2012 was an odd year for me. I spent a lot of time in the hospital, which is never my idea of a good time. I had started writing about my hospitalization this past summer, but never bothered finishing it, and as the actual event moved further and further into the past, it seemed less and less critical to get it written.
On Thanksgiving, I went into the emergency room once more, this time under my own power, complaining that breathing was a bit more difficult than it should have been, and I had felt sluggish for a few days. The ER physician tried to contact an on-call neurologist, but decided better than to wait too long, and had me airlifted to one of the large hospitals in Phoenix. The first few hours I was there, everything went from bad, to very vey worse, and I was put on a bipap machine, and then I don't remember anything for the next two or three weeks.
I'm told that this particular time was very dramatic. The highlights are that I had pneumonia, several bronchoscopies were performed, a feeding tube was put directly into my stomach, and in service of some of the more involved things, and a tracheostomy was performed so that the doctors had a better path from the outside world into my lungs.
I can't say much to what it's like having a tracheostomy performed or having a feeding tube installed, although I will mention that having each of them un-done is more or less painless. What I can speak to is what it's like to wake up, alive (of course), with no notion at all about what had happened, and (because of the tracheostomy) no ability to speak. At first I was fairly relaxed, I understood that whatever was happening was happening with very good reason and I just wanted to let the doctors do what they were going to do in the effort of my leaving the hospital quickly and recovered. However, after a day or so, I noticed that there was a hole in my neck. I suppose it took so long because I wasn't trying to move my arms and hands much. Physicians came and went, and said things at me very quickly, finally I was able to use my iPad to ask some questions, but it didn't work very well.
The biggest moment of what I'd classify as my own being unable or unwilling to accept what was happening was when nobody seemed to be willing or able to give me an answer about whether or not the trach would come out. The trach, you see, wasn't exactly the most comfortable thing to have sticking out my neck, and I was worried about cleaning it, buying supplies for it, etc. One of the first things I was told about the trach they installed at first was that the trach tubing needs to be changed either daily or every other day, and by the time they brought in the speaking valve, I was sure I was going to end up like one of those public service announcements from the 1990s, with an old woman who had been trached because smoking had damaged her airways, and then shows her smoking through the trach. I believe the tagline was "don't even start."
The next thing that happened was that people kept turning on the television, even if I didn't want it on, and I couldn't successfully sleep for well over 50 hours. Without sleeping. Near the tail end of this period, the speech therapist from the main hospital wanted to certify me to eat food again. The normal process for this involves a new toy they have, which is essentially a firewire video camera that they can send down your throat to make sure that all of a certain colored liquid or food they have you eat makes it down the correct way. This is very cool and even though I am well aware of my own body, I was willing to give it a shot for their sake. I was able to get the water down without issue, even with a camera down my nose. However, when it came time for a small bit of solid food, everything came right back out and they had to remove the camera. I apologized and they said they'd come back the next day.
After another sleepless night, they came back to retrieve me for a slightly different kind of swallow study. This time, they put me in the most expensive chair that exists, the $7,000 rocket chair, and wheeled me over to radiology for a swallow study using video x-rays. Having any amount of video x-ray taken of you is incredibly interesting, but after having been in the rays for so long, and awake for as long as I had been, I was juuust about ready to crash. And so, naturally, it was time for a grueling session of physical therapy, where I (with the help of two very nice folks) stood up for the first time in a while, and then immediately needed to sit back down.
The time between the video x-ray, standing, and finally getting some sleep. The best way I can describe it was that some senses that had either been clogged or disabled opened back up, I had a small mental breakdown, and "all these feels" about my sometimes cavalier attitude toward my own health all hit at once, resulting in approximately an hour of me just sitting there, unable to think about anything but how horrible I smelled (whether or not it was me, the room, or just a side-effect of the video x-ray, I don't know) and how bad a person I perceived myself to be, for the aforementioned cavalier attitude toward my own health, and every once in a while, life itself. This wasn't the first time I had a small breakdown in the ICU, nor do I even think it was the last, but it's the one that stands out the most to me, just because looking back on it now, of how surreal the situation really was, to me anyway.
