Hospital Again Again
I was supposed to go to Seattle on Wednesday, June 9, but Lut was admitted to the hospital on June 6, after he grew increasingly confused over the course of the weekend.
The hospital never quite figured out what he had. “Maybe pneumonia.” But it cleared up after a few days, and he was discharged on June 9, about the same time the flight I’d originally scheduled was leaving the airport. In theory, I could’ve switched to a later flight instead of cancelling the trip, but by that point I didn’t want to leave Lut alone to fend for himself for several days.
This was just as well, because a week later, he was readmitted to the hospital, for confusion and hypoxia (low blood oxygen).
The diagnosis was, again, “maybe pneumonia”. They gave him yet more antibiotics, and on Saturday, June 19, sent him home. This time, they prescribed oxygen for him, although this required something of a song-and-dance to accomplish.
Nurse: “We can discharge you today, just need to give you the breathing test to find out if you need oxygen at home.”
Respiratory therapist: comes to his room, takes him off oxygen, brings him back a few minutes later. “He did great! Won’t need oxygen at home.”
Lut: lies down in bed
Lut’s blood oxygen: plummets
Nurse and respiratory therapist: futz with two different monitors and sensors to make sure it’s not a monitor problem
Nurse: “Well, we can’t send him home with his blood oxygen this low.”
Me: “You mean you need to send him home with oxygen, right?”
Nurse: “No, we can’t send him home with oxygen because he passed the breathing test so insurance won’t pay for it.”
Me: “... can I just buy oxygen? With money?”
Nurse: “Sadly, no.”
Me: “So insurance will pay for additional days at the hospital but not for the much cheaper “send home with oxygen”?”
Nurse: “I KNOW RIGHT??? It’s so frustrating. >_<”
By now, the respiratory therapist had left. About an hour later, the nurse came back and took Lut off oxygen. “The RT will do the re-test in 10 minutes and presumably he’ll fail it then.”
An hour passed, of the oxygen monitor beeping because Lut’s was too low. Finally, the RT returned. The nurse and I coached Lut to fail it. “Breathe shallowly! No deep breaths!” The RT brought him back in thirty seconds. Mission accomplished.
I’ve been monitoring his blood oxygen closely since we got home. He does well enough while using the oxygen that I don’t bother with readings while he’s on it. Whenever he’s sitting without wearing it, I check it every hour or so -- we have one of those little pulse-oximeters. On the first two days after he was discharged, he still had the occasional reading of 89 or 88 (they want 90+, and when he left the hospital he was more like 85 on room air). But since Tuesday or so, I’ve only had one reading of 89, and that went above 90 immediately.
We talked to his general practitioner on Thursday 6/24. He said to keep an eye on it and experiment with leaving it off as long as oxygen levels stayed high. But even if he didn’t need it at all, we should wait 4 weeks before calling to return the equipment. You don’t actually buy oxygen at all. You rent an oxygen concentrator. While the patient is at home, the patient uses the oxygen concentrator with a 50-foot extension on the cannula so that they can move around the house. When you go out, you take a tank with you to use. There’s a machine that goes on top of the concentrator that can be used to fill little portable tanks that fit in a shoulder sling, which is a lot less annoying than the big tank on a wheeled caddy that the hospital sent us home with. We have three of those tanks, too, but those are “in case the power goes out” rather than designed for travel. The little tanks have a special valve so that they only dispense oxygen when he inhales, instead of continuously, so they last just as long despite being much smaller. I don’t know why the big tanks don’t have the same kind of valve.
After a hospital stay, they always send out home health aides, so he’ll get physical, occupational, and respiratory therapy starting next week.
My little victory during all of this has been getting back to regular exercise. Over the course of the last year and a half, I’ve dropped from 5+ times per week to 3-4 times. Every month this year, I’ve had “exercise 20 times” down as a stretch goal, and for the last three months I have ended up at 16-17 instead. In June, I exercised for the first three days, and then Lut grew sicker and I didn’t exercise for a week. On June 11, I looked at my list of stretch goals and thought “It is still technically possible to make this goal. I will do the thing.”
And then Lut was hospitalized again and I thought “okay, Imma lower my bar for what qualifies as exercise.”
So I started counting stuff like “did one 10 minute beginner’s aerobics video” or “did 30 minutes of pacing while on the phone” (Google Fit measures how much pacing I do, and I make an effort to pace as if I were walking, by going from one end of the house to the other and then back.)
Doing this reminded me of when I used to trick myself into starting to exercise by promising myself I could stop any time. “Just five minutes. You can always stop.” And then once I got started, I’d always continue through to my usual end.
Except that this time, I was letting myself actually stop.
I made it to 21 times in June -- maybe 22 if I decide to exercise later today. But I’ll take it, either way. My overall activity level this month is higher than at any point since October 2020. “Anything is better than nothing” is a good strategy to keep in mind.
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