Medical Mutterings - September 11th 2018

PTMI ALERT! This post contains mention of vomit and blood. You have been warned.

Apparently there's a virus going around in our area. Naturally, we got it. Kelly especially. He was throwing up, and only managing to eat a bit of soup, which he didn't keep much of down, and was only really eating because he figured he should be eating something. I was feeling really sick, and I got really feverish, but I wasn't physically throwing up. Mind you, I'm pretty good at not throwing up even when I feel really sick. Kelly had a bit of the fever too, but my fever was worse than his. I spent those days eating nothing but toast though, because I couldn't be bothered with anything else, and felt sick enough that I'm not sure I'd have kept more than that down. To be honest, it's mainly my love of toast that had me managing to eat that. That's often the case when I don't feel well. A nice piece of buttered toast. Chips (as in fries) are another thing you can get me to eat if I'm not feeling well.

Anyway, my "couple of hours" at the hospital on August 28th turned in to an entire day spent at the hospital. I did half expect it, because I know what our hospitals are like. But, when I was seen quickly on arrival, I'd hoped that would mean I'd be out of there quickly, which would have made a nice change. No such luck!

First it took about half an hour for them to get a vein to co-operate. My veins are rebelling against all the needles - not that I blame them - and they either couldn't find one, or found one but sticking needles in it did nothing (mostly I didn't even bleed from their attempts). When they did finally find a working vein, it was in my wrist, of course. The right one at that. Having the line in your wrist isn't fun, and since I'm very right handed it makes things awkward for me. But at least it was only going to be there a couple of hours. Or, so I thought.

I was there for an iron transfusion, but the doctor came up with this great idea about testing my blood first. Except he forgot to tell the labs it was urgent, so an hour wait turned in to three, since it was only after an hour and a half he realized and fixed his mistake. He never actually admitted the mistake to me, but I heard him talking to one of the nurses who had called the labs for him. He just told me there was a delay. I didn't bother telling him I'd heard his conversation so knew that about fifteen minutes before he decided to come tell me. Anyway, then my bloods came back, and he said they were good (though wouldn't give me the numbers) but that there's a margin of error due to how recently I had a blood transfusion, so he should do the iron transfusion anyway to be safe. I managed to resist the urge to call him a total idiot for not just doing the transfusion in the first place, but only just. Bearing in mind, this was the same idiot doctor who sent me home on that Wednesday, despite my bloods being low enough for a transfusion at the time. He even actually remembered having seen me and sent me home that day, and told me so.

So... By this time I'd been at the hospital for a little over three and a half hours, and he hadn't signed off on the stuff to come from the pharmacy, which meant I still had to wait for that to happen, which took another two hours. I still don't understand why he bothered waiting for the test results if he knew it would be best to give me the transfusion anyhow. But there you go.

It should have taken about 20 minutes for it to be fed in to me. But my arm was already in pain by the time they were starting, so they decided to feed it in slowly. When the pain increased enough that I was in tears from it, they decided to slow it down more to see if that would help. It didn't. Normally they would have looked for another vein and tried again, but with me being so hard to get a line in to, they didn't want to mess about with it, so I ended up with two hours of pain while the stuff slowly dripped in to my arm. Honestly, I wished I'd managed to hide the pain, because the 20 minutes of it would have been a lot less to deal with... At least it would have been over with more quickly.

What didn't help was that it was a hot day - not the extremely hot days we've had throughout the Summer, but reasonably warm, made worse by hospitals insisting on keeping all windows closed - and I was still a little feverish. They said not, because my temperature was low, but I couldn't get them to accept that the low end of the normal range is too low for my temperature (my temperature normally runs between 36.9 and 37.6, but was down at 36.0) or that my temperature drops when I'm not well, even as I feel hot to the touch. Of course, it's also possible hot flashes were happening thanks to the sideeffects of the shot, which were making things worse. One of the nurses could see I was uncomfortably hot though, so she got me a fan, which helped some. But another nurse came and took it away, because apparently it wasn't fair to the other patients for me to be having it on. Never mind the fact the other patients were almost as disappointed as me when it was taken away. I know this for a fact, because - unlike the nurse who stole the fan - I actually talked to them. Plus, the nurse who brought me a fan had asked them if it was OK before putting it on.

Anyway, between feeling so hot, and dealing with the pain, I was feeling incredibly sick again. So sick I hardly touched my dinner, despite knowing from previous hospital trips that the meal in question is actually one of the meals they do that are pretty good (for hospital food). It was cheese and potato pie, if you're wondering. Thankfully, once they got the thing out of my wrist, and I was out of the hot ward, I started to feel a little better. Although, my arm hurt so badly I actually took painkillers for it when I got home, and it was painful enough that I continued to take painkillers for several days afterwards. Actually, I was on painkillers for a little over a week, and it was still hurting a bit for a few days afterwards. In fact, it still hurts a little now. The lingering pain didn't entirely come as a surprise though, since that's happened before. It still wasn't very fun though, especially since my constant need to keep using that arm kept aggrivating it, and is likely at least partially responsible for it still hurting now.

My only other medical treatment in the past couple of weeks has been my shot, which I had this past Friday (September 7th). So far it's still doing its job, which is nice. My next shot is scheduled for October 5th at 11:20am. In the meantime, the doctor will be rechecking my bloods, since they're supposed to be keeping a close eye on those. Actually, they should have been anyhow, but there you go. I've got an appointment for this coming Thursday (September 13th) at 11:50am to have blood taken for this month's recheck.

By the way, I had them weigh me while I was there for the shot, and discovered I'd lost 1.6 kilos (that's about 3.5 lbs). I actually found this kind of funny, considering I'd been making no attempt at all to try and lose weight in the past four weeks. I'd been eating whatever I wanted, and not really worrying about exercise. I mean, I was feeling really bad for most of that time, so exercise and healthy eating really weren't high on my priorities. If months like the one I had are what I need to lose weight, I think I'd rather stay as I am though. Not that I don't want to lose some weight. I do. But... Well, I think you get my point. I need to figure out a more enjoyable way to lose weight, I think. *wink*

As for Kelly:

We were a bit concerned about some pain and bleeding Kelly was having from his head while dealing with the virus thing. He wondered if he'd accidentally pulled some of the stitches out, so half expected to be told it wasn't as healed as it should have been when he went back to them on September 3rd. But it was all good news. The wound is healing nicely - though he has to still be careful not to be rough with doing things to his head for a few weeks - and the cyst doesn't appear to have been anything to worry about. They said it was just a benign cyst, which is gone now, and shouldn't be causing any more problems. Like I said, he just has to be careful around the wound area for a few weeks while it finishes healing.