Between this and a whole lot of time spent watching re-runs of '80s and '90s sitcoms, my time in the ICU was extraordinarily… weird.
That night, I finally got some sleep, and it was just another short day or so later that I was able to move over from the ICU to the neuro rehab unit. Over the summer when I was hospitalized, I had been more or less independent before leaving the ICU, to the point where I had been taking showers and using a regular toilet. In addition, I had a bit more time over the summer, as I'd gone to an intermediary acute care unit, and then only stayed on the rehab unit for three or four days.
This time, I was a lot more amenable to the rules on the rehab unit, which include things like asking permission to go to the restroom. They brought me over one evening, and I was out like a light as soon as I transferred over to the new bed. It's a lot of effort to be awake so long, and I needed the sleep so direly.
From that point forward, it seemed like a fairly routine stay in neuro rehab – not that any stay in neuro rehab is strictly "routine" as it were. Literally everything improved every single day, I had visitors in the form of my dad and one of my coworkers on a regular basis, and it continued to be that everybody on the staff was very nice. The most awkward part was the bit where actually a lot of the nurses and therapists recognized me from my stay over the summer. I suppose it's not terribly surprising that would happen, if for no other reason than the previous stay had been the same year.
While on the rehab unit, I had a wheelchair, although they stopped having me use that fairly quickly, which was good. About halfway through my stay on the rehab unit, the pulmonologist who had put in the trach and feeding tube popped them out in short order, which certainly put me in high spirits for the day.
Other events on the rehab unit include surprise x-rays, which were ordered by some unknown entity. They loaded me up on a patient transport cart, dropped me off in front of a TV playing episodes of Judge Judy, and then brought me back an hour or so later. The process of getting x-rayed was far more fun this time, however. It was a regular single-picture x-ray room, and the two techs running the machine informed me that it was a new toy the hospital had bought, so upon the successful completion of an x-ray, the pair (who were pretty clearly fairly good work buddies anyway) fist-bumped. I can't even express how awesome I thought that was, just because it's great when people have fun at work.
After that, some other interesting little things happened, such as a visit to the rehab unit from several of the Phoenix Suns players, and a recreational therapy visit to the movies to see Jack Reacher. Almost six weeks after I was admitted, they released me to my dad's house, where I hung out until having some follow-up appointments with my neurologist and pulmonologist.
After that, I went back home and have been working and going to physical therapy since. This coming Thursday is actually (tentatively) my last session. The whole experience has been… eye-opening, for sure. Every single person in the hospital was exceedingly kind and understanding. To me, it's simply amazing that somebody could not just accept but want to do the kinds of things that I witnessed or had to have done to me. I can't imagine anybody exactly likes some of the clean-up work that's required, so these people must get something else pretty powerful out of their work. I absolutely respect that, because for each person who told me they couldn't work with computers, there I was replying "and I totally couldn't work with people, in this way."
At the other end of it all, in a new year and with what I hope is a long-term new reverence not only for my own wellbeing, but for human life in general, I actually feel and (because of the physical therapy, really) can do more, better, and faster than before. I'm still not by any means in really great shape, but I'm in good enough shape to do stuff, and I've even been able to get up off of the floor on my own, which is useful for rearranging cables or cleaning things under desks.
I'm going to continue to work on my overall physical recovery, w conditions permitting. It's hard because there are no steps inside the house to work on some cardiovascular things, but as the weather clears up and walks around the neighborhood or on campus become possible, I hope to stay in good enough condition that I don't need to be hospitalized again this year.
There's so much more to say, and the whole event really does merit more writing, but it was also a very personal event. I suspect the reason I didn't write about my hospitalization in last summer had as much to do with it being such a personal issue as it did laziness. It's hard to decide where to draw the line on putting personal information and experiences on the Internet, for sure. My hope is that by having at least some information up here about what happened, I'll have something in "print" to draw back on in case I need to recollect the whole experience, and to encourage myself to take better care.