Where Were You?
Part 6 of My Medical Nightmare
January 16, 2017
When I arrived back at Maybrook after 36 days away, the staff directed the EMTs to place me in a room near the nurses’ station. I had spent my previous stay in a dim room at the end of the same hall. Now, because I had tested positive for C. Diff at Shadyside Hospital, I had to be in isolation for 45 days. Most of the rooms at Maybrook are designed for two people, but there are two rooms near the nurses’ station made for only one person. These rooms are much cheerier and brighter than the others.
One of the first things a CNA or nurse said to me when I got settled in was, “Where were you?” Apparently most of the Maybrook staff had had no idea what had happened to me.
One of the first questions Julie asked of the staff was to the whereabouts of my belongings. Because I had left so fast in early December and Julie had gone along with me right away and stayed in Pittsburgh the whole time,she hadn’t had time to remove my clothes, laptop, and other belongings from my previous room. By that evening a staff member found them safely stored in a box in a room near the nurses’ station.
The next day two therapists(OT/PT) came to my room and gave me an eval. They basically had to start from ground zero. When I arrived I could barely sit up and definitely couldn’t stand, walk or even unscrew the cap from a water bottle. When I had to leave the room for any reason, the CNAs had to use a Hoyer Lift to move me from my bed to a wheel chair. I was pretty much helpless. Drinking and eating were the only things I could do myself and that was with some difficulty. I hadn’t eaten much at Shadyside, and now it even hurt to chew food and took effort to lift a cup. The doctors said I needed lots of protein to heal properly, and the Maybrook dietitians ordered double meat portions for my meals as well as the protein drinks Ensure and Boost (which taste awful). I still had no appetite for food, so I often rejected the meals and rarely ate double of the protein. This wasn’t good for building strength while recovering from all the surgeries, but sure took the weight off.
I settled into a routine provided at Maybrook to rebuild the muscle tone I had lost from lying in bed for four and a half months. Supposedly you lose three percent of your strength each day when you lie in bed. Where did that leave me?
Each weekday, after breakfast and medications, one or two of the therapists would come to my room and coach me to lift my legs up off the bed, roll side to side, stretch large elastic bands with my arms do and other simple exercises. After a couple of weeks of this I had enough strength to sit in a wheelchair and go to the therapy room in the basement for more advanced exercises. Not until near the end of my stay at Maybrook could I get in and out of the wheelchair without the Hoyer lift. In the therapy room, while sitting in a wheelchair, I lifted small dumbbells(one pound), pulled on elastic bands, squeezed hand grips, marched in place sitting, squeezed a ball between my legs, pedaled a fancy stationary bike, and did various other exercises. I did all the exercises in sets of ten until they got easy, and then the therapists had me increase the number of repetitions in sets of tens.
Sometime before, and sometimes after my therapy sessions, a nurse would come to my room and change the packing material in my tunneling wounds. The deeper of the two wounds had originally required about three feet of packing material, but by this time was requiring less as it healed from inside. Most of the time this process was rather painless. The only time it hurt was when the wound clinic team came once a week to jam a long wooden Q-tip into the hole so that they could record the depth in order to assess how well the wound was healing. Ouch!
After lunch I spent my afternoons watching television. We don’t have a TV at home, and I noticed that the TV programs were much different than what I had watched years before. TV has become really stupid with reality shows. I was even more disappointed to found out that even the reality shows are all staged.
I watched more TV in the afternoon. At suppertime Julia would come , turn off the TV and spend the evening — usually until around nine. Some days she would bring some food she had cooked for supper for her and our sons, but at this point I still had very little appetite. During part of the time, she and I would do the exercises assigned by the P.T. and O.T. After she left, I would watch TV a little longer and then I would have a nurse or CNA setup my CPAP machine to run for the night.
Spending my birthday away from home definitely wasn’t as fun as being at home, but it was nice to get cards from family and friends that day. Then on the weekend Julie baked me a Crazy Cake and our children and granddaughter came to help me eat it.
I was glad when I had visitors. Julie came almost every day, When she didn’t, it was because I told her not to travel in bad weather. Many afternoons, our oldest, Zach, would come visit me on his way home from work at Penn State University. Other visitors who came from time to time were our pastor, church friends, and many family members:my brother Stephen, his wife Chris, their five children, two daughters-in-law and four grandchildren, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, and several of Julie’s family.
At this point I still needed IV antibiotics which were delivered through my PICC line. One day the nurses discovered that the PICC line was plugged up. So the nurses had Maybrook’s transport team take me over to UPMC Altoona to have it changed by a team of nurses. While the original insertion in Pittsburgh had been painful, I was amazed to find that the change was painless.
The nurses would use my PICC line to draw the blood for the required weekly blood tests. A couple times a phlebotomist came early in the morning to draw blood with a needle. Unfortunately, she always stuck the needle in my hand instead of my arm because she supposedly couldn’t find a vein. I didn’t believe her.
Twice, before February 13th on orders from my last surgeon, the nurses had to drain my lung catheter. They did this by using a PleurX drain kit. This kit contains a vacuum bottle, tubing and antiseptic wipes. The tubing, which was attached to the bottle, had a clamp on it only to be opened after the tube was attached to the lung catheter. The first time maybe a teaspoon of fluid came out and then several days later only a little drop. As with my previous lung catheters, when the catheter was drained, my lung collapsed, which felt like a hard punch in the chest.
Before I left Shadyside Hospital, my surgeon had scheduled me to have the lung catheter removed on February 13th as long as there were no large amounts of drainage. Plans were for me to leave Maybrook that morning at 3 o’clock, by ambulance, but because the weather was bad and the ambulance crew came from Northern Cambria, I did not leave until 3:30. The roads to Pittsburgh were icy, so we arrived at UPMC Shadyside almost a half hour late. At the hospital I was taken to a very small room in an area for outpatient surgery. There, medical staff gave me a consent form to sign, plus they took my vitals and asked a lot of questions. At about 7:30 staff wheeled me in a gurney to the operating room. About 40 minutes later I awoke in a recovery area manned by a middle aged male nurse. While talking to him I found out that he knows Altoona and that he fished at Spruce Creek.
After the nurse was satisfied I could leave, the EMTs wheeled me back to the ambulance and we arrived back at Maybrook around noon. Since I had had to get up so early that morning I told therapy I didn’t want to go to the therapy room that day. I was tired.
So the next day my routine returned to normal. Little did I, or anyone else, realize what was going to happen next.
Next Up:”They Should Name One of the Hospital Wings After You”
