No post last week due to Thanksgiving. I hope everyone had a peaceful day filled with gratitude.
I have decided to share the diary entries I wrote during my husband’s illness in the hope that our journey can help others navigate their way. I started keeping a diary because the doctors would ask me a lot of detailed questions during appointments and I would not have remembered it all without these notes. Even though some of what happened could arguably be considered malpractice, I have changed the names of all doctors, hospital, and hospital personnel because I do not want retribution, only effective change to our healthcare system.
This is the sixth entry…
So, Nurse Josefina persuaded Craig to stay in what he jokingly called a jail with nice people. Lying in that hospital bed with intravenous tubes coming out of both arms and a heart monitor stuck to his chest, he was unable to go to the bathroom, let alone turn over without the alarm going off next to his ear. Sometimes it would go off every few minutes for hours at a time. I couldn’t understand why the alarm didn’t ring at the nurses’ station instead of in our room. So, I wrote a letter to the editor of Hearing Health Magazine published by the Hearing Health Foundation as they just happened to be doing an article on noisy healthcare settings and they published my letter. You can read it here.
https://view.publitas.com/p222-4764/hearing-health-summer-2021-issue/page/6-7
Craig was in the hospital a full week. He was miserable, scared, and feeling sorry for himself. I stayed with him the first two nights but between the alarms going off and the hard bed, I decided one of us needed to get some sleep so I started going home at night. On the third night, he told me he had a profound realization. He said he realized that gratitude is a state of mind. Either he could lie there and be miserable or he could be thankful. He quoted the apostle Paul, “In all things, give thanks.” From that day forward, his attitude towards his sickness changed. He decided to be grateful. He spent the rest of his hospital stay thanking the doctors, the nurses, and the staff. He thanked them when they came to poke him for another blood sample. He thanked them when they took him on a gurney for another test. He thanked the staff who cleaned his room and brought his meals. And best of all, his wonderful sense of humor was back. He made everyone laugh and became well-known to everyone on the floor.
One afternoon, they came to take him down to radiology for another barbaric thoracentesis. As the orderly was wheeling him down the hallway, Craig started singing one of his songs. So, I pulled out my smartphone, pulled up the song on iTunes, and started playing the recording. The guy was so impressed that, as we entered the radiology department, he announced to everyone,
“Hey guys, listen to this! This guy wrote this song.”
One of the assistants pulled up one of Craig’s albums on the computer and the whole time that Craig was getting another 1.5 liters of fluid sucked out of his right lung with a foot-long needle stuck his back, the radiology department was grooving to me, Billy, and Craig singing. It was surreal.
The doctors finally decided it was too risky to do a biopsy of the mass in his pelvis so they sent him home to wait until the JJ stent had stretched out the ureter in order to remove the kidney stone. We called his urologist to schedule the kidney stone removal, but he was leaving on a three-week vacation to Italy. The only other option was to go downtown to an unknown hospital with an unknown doctor, so we waited. Six weeks later, the kidney stone was finally removed, and his blood pressure dropped thirty points overnight. His blood pressure was normal! His high blood pressure had been due to the kidney stone. I can’t believe it took over two years and three different hospitals to find the kidney stone in his ureter. They had looked at his kidneys several times, but never went far enough into the tube between the kidney and the bladder to discover the stone. One doctor said it looked as if the kidney stone had been there for a very long time, maybe as long as ten years. Over the course of the last two years, doctors had prescribed a litany of blood pressure medications over the years, sometimes as many as three at once. The list was long and none of them had worked—Losartan, Amlodipine, Hydralazine, Isosorbide Mononitrate, Metoprolol, Carvedilol, Ramipril, Clonidine, and Nifedical. But they had all been hard on his kidneys.
to be continued…