James has been grunting when he breathes. When I ask him about it he says he isn't or that he "can't hear anything." If this is a comment about how bad his hearing has gotten, so be it. But I can hear the grunt sitting three feet away from him.

 

Otherwise he was doing okay—he had his PICC line removed (although he had a low-grade fever the day after)—and we went shopping and picked up some oral antibiotic for him.

Then came Thursday. Started out great: we went to the Cobb County license office and renewed the handicapped tag for the truck. In fact, they let him have a handicapped license plate; when he first got the handicapped tag way back in 2014, we were told he could either have the license plate or the tag; since we sometimes use both cars the tag was the better option. Now he has the permanent plate for the truck and the tag is in "Butch" for when we use the car together. He also straightened out a problem with his bank account.

We had supper. We watched Young Sheldon and something we had on the DVR. Then I put on Law & Order from the DVR. About three-quarters through it, James had to use the bathroom.

All of a sudden he was calling my name. And also telling me to call 911.

He'd sat down on the toilet and all of a sudden felt like he couldn't draw a breath. He grabbed the pulse oximeter on the divider, clipped it on, and his pulse ox was 65! (It later went up to 73.) You bet I was on the phone to 911. I kept telling him to breathe as deeply as he could, and he got up, crossed the bedroom, into the hall, the bit of the living room, and one by one down the stairs, still having trouble breathing. I talked to the lady from 911 all the time. His color was fine, no blue lips or anything, he was just having trouble breathing.

EMS finally showed up, he went the rest of the way down the stairs and they put him on the stretcher. The moment he lay flat he started gasping and saying he couldn't breathe. They propped him up finally and that was better. In the meantime we discussed hospitals. They could take him to St. Joseph's, but they were worried about his breathing. I would have preferred Wellstar Cobb, which is the closest, but they took him to Kennestone, which has the best trauma center. I walked Tucker and then covered Snowy and turned out the lights and beat it to the hospital, stayed with him until six a.m., went home to shower and sleep for a few hours, walk the dog, turn the TV for Snowy, then back to the hospital at eleven. He was all day in ER, and they didn't get him a room until 10:30 p.m., a tiny room with a recirculator fan in it, as it had been used for COVID patients, and he was back on oxygen, and furosimide. And here he stayed until the 18th (they took him off the cardiac floor on the 17th and into a nice big room). I was in pieces off and on, my only respite a Sunday seminar I had signed up for where Vincent D'Onofrio talked about his approach to acting; "method" acting has always been kind of made fun of, but I enjoyed listening to him talk about where his "inspiration" (for lack of a better word) came from when he did various roles—it could also be applied to writing, using your own feelings from your memories to bring life to your character. (He did this from his apartment and it was neat watching the sun lower and then sunset fall in NYC from the window behind him.) Once he got to breathing better, James was bored and restless, and even after they transferred him off cardiac and they let him go the next day, he was looking so wan and defeated that I went out into the hallway, telling him I wanted to walk a little, but instead I was out there crying my eyes out to the nurse.

Wellstar Kennestone's food has gone way downhill; every time I ate in the cafeteria at night I got sick, gravies or ketchup on everything, although the brown gravy on the hamburger the first night wasn't too bad. Their wifi wasn't anywhere near as frustrating as St. Joe's, but the doctors gave us hives: every single time the cardiologist came in, he was hectoring James about eating too much sodium, that we must be mistaken about how much sodium he was eating, that his cardiologist was "not telling the truth" about James' real condition, on and on and on, and yet none of the doctors had any answers about why this happened. He had no weight gain, no leg swelling, we had no clue that something was going to go wrong, we had gone out that day and he had no problems with breathing. It just hit and hit hard. I wanted to scream at someone; we kept pressing for info and got absolutely none at all.

Discharge was absolutely disorganized. Instead of the doctors coming in to tell you you were going home and what you had to do, they basically just said, "You're going home today," and then we cooled our heels through three Law & Order episodes before the nurse came in and asked what was up and we said we didn't know. They also had to arrange for a portable oxygen unit to go home with us until Apria could deliver a bigger model for the bedroom (and then Apria would also deliver oxygen tanks for when we wanted to go out). First they told us the oxygen unit would go to the house, and then they said "No, he must be on oxygen on the way home." So Apria delivered it to the hospital, and then we had to go downstairs to "the discharge center" (the old emergency room). This is where they pull the IVs out of your arm and give you all the instructions. It was horrible.

By the way, it was only when James got dressed that we discovered that they had cut his shirt off him when he arrived at the hospital. He was so out of it he didn't remember.

So we didn't get home until almost suppertime, I had to drag that "portable" oxygen thing up the f*cking stairs, and James just had to get himself up. We had Trader Joe's orange chicken for dinner and remained glassy-eyed for the rest of the night.

The other bad thing about going to Wellstar instead of a Kaiser hospital is that we had to make all the followup appointments on our own. We managed to see Dr. Mobley on Thursday, but James basically spent Tuesday making doctors' appointments.

Labels: errands, frustration, health, sickness

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:01:00 PM

Comments:

I've been worried about you not posting for so long, so its good to see all these new posts today. I'm sorry to learn that James is having health problems. I suppose the good news is that he is retired now, so you don't have to be concerned about work challenges.

# posted by  Karen : 6:48:00 PM

 

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