2005 Fucking Sucked: Part 2 – The Year of the Hospital
Quick! You! Yeah, you! Define “Tachycardia,” “Atrial Fibrilation,” and “Sinus Rhythm.” Can you do it? If you answered “yes,” I’m assuming you’re either some way involved in the medical field, are a hypochondriac (join the club), and/or are very close with someone who has experienced problems involving those terms.
My mom has a condition called cardiomyopathy, which essentially means that her heart muscle is inflamed and doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. The cardiomyopathy was caused by the chemotherapy she received when she was undergoing treatment for breast cancer.
She was diagnosed with the heart condition in 2000, and since then, she’s been through all sorts of nonsense including congestive heart failure, catheterization, angioplasty, insertion of a cardiac stent to keep the blood flowing through her arteries, and a few procedures to make her heart beat normally.
Since 2000, she’s had an average of about one cardiac episode per year involving one of the above. In summer ’04, a stress test revealed she had some major blockages in her arteries due to coronary artery disease, which the doctors figure is a result of the radiation therapy she had after the chemotherapy. Isn’t medicine fun? Swap one life-threatening condition for another! Collect ‘em! Trade ‘em with your friends!
The clogged artery incident resulted in Mom having to have 4 more stents inserted in her heart, and although that was by no means a good time, it was preferable to her requiring open-heart bypass surgery, so we were reasonably relieved.
By the beginning of 2005, I had lulled myself into a false sense of security about my mother’s health, figuring that she was stable and would remain that way for the foreseeable future. Then one afternoon, Mom called me at work to announce that she was in the waiting room of the local hospital’s emergency room. Her heart was beating too fast, and they were going to admit her to find out what was going on.
The panic-disordered parts of my brain immediately took over. I announced to my boss and co-workers that I was leaving for a few days, grabbed my things, jumped into the car, and drove directly to Pennsylvania without so much as stopping at home for a clean pair of underpants.
I would find out later that while I was driving, Mom’s heart rate had shot up to more than 200 beats a minute, which is not good in a normal, healthy person, and is really, really bad in someone with cardiomyopathy. The ordeal apparently involved a SWAT team of nurses, doctors being paged “stat,” a crash cart being dragged into the hospital room, and an IV push of massive quantities of a drug called Cardizem that stabilizes heart rhythms.
She stayed in the hospital for the next few days, where she was cared for by consulting cardiologists from Pittsburgh research hospitals. More IV Cardizem was given, and her heart rate eventually returned to normal, but the rhythm was still screwy. Normal hearts beat in sinus rhythm; my mom was experiencing atrial fibrillation, which is what happens when the muscles of the heart wall get kind of … twitchy, for lack of a better explanation.
By this point, I too was kind of twitchy, and my family eventually decided that my mother should be moved from the local serving-borderline-rural-area-consisting-mainly-of-geriatric-patients hospital to the university research hospital in Pittsburgh that possesses, among other things, the technology to deal with abnormal heart rhythms and my mother’s regular cardiologist.
It was Sunday, and we were informed that Mom would be transferred to Pittsburgh on Monday. At my dad’s insistence, I was supposed to drive home to Cleveland on Sunday. Mom was supposed to be transferred to Pittsburgh on Monday, and I was ordered home on the grounds that I should get back to my husband and my job. I decided on Sunday morning to pay my grandmother a visit, since my mother being in the hospital meant that no one had been looking out for her for a few days.
I found Grandma looking unwell, which I first suspected was due to her worrying about my mother, but she eventually admitted that she wasn’t feeling well.
“I just don’t feel like myself,” she said. A few seconds after I began a full-scale inquisition – what do you normally feel like, and how is this different? – my grandmother answered my question by leaping to her feet, running into the kitchen, and throwing up in the sink.
God. Damn. It.
After a quick phone consult with Eric the Doctuh, Grandma and I were off to the emergency room, where they said they had no idea what was wrong with her, so they’d admit her for observation. After a couple of hours waiting, they put her in a room on the second floor of the hospital, about 500 feet from my mother’s room. I spent the evening and most of the next afternoon (um, no, I’m not going back to Cleveland, Dad. If I go back, YOU’LL be in the hospital by tomorrow.) doing a merry little ping-pong act between hospital rooms, alternately checking up on my grandmother and my mother, trying to remain ever-cheerful and optimistic, right up until the point at which I passed my dad in the hospital hallway – the two of us were trading room duty – where I broke down crying.
