We prepped for Urgent Care Monday morning, but we never made it. James made it down the stairs okay, but when he got to the door to the garage, he got one foot down, and could not get the other foot out the door. Then his knees began to fail. Luckily we had a shower chair in the garage that we had bought for his sister Candy and never got to give her. I shifted it under him and he was able to sit. Then I called 911.

The paramedics came and his vitals were okay, but he definitely couldn't walk anymore. They called for an ambulance, but there was an hour's wait. Instead they helped me get him in the car and we went to the emergency room at St. Joseph's. He wasn't in triage ten minutes when they said he "was the sickest person in the emergency room" and we went right back.

To sum up, his bloodwork was terrible; his creatitine was sky high, his BUN 175, his GFR down to 8, and he had much too much potassium in his system. Right before I had to leave to get the animals to bed, he was assigned a room, 508.

I woke up about four feeling uneasy. I noticed Kaiser had called me three times and the phone hadn't rung, even though I disabled Do Not Disturb. I called the hospital and James wasn't in 508 anymore; he was in 207, in Intensive Care. I promptly had hysterics. The switchboard at the hospital was very nice and got me in touch with his floor, where the nurse assured me he was fine. His potassium was still high, so they had transferred him into ICU.

This was a grubby little room with the toilet behind a shower curtain and nowhere for me to sit, so I sat on the toilet, and later on a folding chair which I would recommend as a torture device. I had bought Zaxby's wings for lunch/supper and felt guilty because no one would let James eat because "we don't have the doctor's permission." The doctor wandered in about four and said, "But I gave orders that he could eat." Sigh. This became a lietmotif for the week: he would need something, but it would need a doctor's approval, but the nurse never got it, like having his sleeping pill at night. He went 72 hours without sleep because they wouldn't give him one except the first night. He also never got miconozole powder for the fungal infection he had on his lower abdomen, and the skin was all cracked and red.

They had, I learned, stuck a tube in his neck and had to dialyze him in the middle of the night. They took two liters of fluid off him.

So the time had finally come, the thing we have been fighting off for six years. He's on kidney dialysis for good now.

Wednesday I was going to pick up a meal at Tin Drum, but the line was out the door. I grabbed a burger and fries instead and was starving all day. I did check out the cafeteria: they had ... shudder ... fried haddock or something spicy chicken. Gross. They also moved James back to the fifth floor (502), he'd had dialysis, and was dead bored. You know it's dull when there's nothing on but Law & Order: SVU.

I did get my Tin Drum on Thursday, but I wouldn't eat until they took James downstairs (several hours late) to get a permacath put in. Why a permacath, you ask? Didn't James have fistula surgery last August because Dr. Kongara knew the dialysis was coming because his BUN was rising? Yes he did. And the surgeon told James that the fistula was fine. But the hospital wouldn't use it because the port area "wasn't big enough." (They gave him two ultrasounds on the arm. We never did hear how they came out.)

We were so bored we watched, James at the hospital, me at home, the debate tonight. It is pathetic that, in this huge country, these are the best two candidates for President we have. Daniel Webster, Charles Sumner, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, and other statesmen are turning in their graves.

By Friday, James still hadn't had any sleep. I got Zaxby's again because it was just easier, only to arrive and discover they were sending him home. Of course, that took hours and ... surprise! ... they sent him home at rush hour. They had a whole bunch of plans for at home physical therapy and arranged for us to have dialysis at the DaVita center two miles from our house in the Smyrna Kroger shopping center, and they said he was well enough, but when we got home he didn't have enough strength to get up the four steps to the foyer where the lift chair is.

Oh, Dr. Austin waltzed in before I showed up on Friday. His first words to James were, "I hear you almost died the other night." What the heck??? Yes, his potassium was so high that, if I hadn't taken him to the emergency room on Monday, his heart probably would have stopped by Wednesday!

So, for the second time this week, we called the fire department. God bless them!

With a bunch of sleep James was feeling better next day; he even cooked breakfast. I did chores on Saturday and we were both sick on Sunday (food poisoning?).

Monday I hope he will be strong enough to get down and up those four steps, because he has to go to dialysis.

In other news, I finally found an avian vet for Oliver (who is indeed an Oliver and not an Olivia). I took him to Riverview Animal Hospital where we used to take Leia so long ago. It turns out Oliver has an infection in his air sacs (sort of like bird pneumonia). I think he may have gotten it when he boarded in March. I have to give him medicine twice a day, and he has to stay in a hospital cage (surrounded with a blanket except in front) and I'm to eat with him to make him eat more. I had him in the spare bedroom while James was in the hospital. He hates taking the meds and the fact that I had his wings clipped so he wouldn't get away from me, and I feel like such a heel.

