This picks up from “Ow, ow, & ow”, for which you can find a link on my page.
On Tuesday night, both Elizabeth & I were worn out. I went to work, & while I got useful things accomplished at NASA, I was looking forward to a long rest at home. Elizabeth’s school is going through the utterly pointless exercise known as high-stakes testing, which keeps her on her feet all day, & has her reading out the texts of the questions to the kids who require such services. Feel free to email her if you want to know about how this trend in filling in scantron forms has changed education. Anyway, we’d ordered in pizza-we’ve finally found one which doesn’t have excessively salty sauce or cheese, & after it arrived, the week was starting to look up. The pizza around here is hardly that of where I grew up, but I’d have eaten almost anything.
A few hours later, my week was going down. The pain had increased, & my pulse was racing again, with some seriously thumping bass, so my BP had increased. This persuaded me to call my cardiologist, Dr. Hausner (Dr. H), after hours. We had a quick chat, & it turns out that our voice mails from earlier that day had crossed. Once she learned that I’d been experiencing the pain, the high BP, & the speedy pulse for a few days by then, she ordered me to go to the ER at Suburban.
Elizabeth & I grabbed a few basics & headed out. The drive was not good for me. My pulse continued to race, & it was getting tight in my chest. The Beltway traffic was light, so we got to Suburban Hospital in short order. Luckily, there weren’t a lot of people in the ER at that moment, so I scored high on the triage list. In one sense, that’s not really a good thing, but it did mean that someone looked at me right away. They already had most of my medical history, since all they had to do was look me up in their system, & so they could settle down to what was really going on. At that point I had a pulse of 123 beats per minute. Most people generally have a pulse of about 70 beats per minute. They got a CAT scan of my heart, & drew what felt like a good half pint of blood, because this time, they wanted to do biological cultures, not just the usual few tubes for chemistry.
At first, the diagnosis was really bad: Mediastinitis. That’s an infection of the interior of the chest, & while it’s a rare complication of heart surgery, it’s unusual that it would have taken this long to show up, & it’s got to be treated fast. The ER doctor had me admitted, & got me on an IV drip of some serious antibiotics. By 2 AM, I was ensconced in a room & left to ponder my fate.
I woke about 3 hours later to get resampled, slept fitfully until 8, & had breakfast. As luck would have it, not only was in the same ward where I recovered from my open heart surgery, but several of the same nurses were still there, so things were starting to look up. At least one of the nurses wanted to know if my in-laws were on their way in, because she really liked meeting them. The clincher to this was a visit by Dr. H. & the surgeon who had worked with me before, Dr. Siegenthaler, who told me that an examination of my blood didn’t show any evidence of infection, but the CAT scan showed that there were about 200 milliliters of fluid between my right lung & its protective membrane-a classic case of pleurisy. For those of you keeping score using the old Imperial system, that’s a little under half a pint.
Naturally, this stuff had to go, so they scheduled me to have a thoracentesis (
http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/thor/), which is shorthand for saying that I would get stabbed in the back by the medical establishment. All I had to do was wait. Well, they had me down for Wednesday afternoon, but whoever was ahead of me had an amazingly bad day, such that the hospital had to clean out the operating theater used for that procedure, so I had to wait until Thursday.
Thursday morning, I was visited again by my doctors, who wanted me to drop by their offices later next week. Since I am in the red on paid time off, they can wait the month or so it’ll take for me to get enough back to go on visits.
The thoracentesis finally took place just as I was going to order up lunch. The procedure itself was pretty straightforward. The nurse with whom the surgeon worked took down some basics, & I threw in the fun I had with the pericardiocentesis in December, which definitely got her thinking. The surgeon & I had a chat after that, & he upped my Novocain. After that, a quick jab, a feeling of pressure being let off, & that was it. The surgeon let me have a look at the fluid which came out of me. It more or less reminded me of the color of apple cider, but I really wasn’t willing to take a whiff.
After a followup X-ray to verify that the lung hadn’t collapsed, all I had to do was wait to get picked up by Elizabeth, celebrate our 14th anniversary, & go to sleep in my own bed, for a change.
