Tag: emergency room

grossly unremarkable

Ugh! I’ve been putting off writing a health update post, hoping to get to a more definitive place before sharing but it’s taking long enough that I figured I better try.

Regular readers may recall that I started having trouble with tinnitus on my left side a few months back and wrote more about it on Mother’s Day. An MRI had been scheduled for June 21 with a hearing test to follow the next week.

Unfortunately, I was accumulating more symptoms on my left side, some visual difficulties in my left eye though the eye itself was fine, pressure or headache behind that eye, discomfort on the left side of my neck, intermittent tingling behind my left ear, a tendency to get lightheaded and feel off-balance, fatigue, and difficulty concentrating, perhaps caused by having to divert conscious attention to things like vision and equilibrium that are usually unconscious. I had been to my primary care provider several times but they needed the information from the MRI before we could proceed further, so the plan was that, if my symptoms worsened, I would go to the emergency room at our local hospital.

In early June, things did get worse. The most alarming part was that the tingling on the side of my head started spreading into my face and toward my neck and became almost constant. I also was having increased problems with my thought processes slowing down as I spent more and more brainpower remembering to move my head and body slowly so that I could keep my balance.

So, B took me to the hospital emergency department, arriving a bit before 9 AM. It was very busy, partially a result (we found out later) of difficulties at a neighboring hospital due to a cyber attack. It was so busy that I spent the first six hours based in the waiting room, going out for various tests and then being returned there. They did a brain CT relatively quickly to make sure I wasn’t having a stroke or some other acute thing. The results came back as “grossly normal” with some aspects being labelled as “grossly unremarkable,” which quickly became a favorite phrase for me, thus, the title of this post.

The waiting room became so crowded that they asked non-patients to leave shortly before noon, unless they were needed for patient care, such as parents of children or people who were acting as translators. So, B had to leave me; he waited at the hospital for most of the afternoon but eventually headed for home.

Mid-afternoon, there was finally a space in the treatment area for me, albeit on a gurney in the hallway, and the decision was made that I needed an MRI – which I already knew because I had one scheduled – but it was too late in the day to fit me in. I got to eat supper and eventually was moved to a room with hospital beds where several of us were on observation for the night.

Or so I thought.

Around 3 AM, I was moved upstairs to a unit that houses neurology patients. Somehow, they seemed to have missed all the stuff that happened in the ER and I had to prove to them that I wasn’t having a stroke all over again. I did have the MRI with contrast in the morning, which also proved to be grossly normal. This was, of course, good news in that it ruled out any tumors in my brain or sinuses, as well as other brain diseases or strokes. However, it didn’t tell us what was causing my symptoms.

The most useful thing that happened was a consultation with physical therapy. Dianne detected that my eyes weren’t tracking as well as they should be. She also did an evaluation for inner ear problems, where crystals in the inner ear loosen and migrate and cause eye and balance symptoms. While I don’t have the most common form of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, I may have a variation of it with the crystals in a different part of the inner ear canal affected.

The maneuvers that Dianne did with my head and neck during the evaluation did help relieve some of my symptoms. The constant discomfort on the left side of my neck went away and I could move my head more easily. The tingling on the side of my head, which by then was constant, disappeared. Dianne recommended that I see a physical therapist who specializes in vestibular therapy and I have an appointment scheduled for next week. She also gave me an eye exercise to do at home in the meantime and some tips on posture. Additionally, a neck X-ray revealed some arthritis, which will be useful knowledge for the physical therapist.

I was discharged from the hospital that evening. There are supposed to be appointments for follow-up with a neurologist and a referral to an ear, nose, and throat specialist but I haven’t heard when those will be. The tinnitus is still constant and I may or may not have answers about that from my hearing test next week.

Over these last couple of weeks since my hospital visit, the severity of symptoms overall has been creeping higher. The current heat dome that is parked over us here in the Northeast US hasn’t been helpful; I’ve been feeling worse despite staying in our geothermal-heat-pump-cooled home as much as possible.

