temperature was. My temperature went down to 99 and stayed around there. Not sure what to do I called the “on-call-ogist” lol (the oncologist on call) and he suggested I stay at home unless my temp gets to 100 and stays there as risk of infection at a hospital is high. Another thing I struggle with is ulcers in my mouth caused by the chemo. The mouth ulcers are like blisters in the back of your throat and this was preventing me from eating or drinking. I slept my fever off, had a dream that my grandpa was curled up on the couch with me. Thursday my temp was all over the map but never really committed to any one temperature. At this point I was unable to eat or drink due to the ulcers in the back of my throat.

-          Friday was the day of the interview and the throat ulcers were very bad. I ended up using the lidocaine mouth wash for the interview and just dug deep and made it happen.  Come Friday afternoon I was very tired and my temperature was stable but high. I felt my temp go up but couldn’t find the thermometer so just went back to sleep. Steve asked what my temp was and I said I had lost the thermometer and promptly received “the look” from him as he went to go discover where I had accidentally hid the thing. We planned to go to the horse races that night but then my temp started to bump up and stay there. This time I did not take a Tylenol. So we were left with the decision to either go to the horse races or go to the hospital. At this point I  started feeling pretty rough so we headed off to hospital.

-          We arrived at city emerge and they had some difficulty accessing my port.  My experience there was really good except for one thing. While working on accessing my port they Dropped their “Sterile field” on the ground, picked it back up and placed it back under my arm to maintain a “sterile” environment. Generally I wouldn’t care but I was coming in with zero immune system and they were poking things straight into my blood system off of this “sterile” field. So that wasn’t ideal but I couldnt bring myself to say anything. 

-          I came in a bit tachycardic, most likely due to dehydration from not drinking and eating, and my blood oxygen saturation's were not as high as I would have liked (low 90’s). So they put me on a saline drip wide open and started pumping me with fluids. By this point my primary discomfort was the throat ulcers which had spread across the entire width of my mouth and were extremely painful. Assuming hospitals had a cure for everything I was happy to be there so they would fix them. Unfortunately there was nothing they could really do beyond what I already had which was a lidocaine mouth wash which was about as effective as trying to put out a camp fire with a cup of water.  After a little while my blood work came back and I was told I would be heading to RUH, then I was given some blood thinners and antibiotics. We were given the option to drive ourselves or take a free ambulance ride. I felt it would be a ridiculous use of resources to send me across a bridge in an ambulance (maybe 5 min drive) so we drove ourselves, but the dreaded “mask” was given to me to wear. I hate "the mask" as it makes me look more sick than I feel, and its a bit conspicuous . When we got to emerge at RUH it was PACKED, people were everywhere, EMTs waited in the hallways with patients on stretchers, people sat in chairs with IV poles beside them as there weren’t enough beds, and I get ushered into my own private room. I mean with walls and a door and everything! Now it wasn’t a very big room, and was definitely not fancy, but I appreciated the fact that people were in the hallways and likely would be for some time and I was getting my own room. Some may ask why I got to walk into emerge and not have to wait and got to go straight into my own room. Well in short, if the wrong person breathed on me I could die. You see my neutrophil (type of white blood cell) count was zero, it was so low that the machines could not measure them so they had to do a manual count. This meant that my body had zero defense against any sort of attack. So keeping me “unexposed” was vital. Because of this I was on something called reverse precautions. Which means any one who enters my room had to wear gloves and a mask.

-          Steve was by my side the entire time and ended up spending the night in a chair by my bedside!

By 3:00 on Saturday we finally got the word that we were on the move and were transferred up to the trauma surgery ward (the oncology ward was not a desirable place to be at that time) where I moved into another private room that had a bigger comfier bed (complete with push button recliner etc), a private bathroom and a window!

