How Phoenix Tried to Kill Me - Part 10

At some point in the second week, my stay in the hospital became not about the gigantic, stapled hole in my side, but the problems with my plumbing. This may sound like an improvement, but in a lot of ways it wasn’t. When I had pneumonia, I knew there were certain things I had to do to get better, and then it would all be over. When my body started basically rebelling against the medication it was being given, all we could do was change the drugs (note: non-narcotic pain killers are not as effective as narcotic pain killers) and wait for my body to work itself out.

I lost twenty pounds, and I suspect most of it was in that last week. I was on a liquid diet, sipping chicken broth and ginger ale three times a day. The thinness of my meals wasn’t really that bad, since I didn’t feel like eating anyway, but the weakness that came with it certainly contributed to what came next.

I’m sure I was edging toward clinical depression. My stomach was a mess, I didn’t have any energy, my ankles had gone all Fred Flintstone on me, and I hadn’t been able to take a shower for over a week. A feeling of wilted grossness had settled over me. I was sweating buckets half the time and freezing the other half. Trelina wasn’t able to come see me for a day or two because she and Jasmine were both sick, and I hadn’t seen Jasmine at all since just before my surgery.Two weeks in a hospital, in this day and age, seemed ludicrous to me. I felt like I was never going to get out of there. I knew, intellectually, that I needed to get out of bed more, but all the steps involved in sitting up and making sure my ass wasn’t hanging out of the hospital gown and sorting out my drainage tube and my IV and then carting them along with me wherever I went, would quickly overwhelm those thoughts. I’d wake up in the morning with the intention of doing a lap around acute care every couple of hours, and maybe manage it once or twice in a given day.

Most of all I missed my kid. I called home one night and Trelina put her on the phone for me. She said, “Hi, daddy!” and I simply broke down. I couldn't talk at all, I was crying so hard. I had to hang up and call back when I’d pulled myself together.

That was the kick in my uncovered ass I needed, though. I started getting out of bed more, even when getting out of bed sucked. While I was awake, I made sure to spend more time walking or sitting in a chair than on my back. The improvement wasn’t immediate, and I was probably pushing myself harder than was healthy, but eventually my mood improved, and my health improved with it. The sun came out and the cankles went away.

On November 17, sixteen days after I’d gone to the emergency room, I was given my walking papers. I still had a drainage tube hanging out of my chest, and a pile of instructions and prescriptions an inch thick, but the hard stuff was over.

How Phoenix Tried to Kill Me - Part 9

If “all” that had been wrong with me was the infection in my lungs, I probably would have gone home a couple days after my surgery and this would be the end of the story. Unfortunately, I had some side issues.

(I'm going to try to be as delicate as I can here, because this stuff isn't the kind of thing you discuss at tea parties. And frankly, it's all a little embarrassing. In the interest of full disclosure, though, I'll soldier on. Bear with me.)

I had been getting pumped full of pain meds for over a week by this point, most of them narcotics. One side effect of taking lots of narcotics is what the pilots in my Air Force days used to call “GI distress”. GI in this case stands for “gastro-intestinal”, so you can probably guess where I'm going with this (or not going, as the case may be). Folks, I didn't do a two-sie for almost a week. My stomach got hard as a rock and I didn't want to eat anything because it literally felt like there was no room left in my belly. Good time for a liquid diet, right? Somebody also brought up the idea of laxatives, but I nixed that right away. Even though I was pretty mobile only a couple of days after my surgery, getting up to go to the bathroom was still a multi-step process, involving coordinated movement of my drainage tube, my IV cart, and my unbalanced body. An urgent call to the bathroom would have ended in disaster.

I got so uncomfortable that one of my doctors finally suggested a nasogastric (NG) tube. This is a small flexible plastic tube that is inserted up a nostril and down through the esophagus and into the stomach. I think the idea was that the tube would suction some of the stuff out of my belly, relieving some of the pressure and maybe even getting things moving again.

An NG tube is not a good time. In fact, I feel pretty comfortable ranking it as one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. It hurt going in and it continued to hurt the entire time it was in. I mean, I was sort of getting used to hurt by this time, but this was persistent and not dulled by the pain meds. Talking and swallowing were possible, but the throat moving around that segmented tube hurt like the devil - and it was in for 18 hours, at which point I demanded it be removed. The doc who originally suggested it asked me to leave it in for a couple more hours so he could come take a look at it after a surgery, but I vetoed the hell out of that idea. In the end, it barely pulled anything out of my stomach anyway.

