Well, James' foot is slowly healing. However...it's been a weird trip there.
First, I unwrapped it on Groundhog Day to do the twice-weekly sterilizing and rewrapping, and on either side of the stitches were big fat blisters! Really strange because otherwise the foot looks great (except for the betadyne stains); even the minor swelling, which he has had ever since he got the infection last December, has gone away. (And heck, maybe this was a sign all along that the bone infection was lurking under the surface all year even though his white count didn't increase nor did his blood test show any kind of infection, even when he was in the hospital to have the pus in the toe treated.) I can only conclude this is the result of his not wearing the compression socks.
Thankfully, the thigh portion of his left leg was still relatively blister free (one broke out right before our doctor visit, but it's not even a half inch in diameter, so it's one of his smaller blisters) and isn't the holy mess the leg was last year after his hospital stay. I treat that every other night with the leg cream recommended by the dermatologist.
So, I was worried about what the doctor was going to say on Friday the 4th at James' next followup appointment, and I didn't sleep well, and then we got to the doctor's office and the nurse took James' blood pressure and it was too low all three times. Well, I've been worried about this happening. When he was in the hospital, his blood pressure was way up in the 160s, and they not only doubled his beta-blocker (the carvedelol), but they pulled him off lisonopril and put him on both hydralazine (three times a day!) and amlodipine. Nobody seemed to be sure if the high numbers were due to the infection or from the combination of two antibiotics. I asked the doctor smack up front when he was released what to do if his blood pressure started to fall, and she gave us the numbers to watch for. Well, the moment he came home his blood pressure started to fall (surprise!) and when he came off the antibiotics it dropped like a rock. First I pulled him off the amlodipine. Then I took him off his afternoon dose of hydralazine. And it seems to have finally stabilized. We'll see this Friday. It was okay at his Urgent Care followup this morning.
(I am still flummoxed why they told us that the lisonopril was bad for his kidneys. Because the person who prescribed it was his kidney doctor! Also glad when he finished the antibiotics, because the combination of the two completely fucked up his blood sugar and gave him diarrhea as well.)
Anyway, to get back to February fourth... James does as he always does at Kaiser; the exam rooms are not large enough for his power chair, so he parks it outside the door and limps to the examination table.
Except when he stood up on Friday, his left pants leg caught in the top of one of the "outrigger" wheels on the power chair. He dropped like a felled tree on his left side and had the wind knocked out of him. Ironically, unlike the other three times he's fallen, he didn't hit his head, or even scrape his elbow. It did hurt him, but he didn't think it was that bad. However, since he really has limited mobility, he could not get to his feet on his own—it's always taken two strong firefighters unless he can buttscoot to the top of the stairs and then get up that way—so they had to use this lift gadget they have to get him off the floor. Only then did he finally get the stitches removed, and nobody suggested he go downstairs and get an x-ray. The doctor did prescribe a limited amount of hydrocodone for any pain, and we picked that up and we got home and he took one and leaded against a heating pad and figured it would help. It got later. We ate something. We watched Steve Canyon to take his mind off the pain.
The pain was getting worse.
So, heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it was off to Urgent Care we go. At least they let me sit inside, on the opposite side of the doors from the Urgent Care area, even though we apparently hit Urgent Care on a dead night and no more than two people were ever in there at the same time. Still wouldn't let me go back with him. So I sat there with my laptop and worked on a story (I had made a major blunder referencing a past event, so I pretty much had to "rip up" over two pages of story; however the rewrite actually did improve the tale). At midnight they were going to throw me out to the cold (or inside Butch, which was just as cold, since his heater doesn't work), but luckily, after a CT scan and scads of bloodwork, they released him just after midnight. He had compression fractures in his T6 and T7 bones in his spine, and a stress fracture in the T8 spinal bone. All this from falling on his left side and there wasn't a bruise on him!
(As they released him from Urgent Care, the nurse asked, "Did Podiatry file an incident report?" Hell if we know! If they did, they didn't ask us to read or sign anything.)
He was in pretty bad pain for the first couple of days; anything that caused him to bed over, like putting on or taking off underwear and pants, literally leave him seeing stars. Basically he had to take two hydrocodone tablets (and he hasn't ever needed two hydrocodone in his life) and a muscle relaxant before bed, and then hydrocodone in the morning, and another muscle relaxant in the afternoon, and, of course being on "hard drugs," he can't work. So he had to call in sick abruptly (and now IBM is whining about having someone "dependable" on weekend duty—he's done this for three years now, and this is the first time he's been "undependable"; otherwise he's worked their damn Sundays and only taken a few of them off with prior approval). So he's been on total rest all week and the days have kinda blurred together. When I get frustrated I duck into a story and that really helps; it's much more pleasant living inside my head.
In other news:
Did the taxes and we owe a lot, but that's okay because I have been saving money monthly from every social security payment in my savings account, earmarked to pay taxes with, rather than having the IRS hold my money interest-free. I'll up the withholding on my pension this year, though, because I got penalized $23 for not having enough money taken out for taxes! You really can't win with the Feds.
Wellstar is still sending us "shame on you" letters because Kaiser hasn't paid them. Dude, I pay Kaiser $500 a month and then the Feds pay them at least another $1300 a month to take care of this shit for me. You can "shame me" all you like; go talk to Kaiser. I'm done.
Both Vincent D'Onofrio and Jonny Harris liked one of my tweets (two different ones). I celebrated by ordering the former's book. (Actually, now that I think about it, I celebrate nearly everything by ordering a book...)
I made a Goren and Eames Appreciation Page, mainly to "hold" all those screencaps I've posted to Facebook.
We have called him by the nickname for so long that Snowy is now saying "chickie boo."
And this is the second week in a row I've gone into Popshelf and they've been out of Tina Burritos. I think our run of luck on these has come to an end.
Labels: accidents, birds, books, errands, health, sickness, television, work
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