I’m looking forward to my vestibular therapy appointment on Wednesday, hoping that their experience will make more sense of my situation and maybe even arrive at a diagnosis that will explain some of my symptoms. It’s possible that there is more than one condition going on. For example, the tinnitus could have a cause not related to the possible inner ear issue.

Meanwhile, I’ve had to clear most of my usual activities from my schedule. My lack of concentration is making reading and writing more challenging, which is a shame, given that that is what I usually spend most of my time doing. I will try to do a quick update late next week after my vestibular therapy appointment and hearing test.

Hoping for some good news to share.

Other than being grossly unremarkable.

Paco update

Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday last week was to base the post around a word that contained -igh. My thought was to write a post beginning with “Sigh” about my father’s continuing health struggles, following up on two previous SoCS posts.

The day after I wrote the post linked above, Paco’s condition deteriorated and I made the decision to send him to the emergency room. After the initial check-in, I was allowed to be with him. The ER team was very thorough and found that he was dehydrated and had three new fractures in his lumbar vertebrae. After some IV fluids, he went back to the rehab facility by ambulance at 3 AM.

I caught a nap and was very grateful to learn that my older sister had moved up a planned visit and would arrive that afternoon. She spent a lot of time with Paco on compassionate care visits while I worked out a lot of logistics. It turned out that a rehab room opened up within his senior community; the place where he currently was in rehab was a sister facility in a nearby city. Paco was set to move back on Friday and I spent a lot of time packing up things in his assisted living unit, some to send up to his rehab room there and some to bring back to our house as we had decided to give up his place in assisted, as we know he won’t be well enough to return there any time soon – and may never recover to that point.

The plan on Friday had been that our family would finish clearing out his place in assisted and help Paco to get settled into rehab, but we arrived to find that someone in the assisted wing had tested positive for COVID, so it had to go into lockdown. Fortunately, this didn’t affect Paco’s move and he arrived safely via medivan. I signed yet another cache of documents and was allowed a short visit to help him get settled.

Unfortunately, our hard-won rights to expanded compassionate care visits got lost in the bureaucracy with the impending holiday weekend adding another layer of complications with so many staff away on vacation. I was able to get permission for some extra visiting time over the weekend but face another round of changing personnel, location, rules, etc. this coming week.

Meanwhile, Paco is confused and exhausted. The silver lining is that his pain level is generally low.

The big question mark remains how much recovery is possible in regards to daily living functions. I don’t know if the rehab team will be able to make a valid prediction or not.

It may be a situation of wait and watch and work and hope and pray and see where we end up.

One-Liner Wednesday: a helpful hint

Helpful Hint: A good, multi-layered cloth mask makes an excellent eye shield if you need to try to sleep under bright lights. (discovered during an emergency room visit with Paco Sunday night/Monday morning)
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Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2021/06/30/one-liner-wednesday-laying-down-on-the-job/

April 8

I am going to preface this post with the statement that Nana is doing well, so as not to cause anyone undue stress.

On Friday, April 8th, my plan was to do a couple of things at Grandma’s cottage, which we were working on cleaning out, have lunch with a friend, and then head to Syracuse to bring daughter T home for the weekend, which would be her first time home since Grandma died on March 22nd.

A few minutes after I arrived at the senior community, my cell phone rang. It was my mom (Nana) calling from the emergency room. She had collapsed in the waiting room of a medical building across the street from the hospital. The rapid response team had done a couple of rounds of CPR on her and she was in the emergency room for monitoring and tests.

I used the speakerphone to tell B what was happening. He made arrangements to go to Syracuse to get T. I left messages for my friend not to expect me for lunch. Meanwhile, I drove to the hospital.

I was lucky to find a parking space in the visitors’ lot and rushed up the hill toward the emergency entrance, a cold wind blowing directly into my face, making it difficult to catch my breath. After an unusually mild winter, we had a couple of cold snowy weeks once spring had officially arrived.