Labels: budgies, food, health, pets, politics, sickness

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:57:00 PM

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James' back continued to hurt as the week crept on. We got an interesting little call from Kaiser saying that James' UTI was complicated by several different bacteria and perhaps it would be prudent to change his medication. We were seeing Dr. Jacobs on Tuesday and we said we would discuss that with him.

Dr. Jacobs was an older man who put us at ease. He said he was the one who had hired our doctor, Mobley. We discussed the antibiotic and he wanted to be cautious and let James finish the cephalexin and then be retested to see if he needed further antibiotics rather than "changing horses midstream." We agreed. He also said a short course of high dose steroids might relax his back, so he put him on 60mg for three days, 40 for three days, and then 20 for five days.

We also got the lift back, my savings account considerably poorer.

Steroids usually make James lose weight. Well, it didn't this time. Taking one torsemide is certainly making him gain. I finally got frightened enough on Friday to give him a second one.

We tried to go out on Friday: ate at the South Cobb diner, which is the sister restaurant of the West Cobb Diner with better parking. Alas, they don't have the cucumber salad anymore, and they have changed the turkey dinner stuffing; it's more cornbready and tastes, frankly, like Stove Top. On the way home we stopped at Ollie's Discount Store.

James continued to deteriorate over the weekend. His back still hurt badly, and now he was complaining of feeling weak, and he is acting distracted. When he took a shower on Saturday night, there were dozens of little bumps on his abdomen that look like he is accumulating fluid there, and his skin is irritated.

We were supposed to be at Libertycon this weekend, but we cancelled the hotel reservation on Wednesday right before the cutoff time, and James talked the Libertycon people into rolling over our membership till next year.

Labels: conventions, food, health, shopping, sickness

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:28:00 PM

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This has been a week of shocks.

It started out harmlessly enough: James had an appointment for a Procrit shot. We talked to Dr. Kongara and Bruce, and wondered if James needed a urinalysis. Based on what we told him, he didn't think so. He did say James' BUN number was very high, so to cut back the torsemide (diuretic) to one a day.

Alas, next day James was peeing very red, so we ate a good breakfast, packed a lunch, and went to Urgent Care. Providentially, it wasn't crowded, and we were in almost immediately. He did indeed have a UTI, and they gave him an IV bag of antibiotics and then a 10-day prescription for cephalexin and asked him to come back next week for a followup. They also took a CT scan of his back, which is still killing him—to get out of bed at night to use the bathroom he has to put the head of the bed up to help him—and they did indeed confirm that nothing was broken or torn. No painkillers offered this time; they just told him Tylenol and heat/ice.

On the way home, something frightening happened. You remember that I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had expressed concern about the chair lift on the back of the truck, that it wasn't holding the chair on properly? And then we took it to Mobility Works and paid $165 for a "tune up" in which it was checked out and lubricated and they recalibrated it with the chair and they said it was fine?

When we left Kaiser we put the chair up on the lift and I gave a puzzled little look once it was up because there was still a gap a finger's width wide between the end of the bar and the chair. But we were tired after everything at Urgent Care and just drove home, through the park, downtown Marietta, and about 45 mph at least down South Cobb Drive. James turned down side streets, and we were waiting for the light at Windy Hill when I noticed the little blue flag at the back of the chair was looking awfully low. I figured it was just the angle we were at.

The light changed and when James put the truck into drive we heard a funny little jolting sound. We crossed Windy Hill, finished going down Olive Springs, made the sharp right turn onto Smyrna Powder Springs, stopped at the stop sign, then did the left turn into Trellis Oaks.

As we turned left into the driveway, something scraped the concrete.

James came to a stop, I jumped out of the truck, and nearly had hysterics. The base of the lift was almost at a 45-degree angle and his $8,000 power chair was being held on it by the barely two-inch tall outer rim of the base of the lift and the inner edge of the crossbar that usually extends across the seat!!!!! The two welds that fasten the inner edge of either side of the base to the vertical part of the lift were both cracked completely in half--looked like metal fatigue. At least one of the cracks had rust inside it--which means I was right all along about it not clamping properly when I first noticed it at Costco.

I think I need to go light a candle somewhere to thank God the freaking chair didn't fall off, get damaged, and worst of all, maybe cause an accident with the car behind us. Can you imagine if it had come bouncing off in the middle of South Cobb Drive? Or downtown?????

