The journey began here.
Dr. Google never went to medical school. Please visit an actual health care provider – a physician, a nurse practitioner, or a physician assistant – for any medical help.
I didn’t have to sit long before an ER nurse came out with a wheelchair and took me into the next open pod. I’m pretty comfortable in ERs as a rule; I was in my old hospital’s ER on a regular basis, and knew several of the doctors there, so my initial reaction was more along the lines of “Hm. Bigger pod than I expected.” The nurses swung into action, taking my vital signs, asking if I could tell them my name, did I know where I was, if I knew who was president, was I on any medication. Could I close my eyes and touch my nose? With my left hand, but not my right. I kept hitting my mouth instead. Then the ER physician came in. I stumbled through giving him my history, hating the right-sided facial droop and the effort it took to speak clearly.
My husband was hovering by my side, trying to stay out of the way, but wanting to stay close to me. At one pause in the proceedings, I asked him to call my stepmother so she could spread the news on that side of the family, and he got out my smartphone so he could call my manager and let her know I wouldn’t be at work for a while. He was glad to have something to do.
A neurologist was called in pretty quickly. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was an exceptional neurologist. Former chief medical officer, had gotten his degree at the Mayo Medical School, and most importantly, a kind and gentle man who tried to hide his shocked whisper at my blood glucose results: “Three hundred.”
I was wheeled off for a CAT scan, then wheeled back into the ER for my neurologist to break the bad news: “You’ve had a brain bleed. We’re going to need to admit you to the ICU.” Soon afterwards I met the woman who was going to be my hospitalist, and I tried not to look at my husband as she asked me about my medical directives. “DNR, DNI,” I said slowly, meaning no resuscitation, no intubation. I consented to oxygen, but I knew I didn’t want heroic measures taken. Like many other couples, my husband and I had talked about this when the Terri Schiavo case was in the news, but it was still painful for him to hear me outline when it was okay to let me die.
I was lucky. The ICU was only half full, so it didn’t take long for me to get a bed. Once again, I couldn’t help but compare this hospital’s ICU to the one I’d known from work years ago. It was better than thinking about why I had to be there.
I managed to keep calm until my husband had left to fetch me a few things from home–some spare clothes, my Kindle and headphones–and when the nurses were giving me a bed bath. The tears just started flowing, and I apologized, because they were being so kind and I didn’t want them to think I was in pain from their attentions. They soothed me and hugged me, telling me it was okay to cry if I had to. They would take care of me.
I was visited by a neurosurgery nurse and a neurosurgery physician assistant. My luck was holding out: no surgical intervention required. They explained that I’d suffered what was known as a hemorrhagic stroke. I had undiagnosed/untreated hypertension and diabetes–undiagnosed because I’d been putting off any kind of regular doctor visits–that had resulted in a weakened blood vessel in my left basal ganglia, which had finally burst. All I had to do now was rest and let the IV medications do their work.
It wasn’t hard to rest, though at one point I was woken up because my oxygen saturation was dropping and my nurses put me on nasal oxygen. That was rough when my husband came to visit, and saw me with the nasal trumpets in place. “And there were things going whirrr and beep all around you, and I didn’t know what any of it meant,” he told me later. He hates hospitals. They are strange and foreign places to him where scary things happen. “Hospital” to me means “workplace.”
My rest was interrupted a few times by various members of my care team. I was put through a daily series of regular neuro tests. Did I know where I was? Could I tell them my name? Here is a picture: can I describe what is going on? Can I count backwards from 100 by 7? (No, but math gives me anxiety.) Can I write my name? I could grip a pen, but I couldn’t make a mark on the paper. I knew what movements would result in my name, but I couldn’t do it. Later on, I saw the Doctor Strange movie, and I had to stop watching when Stephen Strange failed the same signature test I’d failed.
I set about making friends with my nurses. I shared my work background with them. The key moment was when they were swabbing my nostrils, explaining, “This is to help protect you from an infection called MRSA,” and I said, “Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.” It was an impressive achievement, remembering what the acronym stood for and managing to say it clearly enough to be understood.
In between visits from my nurses and other team members, I slept, or distracted myself with my Kindle. I devoured episodes of Ellery Queen, a show I’d remembered watching as a kid with my parents. I watched Zootopia and Iron Man. I tried reading, but my right hand still wasn’t working very well, certainly not enough to turn pages, so I returned to watching. I didn’t need a fully functional hand for that.
I had a short-term patient care goal: get my blood glucose down so I could be transferred from the ICU to the neuro unit. On the fourth day of my ICU stay, I finally met my goal and was wheeled upstairs to the neuro bed. I was on my way to recovering enough to go home.
Rachel
I'm a writer, a knitter/spinner/weaver, a young stroke survivor, and a type 2 diabetic.
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