Eventually these problems worked themselves out, as these things often do. It wasn't the only post-surgery problem I had, though.

How Phoenix Tried to Kill Me - Part 8

I was in the hospital for almost two weeks, so I got to meet A LOT of nurses. That sounds like the beginning of a Penthouse Forums letter (“I never thought it could happen to me...”), but that's definitely not what I 'm getting at. What I want to say about the nurses at Howard County General Hospital is that 99.7% of them are amazingly helpful, patient human beings, somehow maintaining compassion for their patients no matter how whiny, belligerent, and/or needy those patients happen to be.

Unfortunately, two weeks is enough time to encounter a couple representatives of the other 0.3%, both of them in the ICU. The first one I don't even remember, but she gave Trelina a hard time early on during my stay in the hospital. The other left me moaning and squirming in pain, not responding to her call button for over an hour, and treating me like a junkie asking for a fix when she finally did respond. Lovely woman.

The rest of my nurses and techs (more than 20 cared for me over the course of my stay) were wonderful. I particularly remember the woman who helped me into the ICU bed after my surgery. She rolled up some blankets and taped them together for me so I could wedge them under my side. This allowed me to sleep sort of on my back without putting any pressure on my incision or jostling my drainage tubes. She called this wedge my buddy, so I decided in an anesthesia-induced fog that it should be named “Tommy”. I slept on Tommy for the rest of my stay.

The surgeon came back to check up on me the day after the surgery. Everything looked fine, but for some reason, he decided the higher drainage tube, the one that was practically in my armpit, should come out. I'm not sure if that was part of the plan all along or not, but he cut the stitch holding the tube in place, then had me roll over onto my uncut side and bear down like I was “having a bowel movement” (his words). At which point he just pulled the tube right out. It hurt, but that was probably just because everything hurt at that point. It was mostly just unpleasant, like I suppose anything sliding out of your body from a new and strange orifice would be.

Then he slapped what must have been five pounds of bandages and tape over my side and bid me adieu. I still had the lower drainage tube sticking out of me, but otherwise I was officially on the mend. After a day or so in the ICU, I was moved back up into a “normal” room in acute care. Now I could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. I was sure I'd be home by the end of the week.

How Phoenix Tried to Kill Me - Part 7

I've had surgery before, but those were always of the “this is a useless part of you that's causing trouble and we're going to cut it out” sort. Also known as the “very low risk” sort. Obviously cutting my chest open to drain infected fluid out of my lungs was not in the same ballpark, but everyone assured me it wasn't too risky... while pointing out that I would want to make sure that my living will and... um, dead will(?) were up-to-date.

Honestly, though, I wasn't that worried about the surgery – not because I'm brave like a lion, but because I was so damn thirsty after fasting for 24 hours that “when can I have a drink” trumped “possible death” on my list of mortal concerns. The nurse assured me that I was well-hydrated thanks to the IV, but she knew and I knew that even the tastiest IV doesn't exactly wet a guy's whistle.

My anesthesiologist was the same guy who worked on Trelina when Jasmine was born. I've met him twice now and I still have no idea what his name is, and only the vaguest idea of what he looks like without his surgical mask on, but he did a great job with Trelina, so that also went a long way to setting my mind at ease.

(One interesting note: I'll bet I'm the only dude reading this who's had an epidural. That was part of my anesthesia cocktail that day.)

I was taken down to the staging area and met all the people who would be cutting me open that day. I remember, very dimly, being given the epidural (probably just because of the novelty). And then I went to sleep.

The next thing I remember, I was in the ICU. I had apparently woken up and started talking before that, but (surprise, surprise) I don't remember any of it. My nurse helped me scoot from the gurney into my ICU bed. My left side was a solid block of pain. I didn't even want to look at it or know what had happened there. I just knew it hurt and somebody needed to get me some drugs STAT.

Here's what happened: The surgeon cut a long, swooping incision under my left shoulder blade and around my side to get into my chest. Then, after cleaning up the abscess on my lung and clearing out as much of the infected fluid as he could, he cut two more holes in my side – one above the incision and one below – and threaded drainage tubes the width of cigars into them and between my ribs. Then he stapled the incision closed and sent me to the ICU, tubes and all.

