I’m home!

After breaking my ankle last week and returning to the fracture clinic on Tues, I was called for an urgent CT scan of my foot Wed am.  That would have been enough.  My right foot incapacitated meant no driving.  Pain could be managed.  And a little more risky during the winter months etc.

Wed am I took a cab to the hospital and had the CT.  I could barely get from here to there on the crutches.  I thought my brain was going to explode through my skull.  Then when I started back toward the ER exit to catch a cab back home, I felt something vaguely wrong.  Within minutes I was sitting back at the ER triage desk. 

I knew I had a fever.  And whatever it was, it was coming fast. 

After 2 hours, a doctor saw me for less than 5 minutes, examined my ankle and ordered an ultrasound of my leg, suspecting a clot.  I had to walk to the US suite to have the test. 

At hour 3, I was back in the ER waiting for next steps. 

Than I became sicker.  I had to call a friend. 

At hour 6, I still had not been re-seen by the doctor, had never been seen by the incentre nurse, had no blood work or vitals signs taken.  After repeated efforts to get someone to pay attention, and as hour 7 approached, I began to have rigors and was losing my ability to think clearly.  They were apparently waiting for my ultrasound results.   My family was called. 

Other patients in the ER started coming forward to advocate for me as well.  When my family arrived, I was finally taken into an exam bay to lie down.  My friend says I was incoherent.  Pale gray.  Scared. 

I remember looking up at the clock, reading it at 1230 am.  Then an internal medicine specialist walked in and grasped my hand.  ”When’s the last time your temperature was taken?”  Of course, never since I had arrived that day.

People began to crowd around me doing different things. I was immediately given IV, tubes and bottles of blood were taken, I was placed on a monitor, they inserted a cath, started me on extended spectrum antibiotics and admitted me as septicemia.  Cause unknown. 

I had good instincts not to head home that morning after my CT but of course I would have much rather have averted what followed.

The week has been interesting to say the least.  My cast had to be reapplied and then cut again.  I’ve seen eight different doctors over the course of seven days.    Three surgeons, two internists, one nurse practioner, two ER physicians.  One night, I woke feeling an excruciating burning in my hand and arm, only to realize that the nurse had just given me two incompatible IV drugs without flushing between the doses.  Why did I have have to argue and be so “nurse”, I was challenged.  Sorry, but it’s my life.

I am crazy tired.  From being sick and from trying to keep from being made sicker.   I guess I was caught in a tide of everything going off course and coming in a whole lot wrong. 

And then I am told I am a great patient.  I do things for myself.  I seemed to have been giving the staff respite from their overloaded assignments.  That doesn’t cut it for me.  I need to feel safe and confident in what is being done for me.  Whatever is required.

It wasn’t all bad.  The nurse in the ER admitted unit where I spent the first night awaiting a ward bed, was incredible.  The internist that saw me in ER and admitted me, gave the best exam I’ve seen.  She looked me in the eye when she spoke.  She heard me.  When I was walking out today on my own steam, on my crutches, she caught me in the elevator, clasped both my shoulders and said I looked so much better.  Genuinely.  There was a most serene elderly Ecuadorian woman who shared a room with me this week.  We came to a nifty means of communicating, between her Spanish and my English.  I shared my flowers with her and somehow understood her as she was telling me that she had taken one of those yellow roses to lay at chapel yesterday.  I even got a kick out of one of my youngest of nurses, whose metallic thong could not be overlooked whenever she bent down to empty something for another patient across the room.   For some of you guys, that would be some much desired medicine.  She was a dear.

I am so, so happy to be home.  To make a bowl of soup, put my feet up, arrange my pleasure reading for the week and to write this all to you folks.  Life gets blue and then then it makes a mess with colour that one is only too happy to be messy with.  It is good to be home.