What could possibly go wrong? (not a Ronald Story)
As much as I would like to write about one of the prompts this week, I have decided to share some things that have happened to me since last Wednesday (April 19).
The first part will be a summary of the events. The second will be about some observations and thoughts that happened along the way.
Part 1 – What happened?
On Tuesday and Wednesday last week, I felt some pain in my chest. After calling my cardiologist to see if they could push up my June appointment to a sooner date, it was recommended that I take a trip to the Emergency Room at the hospital, where more tests could be done than in their office, which Christina and I did.
The follow-up to that trip was 4 days in the hospital, many tests, a coronary catheterization, which turned into a coronary angioplasty in which two stents were put into the right side of my heart, and time spent in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit.
I’m home now, feeling a bit tired and somewhat bored since I’m not allowed to do anything for at least a week and have the fun outlook of having to go back to the hospital within a month to have more stents put in the left side of my heart. I’m glad I made the choice to call my cardiologist when I did.
Part 2 – Are we having fun yet?
When you go to the emergency room desk and say that you are there because you have chest pains, and your cardiologist suggested coming in, you tend to get bumped up to the front of the line. We got there between 4 and 5 pm. I was taken in, given an intake interview, and had blood drawn, a chest x-ray, an EKG, and an echocardiogram. I was taken upstairs, where more blood was taken (3 times, each separated by an hour), a CT scan (with and without contrast), and probably more tests, but I can’t remember them. The total time spent testing was about 6 hours. It was decided that I would be their guest for the night, with the distinct possibility of more tests and an angiogram the next day. Christina went home, and I was sent to what could be referred to as a holding cell until the hospital could find a room for me. While there, the attendant, in the act of putting another IV port into the back of my hand (because he couldn’t find any veins in my arm to stick me with), managed to blow a vein in my hand. If you’ve never had that happen, it means he punctured a vein in two places, so the blood leaks out. It heals quickly; however, the blood swells at the site, which could take over a week or two to absorb and return to normal color. My left hand looked like I lost a prize fight with a brick wall, a nice shade of purple and still spreading. Every other nurse and attendant in my stay there said I had beautiful veins, so easy to find.
Since it had been 11 hours since I last ate, I asked if some food was available. Even though the hospital cafeteria was closed, the attendant got me some food. By midnight I was wheeled to my room on the 16th floor of the hospital.
My roommate was separated from me by a curtain. In this room, each bed had a TV on the wall. The TV speaker was the remote you kept by your side. It turned out that my roommate was a big fan of the Movie Classics station, which he had on whenever he was in the room, whether he was sleeping or not. Then there was all the beeping of monitors all over the place, loud conversations of people in the hallway, and loud emergency announcements over the hallway that they always repeated three times. Sleep was not an option.
The next morning I was taken to get another echocardiogram around 9 a.m. I wasn’t allowed to eat because my next port of call would be the operating room. I was supposedly number 6 in line. For some reason, the hospital feels it necessary to prioritize ER patients coming in with real heart attacks. I did not get wheeled into the operating room until 4 p.m.
Did you ever go to a class where you knew you were getting the best teacher available, and instead, you got a student teacher? The doctor slated for my procedure was the chief of cardiology at a different hospital branch. He is only at the hospital I was in one day a week. I felt confident having him do the surgery until I heard he was also a teaching physician. He was listed as the attending physician on the list of people that were part of my surgery. Also listed on the credits were two “Cardiac Fellows.” It turns out that the attending physician did the angiogram, while one of the Fellows did the putting in of the stents under supervision. What was supposed to be a simple procedure became more complicated when there was coronary artery perforation. Once resolved “under supervision” by the attending physician, I was invited to stay in the CICU (Coronary Intensive Care Unit), where I would be monitored for the rest of my stay. I finally got to eat some food some 19 hours after my last midnight meal. Though at that point, I wasn’t very hungry.
With a blood oxygen detector on my right hand and a blood pressure cuff on my left arm (which automatically took new readings every 1 to 2 hours), connected by wires to a monitor, I was ready to recover.
Did you ever try to get some sleep with wires on both sides of your body, such that no matter which way you turned, you would tie yourself up? I figured out that I could disengage the blood pressure cuff, so in the middle of the first night, when I wanted to go to the toilet (which was in the room), I attempted to. It would have been nice if they had told me I could not leave my bed. The moment I stepped off the bed, lights flashed, and alarms rang out. At least 2 nurses or aides rushed to my room to tell me I wasn’t allowed to do that. For my entire stay there, I was not allowed to pee in the toilet at all; I had to pee into a plastic urinal bottle. It seems they had to keep track of fluids that left my body.
I always had a nurse call button beside my bed if needed. The main nurses’ station was just outside my room. No matter how many times I pushed the call button or tried to call out for assistance (my room had an open door), it took a while for someone to come to me. It was a good thing that I was in ICU.
The best example of critical awareness of patients was on the morning of the day I left. I was given permission that if I wanted to get up, disconnect the BP and O2 detectors, and walk the halls, I could do so. That’s exactly what I did. As soon as I disconnected and left the room, I heard a steady beeping coming from my room. I assumed it was because I was disconnected. On my way back to my room, as I passed the monitoring station in the hall, I asked the attendant behind the desk if the flashing light and beeping on the computer at the other end of her desk was me. She first said no, then sliding over and viewing the computer, she said, “Yes, it’s you. You left your room.”
As I said, it was good that I was in ICU, and they were right on top of things.
There are probably a number of other things I could share with you about my experiences in our efficient hospital system, like the 40-page packet of all my results, information about the new medicines I was to take, and recommendations of things I should do both dietary and exercise, I was given as I left, which no one went through with Christina or me. But I’ll have to save those stories for another time.
For now, I’m glad to be home. I’m not looking forward to Eluting Stent Placement – Part 2. But I guess you gotta do what you gotta do.