Once I was able to get through the line and behind the locked doors of the ER, the wait was on. An EKG was done. The heart monitor was tracing green lines across a screen above Nana’s head. Blood was drawn for tests. They took Nana down for a chest X-ray. There was a line started in her arm, although she wasn’t hooked up to any intravenous fluids. She wasn’t allowed to eat or drink. We were talking to pass the time. The ER became increasingly busy and noisy.

Nana was having some pain in her back and chest. The nurse told us it was from the CPR. A small price to pay from having been brought back from death…

Several hours later, the physician assigned to her case came in. Nana was not dehydrated. Her electrolytes were fine. She hadn’t had a heart attack.

In fact, her heart had not stopped at all.

She had fainted, mostly likely from a combination of cold, wind, walking too quickly uphill in the morning when her medications tend to drop her blood pressure.

We were grateful that she was okay, although I admit that I have been struggling with the fact that a highly trained medical team missed her pulse and performed CPR when they should have been reaching for the smelling salts.

This was especially difficult as she has had to deal with a bruised chest and ribs over these following weeks. It was all unnecessary.

For me, it was also an extra measure of fear that pushed me within a hair’s breadth of melting down. I have been working hard at keeping myself functional during this stressful time. For a few hours, I felt as though I might not be able to cope with an added crisis.

Thank God that Nana and the rest of the family were spared what could have been so much worse.

 

 

 

Friday night fun? – part 2

In part one of this post, I wrote about reading at poetry open mic for the first time.  Here is a (somewhat condensed) continuation of the story.

While stopped at a traffic light on the way home, I turned the ringer of my phone back on and was surprised to see that there was a missed call from my husband B, who had stayed at home because he wasn’t feeling well.  He knew where I was and that I wouldn’t have the phone on during the reading, so I immediately became apprehensive and rushed home to find that my mom (Nana) had called for advice as to whether she should have my dad (Paco) take her to the walk-in or the emergency room when she had suddenly exhibited symptoms of a gastrointestinal bleed.

B advised the emergency room.

B had called my cell phone, hoping that I would put my ringer back on before leaving the bookstore so that I could get to the hospital more quickly, but, as it turned out, it was good that I had gone home first. They phoned again during the few minutes I was home to say that Nana was being put into a room in the ER. I grabbed a few magazines that I could leave with my mother for entertainment during the inevitable waiting times and headed out to the hospital.

The ER waiting room was filled to overflowing and there were so many patients back in the unit itself that some were in the hallway. My mom was in a room, though, because they needed to keep her hitched up to cardiac monitors, given that some of her symptoms could have been a second heart attack. Her heart was okay, but she needed to stay in the hospital to figure out where the bleeding was occurring. There were no rooms available in the hospital proper, so, about 2 AM, she was moved to another section of the ER that had beds rather than gurneys.

The next day, the gastroenterologist who was on weekend call, Dr. B., came in and we decided that it was best to do a colonoscopy on Sunday morning and Nana was admitted to the GI unit when space became available. The colonoscopy revealed that Nana had developed arteriovenous malformations (AVM) and was bleeding from several different sites, which Dr. B. cauterized. Dr. B. explained it to us as being similar to varicose veins that break through to the surface and bleed. Unfortunately, the meds that Nana needs to take due to her cardiac stents don’t help matters, as they act to prevent blood from clotting easily.

Although Nana had lost quite a bit of blood, the doctors decided not to transfuse but to let her try to build back her blood count on her own.  This didn’t turn out so well, as Nana had to spend several days in the hospital about a month later when her low iron levels started to affect her blood pressure. They finally gave her a couple of units of blood and, while her iron level isn’t quite up to what is considered normal, she is slowly gaining strength and getting back to some parts of her old routine – with, we hope, more progress to come as spring continues to unfold and we celebrate Mother’s Day and her birthday.

There is no way to tell when the AVMs may recur, so, for now, there are weekly blood tests so that, if she becomes more anemic, the gastroenterologist can intervene before she loses too much blood.

Vigilance is our friend, as is following through on recommended treatment, medication, and lifestyle choices. It’s what has kept Nana and Paco as active as they are as they age.

But fingers crossed that we don’t have any more medical adventures in the coming months.

We all need a rest.