I left a hysterical message on Mobility Works' message machine and the next day I followed James and the truck to get it examined and drove home.

Mobility Works had that bottom platform in stock and will replace it for a nice fat $1400. Just wondering why it cracked in the first place. It was sold to us as supporting this wheelchair.

So we were in need of a distraction and never got it, as the internet crashed Saturday afternoon and never came back until Sunday night. We watched DVDs for the duration. We will never put our eggs all into that streaming basket; it's too easy to take down.

Labels: accidents, events, health, internet, sickness

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:57:00 PM

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James fell again this week.

When he fell because of the plastic boot a few weeks ago, it was an easy slip to the floor, even if we did have to call the fire department to right him, but he bumped the divider next to the toilet and was covered in bruises on his back.

This time he fell flat backward in the living room and only had one bruise on his shoulder, not even as bad as any of the others, and he actually scrunched to the stairway and we got to Hangar to order his new orthopedic shoes. But after that...he has been in terrible pain since then.

If he goes to Urgent Care and nothing is broken—and he can move, so he feels nothing is—they will just take an X-ray and then maybe offer him pain meds. So he doesn't want to go. Instead he is on Tylenol and the heating pad.

The only fun thing we did was go to lunch with Alice and Ken, and James was then even too tired to go anywhere else afterwards.

We also heard that a friend was in the hospital with severe heart problems. He did get out, but it looks like he'll need surgery in the future.

Getting old is not for sissies.

Labels: friends, health, sickness

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:43:00 PM

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Was feeling so bad on Sunday that I forgot to put on the National Memorial Day Concert. I figured I could watch it Monday on PBS. Surprise! Not there. However, it was on YouTube. Streaming television is so weird.

We were both out of sorts on Memorial Day. I made ribs, but I wasn't really satisfied with them.

I am trying a new experiment on laundry day. Usually by the time we get up these days, I don't start the laundry until after noon. This week I loaded the first load before bed, put in the detergent, and put the washer on delay. Tuesday morning when I came out for breakfast, the first load was already finished and I could toss it in the dryer and start the second load. I may keep doing this!

My main worry at the beginning of the week was that James might be spoiling for a UTI; however, when we saw Dr. Kongara on Thursday he seemed to think there was no problem. This appointment was supposed to be a video appointment, but Bruce, who's Dr. Kongara's PA, had to give him a Procrit shot anyway, so he changed the video appointment to a real one and we talked to the doctor while Bruce got the shot ready. Bruce is in his fifties, but he is always moving. He makes me tired just listening to him talk, and he practically bounces off walls.

This week to do something different in entertainment, we decided to explore the origins of a character. We have been watching Elsbeth on CBS; Elsbeth Tascioni is an attorney, seemingly scatterbrained who is actually brilliant, who has been sent to New York City as an independent observer in a precinct where corruption has been suspected, specifically with the captain of the precinct. She accompanies a young uniformed officer named Kaya Blanke on cases and of course gets mixed up in the mystery. She also comes to like the captain she's investigating.

However, Elsbeth is not an original character: she was originally an occasional character on the series The Good Wife, and appeared on a few episodes of the sequel series The Good Fight. So I found out what episodes she was on, and we went on Paramount+ to check out those episodes. To my amusement, Paramount+ already has the Elsbeth episodes of both series linked for immediate viewing.

We enjoyed them, although with both series' serial-type format, we missed big chunks of plot points. If I were to watch the series, I would probably watch The Good Wife, which had a politician's wife taking up her legal career again while her husband was investigated for wrongdoing. I didn't like The Good Fight as much, even though Christine Baranski was excellent as usual. Both series, because of the characters and the clients, relied a lot on political plots, and I hate political maneuvering more than I hate child molesters, and Good Fight got a lot more into politics and infighting. However, we did enjoy the Elsbeth episodes a lot! The one with the potentially banned athlete and Elsbeth in jail was quite funny.

I want to say one thing, though: if this is truly how supersized law firms work, I wouldn't hire one. They seemed to be more obsessed with stabbing each other in the back and competing against each other than in their law practice. I would be concerned they weren't giving my case enough attention! LOL!

Saturday James went to his club meeting and I spent the afternoon fixing the beater bar on the vacuum cleaner. What fun. But on Sunday I got a good book (American Ramble) at Barnes & Noble. So sometimes things balance out.

Labels: books, chores, health, television

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:06:00 PM

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