087 RADIOACTIVE

I got a little ahead of myself with the last paragraph.  The surgeon did the drainage incisions on my last day there, but that was after I spent two weeks in Kamloops.  I started off in a semi-private room with a room-mate who always kept the curtain closed and was not very friendly, neither to me or the care team.  I didn’t care if he spoke to me or not, but I really didn’t like that he would hurl abuse towards the nurses and care aides.  I assumed that he was just another junkie.  Shows why you don’t make assumptions.

I was told by one of the nurses, when he was out of the room, that he was a young fellow, 20 years old who had been T-boned in an intersection by a drunk driver.  The impact shattered his pelvis and lower spine leaving him a paraplegic and confined to a wheelchair.  He was in constant excruciating pain and ever few months or so over the past two years had to be readmitted to hospital due to his skin breaking down and causing huge ulcers on his butt and thighs.  So, he was a little bitter.  I was suddenly transferred out of that room and as I was being wheeled out, he called me by name and wished me luck.  First time he had spoken to me and I was surprised he knew my name.

From there I went into a 4-person ward and I found out it was for infection protocol.  They weren’t sure what infection I was harboring and didn’t want to risk me cross-contaminating the young fellow.  In the new ward, I was with 3 other people who were all fighting major MRSA infections, which is what they thought I had.  When the tests came back three days later, they had ruled out MRSA on me and immediately transferred me to another two-person ward.

There I was teamed up with a woman who had lost her leg due to smoking and the resultant narrowing of the blood vessels in her leg.  She and I hit it off and we would chat and visit when we were feeling up to it.  If not, the curtains would be closed.  I had a few setbacks where the sepsis tried to reassert itself and they would hammer it with different types of IV antibiotics.

My shoulder would continue and while I tried to wean myself off he heavy duty drugs, there were times that I was left begging for it.  Nobody could figure out why it was hurting.  I was taken down for x-rays and they would come back negative.  Then I would get taken down for an ultra-sound which was also negative.  Finally, they did a tap of the shoulder joint, which consisted of a large bore needle which looked like it was two feet long.

It wasn’t really, it was maybe 4 to 6 inches, long enough to reach the center of my shoulder joint.  They jammed that thing into my shoulder and sucked out some of the fluid.  If I thought my shoulder hurt before, that needle made me scream in pain.  The purpose was to see if there was any infection in the bursa fluid.  There wasn’t and to this day, nobody knows what was wrong with my shoulder.  It still hurts a lot when I move certain ways, but it is much improved.

In total I had three x-rays of both of my feet, 2 CAT scans of my feet, two ultra sound on my feet, two x-rays of my shoulder, one ultra-sound and a joint tap.  I had two x-rays of my left hand, which had become totally immobile.  I also had an x-ray and ultrasound done on my left knee which had also swollen up.  As I said earlier, I’m surprised I didn’t glow in the dark.  These tests were all done in the two weeks I was in Kamloops, there would be more after my transfer.  One reason I was worried about the transfer of rooms, was that I had such a great care team and I didn’t want to lose them.  It turned out though, I was still on the same floor, so I kept the same team.

By now I was conscious and had weaned myself off the major, heavy duty pain meds and had dropped down to Tylenol 3’s and was more capable of having and remembering visitors.  I’ll get into that in the next segment.