This brings us ever so slowly struggling to stay in my fantasy land, back to the world of the conscious yet still very groggy for many days. To make sure I knew what hospital in, Eric made sure to tell the entire staff right done to cleaning people to make certain they showed me their name tags with Mercy Hospital embossed on them so I wouldn’t freak out thinking I was back at Presby.
During my lucid periods I was pretty miserable with the ventilator shoved down my throat hurting my jaw and pushing the tip of my tongue out through a small space between my teeth making it dry and sore. Plus the tube itself hung out of the corner of my mouth pressing against my lips in the same place for weeks. It made it difficult to enjoy Eric’s visits and almost impossible to sleep. Until Eric talked to my doctor to get my meds increased then I began to feel better because I was sleeping and dreaming more than I was awake. At least that’s how I remember things which doesn’t mean that’s how they happened.
Before coming out of the coma Eric was staying at the hospital every night and Dale would stay to give him night off. While having the brain seizures my heart failed then after the cardiologist got me all fixed up my kidneys failed. So before my neurologist found the right combination of seizure meds I had a virtual team of specialists. And even though they had me on a special mattress because of my pneumonia, I still developed three deep bed sores on my behind. Since I was being fed with a feeding tube, unconscious, and a quadriplegic I had to have a bag attached to my rectum. Had I been able bodied the bag would have been easily used. It had a long tube attached to it and at the of the tube was a catheter type ball that fit into the rectum to collect the feces which was kept liquefied by stool softeners.
Unfortunately, this procedure was not easily done with me because of my paralysis I don’t have the muscle tone to hold the ball inside me so the nurses were constantly taping the bag to bum with gobs and gobs of tape. Early in the mornings I would have an accident and they would have to pull the bag off with tape and a lot of my skin as well! I ended up with two stage two sore on butt cheeks and a stage three on tailbone (it’s still scarred to this day). It was a viscous painful dirty cycle. I used to watch the clock in nurses’ station for my medication times and start pushing my buzzer ten minutes before my pain meds were due every time. (to be continued)
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please feel free to be as open, honest, blunt, and real as think you need to when leaving your comment. any of you who can relate to any one of my issues or takes offense to something I've written I'd especially like to hear from. I'm sorry to say that any comments left anonymously will not be published whether positive or negative. however, i still appreciate the insight and value the opinion. Thanks, L.A.M.B.