Monday, June 16, 2014

Dr. Pooh Bear and the amazingly horrible cherry spray

Thursday night I slept decently.  Okay, I'm lying.  I didn't sleep worth a darn but what do you expect when you are constantly being tested and evaluated throughout the night?  And the silly silly nurses would always say, "now get some rest".  I'd LOVE to get some rest, but it's a bit hard when you keep waking me up every hour.  We were fully expecting, from the way they (the doctors) had talked on Thursday that the TEE was going to be Friday morning.  7am came and went.  No orderly wheeling me down.  8am came and went.  Nothing.  9am came and went and Tommy asked Auntie about it and she said she didn't know, but she'd find out what time it was supposed to happen.  10am came and went.  Nothing.  Nada.  Zilch.  11am and noon came and went with no information or tests.  What the stink was going on? 

Well, I'll tell you one thing that was going on.  My dear loving husband had had contraband snuck in to him from a family member and he was trying his hardest to hide the fact that he was eating lunch.  When I noticed what he was doing, turning his back every so often and trying to keep up the conversation in between bites hoping that I wouldn't realize, I asked him what he was eating.  He tried the old, "nothing" routine that I'm sure he had used a million times as a child (I mean, come on, don't we all do that at some point?  have candy in our mouth in school and tell the teacher through puffed up cheeks and forced swallows that "really there's nothing to see here!").  Then he told me.  He was eating Ann's Chicken Fried Steak.  For anybody NOT from the Oklahoma City metro area, you wouldn't know what I'm talking about, but those local folks know.  I couldn't really be upset with him, after all, it wasn't his fault that I couldn't eat anything and he had been such a trooper, sleeping in the horrible recliner in my room every night where I'm sure he didn't get much sleep either.  But here it was a good 18 hours since my last meal and he was trudging that in the room.  And we still didn't know when this goofy test was taking place.  What the heck?!?!?

Finally Auntie came in the room a little after noon and told us that the test was scheduled for 4pm.  Great.  At least we had a time to look forward to, but I was afraid that since it was so late in the day, that that meant another night in the hospital and yet another day away from my beloved Shadow.  Shadow, for those that don't know, is usually with me everywhere I go, except when she's at daycare.  She's my 3.5 year old female lab.  And she is the absolute best therapy dog for me that I could ever wish for.  She isn't a "certified" therapy dog, but I swear she knows when things are not right in my world because she will stay within inches (literally) of me the whole time and she has even been known to sit down right in front of me so I can't proceed until I have at least stopped and either eaten lunch, taken a nap, or whatever it is that needs to be done.  She was at daycare on Tuesday when I had my stroke and Tommy had gone to pick her up, then taken her back to daycare on Wednesday and had them keep her overnight for the time being.  She loves being at daycare.  I missed her something fierce. 

Remember how I mentioned earlier that I was self-employed and had an all-consuming business that occupied pretty much every minute of every day for me?  Well, that business really had not stopped much while I was taking my little forced sabbatical in the ICU.  Yes, Tommy had posted on our facebook page that we would be closed indefinitely, but that did little to stop the inquiries and customer contacts.  Last year we made the mistake after the first stroke of giving too little information and just saying that we would need to close due to an illness.  Figured it was really nobody's business what was going on.  WRONG.  Within a week of posting that , I was bombarded with messages and calls asking about orders and stuff.  We found out that ILLNESS to most folks is like the flu.  Within 7 days you are better and life goes on.  I was not better within 7 days of the first stroke and life wasn't going on.  So this time, he put it all out there to folks.  We were closed due to a stroke and being in ICU.  You'd think that would be good enough to let folks know that "hey, as much as we'd love to help you right now, it just isn't happening." It wasn't. 

But, I digressed, 3:45 came around and I was rolled down to a great big horrible room that had sections curtained off and there were patients between each section of curtains and visitors in various stages of support to their loved ones visiting them and doctors and nurses swishing around here and there.  This was the first contact I'd had with a "non-quiet" zone since I'd left the emergency room.  It was overwhelming.  All the lights and noises and people.  Like a bustling little metropolis of heart patients waiting at Grand Central for their turn on the Pacemaker/Heart testing train.  My mind couldn't keep up with everything that was going on around me.  As much as I was starting to detest the quiet of my hospital room, I wanted to escape back to its safety after seeing the mess that was this area. 

Shortly before 5, a guy in scrubs bearing the name "St Jude Medical" came around and started talking to us about the loop heart monitor that they would be implanting after the TEE.  I had had a TEE before in the past so that was no big deal but I was a little leery of the implanting of anything in my chest.  I was sure this was the first step in the New World Order's agenda to have everybody microchipped for total control.  Especially when he starts talking about how it is no bigger than a flash drive for a computer and it'd just sit right under the skin above the heart.  Then he showed us this little contraption that resembled closely a pager from the early 1990s and how it works with the monitor.  At that point I trusted that Tommy was listening because my brain checked out.  Too much information.  All I kept seeing was the St Jude's logo on his scrubs and thinking of those stinking telethons and commercials.  Who was the latest spokesperson, Jennifer Anniston?  I couldn't remember but that was what was going through my mind as I was pulled from my space between the curtains and taken back into a very cold room with tons of contraptions and a staff of at least 6 that I saw. 

One of the women told me that she was going to spray my throat to numb it.  This was standard, camera down the throat procedure.  Then another lady told me that she was going to wait until the second spray and then give me an injection that may sting a little bit.  True to their words, the first lady sprayed this horrible, worse than Robitussen spray down my throat and I couldn't spit or gag or cough it out.  Then less than a minute later she asked me to open again and she sprayed it again.  THIS was supposed to be the cherry flavor too.  I don't know where they are getting their cherry flavoring but I had a good mind to tell them that they needed to get with Sonic or Braums to find a new manufacturer of cherry flavoring.  Just as the second spray was sprayed my arm felt a pain like a lightening bolt shooting down it and then I don't recall another thing.  At least until I woke up back between the curtains with Tommy standing over me asking me how I felt.  There was a foreign man standing there as well and I swear he said his name was Dr. Pooh Bear.  I now know it wasn't, but in my heavily medicated state, that's what I heard.  He said everything went well and that I would be going back up to my room.  My safe haven on the 8th floor.  I could care less.  Really.  I was drugged.  Life was good. 

Sometime between that conversation with Dr. Pooh Bear and getting back to my room I fell asleep.  A deep sleep.  I wish I could sleep like that all the time.  When I woke back up a few hours later, it was getting dark outside and Auntie was telling Tommy that as soon as I woke up and was checked out that I could go home.  I was sure that I was dreaming, but I tried to pry my eyes open as best as I could and focus on who and what was being said, "I'm awake." I volunteered.  I didn't care what happened, I wanted to go home.  And home we went...with a stop at Taco Bueno on the way. 

Arriving at home at 10:30 on a Friday night with Taco Bueno that I couldn't eat very well because my left side of my mouth was still not working properly and I kept biting my tongue, lip and cheek and drooling everywhere every time I took a bite, was absolute nirvana.  I would be sleeping in my own bed tonight.  But tomorrow the adventures of post-hospital would start.  After all, the grass had to be mowed (the City of Edmond is kind of particular about how tall they will allow the grass before they send a "love letter" and yard work had not been a concern of Tommy's the past week), Shadow had to be fetched from daycare and prescriptions had to be filled.  Also, as part of my discharge paperwork they had given me exercises to do at home until Monday came and we could get therapy sessions started.   But the first order of business was going to be figuring out how to navigate throughout our house with a walker.  So navigation, therapy and dogs, were on the agenda for the weekend....



No comments:

Post a Comment