Musings of a Restless Mind

I haven’t posted anything for a month or so, and there’s a reason for that as I explain below. Life is slowly getting back to normal…, well except for all that extra time it takes to watch the hit ’em where they ain’t Padres line drive their way to the World Series (fingers crossed).

First, a little background. I’ve been healthy most of my life. I rarely catch the flu, and I rarely feel the need to go to a doctor. On the afternoon of Thursday August 8, I started feeling like I might be coming down with something, so, with my typical confidence in my robust health, I lay down expecting to feel fine in a few hours. Then I woke up, and it was Saturday morning, and my lower left leg was swollen and bright red. I waited a day just to be sure it wasn’t going away on its own, and, knowing that I was likely to end up in the hospital, I called my best friend to take me to the emergency room.

They quickly diagnosed me with an infection, but began a thorough and mostly futile search for anything else that might be wrong with me. I had an irregular heartbeat likely caused by the infection, the doctors admitted, but they did x-rays, ultrasounds, and MRIs on my leg, lungs, and heart. They found a partial blockage of one of the arteries in my left leg, but said the ultrasound showed my circulation was actually fine.

Even though I’d been a frequent visitor to the hospital all the times my wife was sick, it was a different experience on the other end of the stethoscope. Because of my AFib, they put me in Critical Care, which is apparently a step down from Intensive Care. So I found myself in a very large room with a big curtain separating me from my roommate. Unfortunately, he was hard of hearing, so every conversation was very loud, not that it really bothered me, because they had me hooked up to an electrocardiogram machine 24/7. I had all the sticky electrodes stuck all over my chest, making moving difficult. Plus they had an oxygen monitor on my finger. Every 20 minutes or so, the machine would beep, and I could usually stop it by waving my hand around for a few seconds, or maybe it just stopped on its own. It was hard to do a controlled experiment.

A nurse came in to give me my pills every 4 hours, guaranteeing me not getting a full night’s sleep. Not that I could anyway because the vital signs monitoring machine next to my bed would start beeping loudly every couple of hours or so. If that meant my heartbeat had gone irregular again, I have no idea. I couldn’t see the display most of the time, and, with everything hooked up to me, couldn’t reach out to move it. After a day, I sort of understood that the wavy line on top was my heart rhythm. I could also see the blood pressure display (my arm cuff would automatically inflate every 2 hours). Once I started feeling less like a fish trying not to flop around as he awaits his demise in the boat, my system engineer brain kicked in and I wondered why any fool would design a machine with an audible alarm that never summoned anyone. I asked a nurse and she medsplained to me that it also dinged at the nurses’ desk. That still didn’t explain why it beeped on my end when nobody ever showed up to do anything about whatever was so alarming. Someone should take a two-foot steel slide rule to the backside of the machine’s engineer, but then probably nobody ever told him the use-case for the machine.

They also diagnosed me with low sodium levels, not alarmingly low, but not in the “green”. I’ve never smoked (anything), and I have a diet that doctors find it hard to find fault with, breakfast consisting of orange juice, two pieces of toast, a banana, and a handful of unsweetened blueberries for breakfast. Lunch/dinner (whichever is bigger that day) is either a portion of meat or cheese, unsalted cashews, grapes, and figs (or whatever other fruit is in season). I rarely eat any fast food, and almost never drink alcohol. I think the doc was impressed that I could also tell her that I typically drank two liters of water a day. Somehow I don’t think she was used to people knowing exactly what they eat and drink. But since they found my salt deficient, she told me to do everything common wisdom says is wrong. Eat more salty foods and drink less fluids. In fact they strictly limited me to 1.5 liters of water per 24 hours. They even gave me salt pills as if I were on a trek across the Sahara.

Probably because I was starting to feel better, I started grilling the doctor by the third day. I was slightly annoyed that they kept trying to find things wrong with my heart and circulation when the big problem in my mind was obviously the infection. Her only evidence that the antibiotics were working was that the redness and swelling had not gotten worse. Thinking like a systems engineer, I asked her if they had taken a sample of my infection to test to see which antibiotic worked best against it. Her response was that they hadn’t since my leg hadn’t been secreting any fluids. I stifled my sarcastic response, but could tell she was getting annoyed at my grilling her about them keeping me in critical care when they couldn’t find anything wrong with me that they knew how to treat except for the infection that, to my mind, they were mostly ignoring.

Of course there was the food. I was put on a totally unrestricted diet, but I had to remember to ask for salt with every meal because standard hospital practice was no salt added to any meal. My first breakfast, I ordered two eggs over easy. When I lifted the domed lid I found a flat, eggish thing that looked like it had been run over by a tractor tire and sealed to the plate. After that I stuck to omelets. Fortunately my friend was willing to bring me a fast-food hamburger and fries for lunch, so I managed.

After a week, the doctor reluctantly decided to release me, probably to get rid of her feisty patient. I spent the next week mostly flat on my back. I was supposed to keep my leg elevated, which made ordinary life difficult. Also I could only manage to stand for 5 minutes at a time for the first couple of days, but I depleted my freezer and even tried call-in food ordering, so I survived. For another week, although I could stand longer, I found myself staggering around like a drunk waddling back from the bar at 2am. After that I celebrated being able to walk normally, but, after 2 weeks on my back, I’m still not back to my normal routine of walking to the stores and back 2 or 3 times a week.

Because I didn’t have any regular doctors before this, I’ve still got 3 weeks until I see my new cardiologist after I gear myself up to grill him on whether I really need medication or just an exercise program to get myself back into shape. As someone who made it to 73 years old with no medications at all, I now confront the health-care system head on rather than as a “normal person” who’s intimidated by the doctors and only willing to resist them passive aggressively if at all. I’ll see how it goes.