Steve spent another night in a chair beside me and was incredibly exhausted by Sunday. Eventually I kicked him out of my room and forced him to go home and have a sleep. Saturday at supper I recieved the previous occupants dinner which I was unfortunately unable to eat. So Sunday morning came around and as it was my first official day in that ward I didnt know what time breakfast was. At 8:30 am the nurse came by and noticed I had not recieved breakfast. She found a food services person and informed them they had somehow missed me. By 9:15 they still hadnt come by so she called down and asked for a meal to be brought up to me. 10:00 she called again and then brought me some juice to tide me over.  11:00 am still no food, they indicate to her that it is too close to lunch and no breakfast would be brought to me. At first I accepted this. Then I compromised and demanded jello and ice cream to tide me over. When the food services girl came to deliver the jello and icecream she said "i guess this must be for meds or something", feeling a little bit hangry I believe my words were "no, in fact its because you never gave me breakfast". That was my most insolent moment for the week, but I was pretty frustrated that it was okay to the staff to just not feed me. My nurse was pretty annoyed as all she could really offer me was toast which I was unable to eat. 

  Come Monday I was pretty excited when I found out breakfast was oatmeal! But other than that I still wasn’t eating much as they lunch/supper program I was on included a lot of gravy. Unfortunately for me the salt in the gravy was literally "Salt in a wound" and made it very painful for me to consume. Finally somebody put a req in for me to see a speech pathologist. However, no one told me.  So in walks a stranger telling me he’s from speech pathology. As I had to see a speech pathologist as a kid I was a)confused and b) a bit offended. 

Then he explained he was there to do an examination of my throat and see if there is anything they could do to help me eat. Well! Now we can be friends! So after some discussion we switched me from the “advanced minced diet” to the “soft diet”. He also had the dietitian come up and she informed me that I could be getting up to 3 snacks a day on top of my meals and the same day they started giving me a menu to select my food off of and voila! I was eating again. It took a couple of days before eating wasn’t painful (eating a pudding or jello would put me in tears) but I was getting nutrition in me, which was of immense relief to all involved parties. The thing I have learned with hospital food is that even though it might not always look super appetizing it actually tastes pretty good and what really amazed me was that they could consistently deliver piping hot meals! I don’t know how many patients are in the hospital at any one given time but I ate a LOT of meals there and there were times I actually had to let my meal cool down first. So kudo's to the staff!   

After four days of not even looking outside my door I was officially suffering from cabin fever and decided I was going to make a break for it. So I unhooked my IV pole from the wall put on a mask and emerged from my room. After checking with a nurse I took off on my adventure around the hospital on the hunt for Jello. 

In case being bald and wearing a hospital gown that dwarfed me whilst leaving my back exposed wasn’t inconspicuous enough I also happened to have the world’s most obnoxiously loud IV pole! I mean it was obscene! For example the main lobby or “mall” of the hospital is a bustling place. My IV pole was so loud that people would actually just completely stop talking and just stare. When walking down a hallway I had to stop so that someone could continue their phone conversation while passing me in the hallway. It got so bad that Steve and I both resorted to carrying the damn thing around instead of pulling it. Thankfully after informing the right people of this unfortunate IV pole it was replaced first thing the next morning and I had the most beautifully smooth IV pole J The other noteworthy thing about my IV pole and the design of the room I was in is that I could leave the IV pole plugged in when I needed to use the bathroom which was REALLY convenient!

 The rest of my week involved eating food, sleeping, netflix and visiting. On Tuesday night I was taken off of my IV except for when I received my antibiotics via IV. On Wednesday I was completely taken off of IV and put onto oral antibiotics and Thursday my blood counts were finally high enough it was safe to let me out and I was released back into the wild!

I have to say my time in the Trauma Ward was amazing! During this experience I learnt that not all nurses are created equal but boy there sure are a lot of amazing nurses out there and I had a bunch of them! They definitely had the ability to "make or break" the experience and almost every single one of them did a bang up job! So thank you Trauma Ward you guys rock! 

Left Foot Right Foot!

Steve  & Alyssa