I missed my blog for May 30. Sometimes I have a number of blogs “in the bank,” but not at the moment. My cupboard was bare and I was too incapacitated to refill it. I thought I’d share with you what happened. It has nothing to do with gambling (although there was one AP move during triage), but perhaps you’ll find it interesting anyway. At a minimum, most of you have probably gone through your own version of hospitalization, and/or been close to others who have done so, and this blog might inspire all sorts of comments.
I spent three painful days in a hospital for an obstructed bowel recently. I haven’t been hospitalized since my appendectomy 50 years ago, and things are different.
On the day before I went to the ER, I went to an Urgent Care facility and they prescribed basically a “colonoscopy prep” which means drinking a gallon of liquid with various sorts of powdered laxatives. That’s supposed to Roto-Rooter my problem down the drain. I drank it all. Nothing came out. So, I was back in Urgent Care the next day.
I guess I thought Urgent Care was the same as an Emergency Room. They’re not. The Urgent Care room in which I started the day said I needed a CT scan to diagnose my problem. Yes, they could do that, but if the result came out a certain way, I would need to be hospitalized. This particular Urgent Care facility wasn’t attached to a hospital. And the fact that the colonoscopy prep didn’t work at all meant that my symptoms were serious enough that it was suggested I go to an ER.
I did. I picked Henderson Hospital because it was relatively new and probably didn’t have the long lines some of the other places had. I don’t know how many people were at any other ER room, but this one had 40 or so people in the ER waiting room when I arrived. Surely at least some of them were there to support others and wouldn’t need treatment themselves.
While I was in considerable pain, ERs operate on a triage system, where the patients with the most urgent needs are seen and treated first. For some reason, these ER doctors put constipation complaints much lower on their list than gun shot wounds and ruptured appendices. Go figure.
I moaned and groaned a lot, especially when I was meeting with the triage nurse. Partly because I was in real pain. Partly because I hoped that would place me nearer the top of the list to be treated. This was my AP move and I don’t know if that helped or not. But I don’t think it hurt. I ended up waiting three hours for a CT scan, and another hour for it to be interpreted, but it definitely showed a blockage and I needed to be hospitalized to be treated. After asking a lot of questions, they gave me some intravenous morphine to ease the pain.
I’m not a recreational drug user and I don’t think I’ve ever had an opioid before. I didn’t know at the time, but 2 mg of morphine isn’t very much. It helps the pain for a couple of hours. But it also makes you more constipated — which is sort of a Catch 22 because constipation was the original problem! Still, keeping the patient relatively comfortable seemed to be the game plan. At the time it seemed like the right game plan to me.
About six hours after I first arrived, I was moved to a hospital bed within the ER department. While I had been officially admitted to the hospital, there were no beds at the current time and the only beds were in the ER area. So that’s where I was originally placed.
Perhaps six or so different doctors came in, asked about my condition, prodded my belly, and gave their recommendations. I never knew which doctor was which. Once a doctor told me she thought I should get such and such a treatment, but what she told me didn’t get written on my chart. So as far as the nurses were concerned, the doctor never told me whatever it was. And I hadn’t written down the names and specialties of each doctor, and didn’t always know who had said what, so sometimes things fell through the crack.
Twenty-four hours after I was placed in a bed at ER, I was moved into the regular hospital. I was in a single room with its own TV and bathroom so I didn’t have any roommate issues. Perhaps I won’t be as happy with this when the bill comes. Right now, I don’t know how much my insurance is going to pay and how much will be my responsibility. Presumably the insurance pays for double occupancy hospital rooms and there will be a surcharge for the single room. We’ll see. At the time though, I was happy to have the single room. While I’m blessed to be able to pay whatever is required, I’m still a cheapskate and I won’t like it.
In the area I was in at Henderson Hospital, many of the nurses and other personnel worked 12-hour days. I don’t know how many days a week they do this, if this was always the norm there, or if this was a post-Covid staffing shortage that has affected many businesses. But for the 40 or so hours I was there, this was convenient because I got to know them and they got to know me and my situation. There was even one nurse aide who would come into my room, sit quietly, and read her cell phone. If I needed something and asked her, she would comply, but basically, she was just killing time. This was her way of goofing off, I suppose, and I wasn’t going to bust her.
To fix a blockage problem, the options fall into three categories: things taken orally, going in from the bottom, or, as a last resort, cutting me open and performing some surgery. My bottom side was on fire with pain, and they would have to tie me down or totally sedate me if they were going to try to solve the problem from that end.
Forty-eight hours after I had originally arrived, they gave me another colonoscopy prep. This one stronger than the one I had taken before. I wasn’t optimistic this was going to work because it didn’t work a few days earlier, but eight very painful hours later, my innards were clean. Soon it was time for me to go home.
Going home didn’t mean I could resume life as before. The colonoscopy prep still had an effect, and, shall we say, there were a few messes to clean up. Bonnie was an RN for 40 years, and was a good sport about all of this. That was one of the reasons I popped the question almost 10 years ago. If I ever needed care, she was competent at it. Although I’ve helped her more medically in the last 10 years than she’s helped me, this time I was the one in need and she was front and center on the job. One of her recommendations was that I wear a diaper until my system got back to normal. This helped neither my pride nor my masculinity, but I complied. Getting old is not for sissies!
It takes a few days to get your system back on a regular schedule after something like this. After that much purging of the system, things don’t just automatically readjust.
I take a lot of care with my diet and am positive that this sort of malady is very unlikely when you eat the way I do, but my bowel became obstructed nonetheless. This makes me less confident that I know what I’m doing diet-wise. But depending on what my doctor tells me, I’m going to continue what I’m doing until I learn otherwise.
As I write this, I’m still in that readjustment process. It’s a guess for me exactly what food, medicines, and exercises will work the best and what should be avoided. I have a follow-up visit with my primary physician scheduled, but that’s about 10 days after my release from the hospital. I’m hoping I can make it that far without further medical treatment.