Next came the fun part: recovery.

How Phoenix Tried to Kill Me - Part 6

Remember how I mentioned that cup that one of the nurses kinda-sorta implied that I might want to spit into, and how I blew her off? After day two of my confinement in the negative pressure room, I asked somebody when I would be free to have other people visit. Trelina was allowed in (I guess they figured if she hadn't caught my cooties yet, she wasn't likely to), but I was thinking in particular of Jasmine. I hadn't seen her in three or four days at that point, and that's just about my limit. The DTs get really ugly from that point on.

So this nurse-or-doctor (they were all sort of blurring together) informed me that getting out of the room depended on them finding out what was in my lungs. And their ability to do that was hanging entirely on me giving them four phlegm samples. What? Nobody told you that?

I had only given them one so far. I had to produce three more and wait for the results before I could get out of that room, and I was already going stir crazy. I learned that day that it is possible for a man to hone his will into the singular goal of producing and expelling phlegm, even when it feels like a Giger Alien is trying to burst out of his chest the entire time. I was focused like a freakin' laser, man. They'd bring me a cup, and I'd be calling (okay, moaning) (okay, whining) for another one before they even left the room.

It was another day and a half before the results came back, saying that I would not kill anybody with my lung fungus.

(Trelina and I just figured the timeline for all this out before I sat down to write this, and I cannot believe that it wasn't longer. It felt like I was stuck in that negative pressure room for more than a week. In reality it was only three or four days.)

So I got to see my kid again. Trelina's sister (who had come up to stay with her and help until I was out of the hospital) brought Jasmine to the room, and she ran around and explored and didn't destroy too much of the machinery keeping daddy alive. I still couldn't get out of bed or interact with her much, but at least I got to see her.

Now the doctors had identified all the invaders in my lungs and knew what they were up against... but they were also coming to realize that the drugs alone weren't going to do the trick. My right lung had cleared up by this point, but after five days of getting firebombed with antibiotics and anti-fungals, my left lung was still teeming with infection. Finally, somebody made the call to send me to the sawbones. It was going to take surgery to get all the crap out of my chest.

How Phoenix Tried to Kill Me - Part 4

I spent most of my first day in the hospital in one of those curtained alcoves that pass for patient rooms in ERs. Trelina had to leave eventually to pick up Jasmine, and it was about that time that the attending doctor decided that it might be a good idea to semi-quarantine me, just in case whatever plague was filling my lungs was contagious. They closed the door and decreed that anybody who came inside had to wear a surgical mask. They even tried to get me to wear one, but I just laughed my wheezing, half-conscious laugh at that. It was hard enough to breathe without installing a filter over my face, after all.

A nurse came in at one point and had me breathe some medicated mist through a tube for a few minutes. This was the first respiratory treatment of literally dozens over the next couple of weeks. When we were done, she left me with a plastic cup and mentioned offhandedly that I might want to try to cough some phlegm up into it for analysis. As she didn't make it sound urgent, AND I didn't have to cough, AND making myself cough hurt like a bitch, I took this for a suggestion only and ignored it.

This will be important later.

By that evening, they'd moved me into a sealed room in the hospital proper and started getting serious about filling me with pain-killers and antibiotics. I was only sort of aware of the fact that I was still under quarantine, partly because my head was still fuzzy from the pneumonia, but mostly because the quarantine room wasn't at all different from a normal hospital room. I even, I was told, had a sweet view of the hospital helipad from that room, even though I never saw a helicopter coming or going.

I've often thought that if I ever had to spend any time in the hospital, I would use it to catch up on reading and writing. What better time to do that than when you're forced to lay in bed most of the day anyway, right? The thing I didn't take into consideration was that I would be so uncomfortable that it essentially made those activities (or anything that required more than ninety seconds of concentration), impossible. Fortunately there was a TV on the wall, and even though there wasn't a DVD player attached to it, I did have some basic cable channels. Thus began my two-week Food Network and Travel Channel marathon.

I did eventually spit into that cup the nurse had left me, but when they brought me another one, I just put it on the bedside table and forgot about it. Nobody had made a big deal about it yet, and coughing still hurt, so I just laid in bed for the next day or two, No Reservations flickering on the opposite wall, and waited for the doctors to decide what to do with me.