Re-Emerging

[estherchaya]

After my last post, I disappeared again.  This was not by design.  On May 29th, I was supposed to see my gastroenterologist in the afternoon.  Before leaving for my appointment, my home health nurse came to change the dressing on my central line (a Hickman catheter).  When he was here, he was concerned, because it looked like my line was getting

Comments

[estherchaya]

It's likely a combination of things - I was on large amounts of painkillers and phenergan (an anti-emetic) that kept me pretty delirious, but also I was fighting a very bad infection with the pneumonia. I was on IV antibiotics for the pneumonia, but when your body is fighting a nasty infection, you can be quite delirious, as I was, especially since my body is already in a weakened state of chronic malnutrition. Apparently there were times when I sounded lucid (but more chatty than usual) and times when what I was saying made no sense whatsoever. Either way, I have no memory of it.

I have a few spotty memories of the psych consult (the guy was an ass - he outright accused me of causing my line infections myself, but beyond that I remember very little from the consult, but he came up with some crazy wackadoodle diagnoses which I now need to fight to have removed from my record - which I'm allowed to do under HIPAA, but they have the right to deny should they decide the record is complete and accurate - SIGH).

But mostly, I don't remember much of anything. I came to around Sunday, the 10th and I'm pretty sure I lost all of the first week of June and possibly some of the week prior. I was discharged on the 13th (would have been the 12th, but my feeding tube got clogged and they had to give me a new one).

I lost 15 pounds in the hospital. Normally this would be a good thing - but that's not the way to lose weight. I was actually getting MUCH more nutrition in the hospital than I was getting at home, so it's a bit weird that I lost that much weight. It's a testament to how sick I was, really.