The next day, Mom was transferred to Pittsburgh, where they shot her with a big jolt of electricity – it’s an actual medical procedure called a cardioversion – and glorious sinus rhythm was once again achieved. Meanwhile, my aunt had arrived from out of town to provide backup support, which was a damned good thing, since she was the one there when Grandma went completely fucking mad two days later.
Apparently, according to my shrink, this is a fairly common occurrence among elderly people in hospitals. It has something to do with a lack of mental stimulation which causes the geriatric mind to go gonzo and make shit up just for fun.
By the time I arrived at the hospital that day, my grandmother had insisted that:
- Henry, a man who lives in her hometown, had come in to the hospital room and painted the walls;
- Henry had forgotten to close the windows after he painted, thereby allowing throngs of insects to enter the room;
- she, my aunt, and I were covered in said insects, and why weren’t we brushing them off?
- in the middle of the night, the nursing staff had been standing in the hallway winding Saran Wrap around a reluctant midget.
I shit you not.
Several minutes after I arrived, Grandma began demanding that we let her go, because she had to “get back.” Where she needed to get back to was a mystery, but my aunt wisely decided at that point to run to the nurse’s station and insist that they do something, preferably something involving powerful pharmaceuticals. I stayed in the room to keep an eye on the Insect Woman, who was now attempting to climb out of bed, and by the time my aunt returned with the nurse, I was kneeling on the hospital bed pinning my grandmother’s shoulders with my fists and yelling, “NO! You STAY!” while she tried to punch me in the stomach.
In case you ever find yourself in this situation, there are two things I want you to know:
1. Hallucinating elderly women are much stronger than they appear.
2. Seroquel. That’s the name of the drug you need to ask for. It’s an anti-psychotic that, when injected into delusional old people, causes sleep followed by a return to “normal” – and I put “normal” in quotes because this is a woman who stores aluminum foil on the basement stairs and used to dump hot water into my kiddie pool during 95-degree summer heatwaves so I “wouldn’t catch a cold” – mental function.
I went back to Cleveland that evening. Marc and I returned the following weekend to pluck my mom from the hospital and to check on Grandma, who it was eventually determined simply needed to have her medication adjusted. Everyone was back home where they belonged. For the time being.
Towards the end of March, I was experiencing End-Stage Cleveland Winter Syndrome, which meant that if I didn’t travel to a place where everything, including the people, wasn’t gray, Marc was going to lock me in the garage until mid-June. My husband decided to visit his family in Florida, and I decided to go to South Carolina with my mother.
The trip was nice … a little colder than I would have preferred, but in March, after suffering almost six months in the Northeast Ohio tundra, 60-degrees is wonderful. I don’t remember much about what we did on our vacation other than after three days, Marc rented a car to drive up from Florida because he missed me. He left the day before I was scheduled to fly home. My mom was planning to hang around for an extra couple of days, and apparently, the thought of being alone after the previous month’s health scare began to worry her. At some point during Saturday Night Live, she announced that her heart beat was once again racing, and after paging the on-call cardiologist in Pittsburgh, we were once again off to the ER.
I sincerely hope that if you are ever vacationing at or near Pawleys Island, South Carolina, you have absolutely no need for medical services. However, should the need arise, I insist that you go to Georgetown Memorial Hospital, home to the Nicest People on Planet Earth. While doctors and nurses attach your mother to electrodes and tubes and bells and whistles, they will let you be in the room with her, and when the sight of it all is just too much and you run out to the hallway so your mother won’t see you cry, nurses will swarm to hug you, comfort you, hand you tissues, and get you a cup of water.
After your mother is admitted to her hospital room at around 4 a.m. and you fall asleep in the vinyl recliner next to her bed, you will wake up at some point to find that the petite pregnant nurse has covered you up with a blanket. When the doctor eventually shows up, he will sit beside the bed and talk to your mother for a half-hour, doing his best to calm her nerves. All of the staff will call you “sweetie” and “baby,” and when your mother is finally discharged the next day – back in normal sinus rhythm thanks to a Cardizem IV – you will find yourself thinking that if Georgetown Memorial Hospital didn’t have the misfortune of being a hospital, you would have happily hung around a bit longer.
U.S. Airways, however, can get fucked.
When you call U.S. Airways from the hospital to say that your mother’s been admitted and that you’ll need to change your return date, U.S. Airways will tell you that they don’t care, that they will not change your flight arrangements. And then, when you yell and scream and threaten, they will say OK, you can change your flight arrangements, but it will cost you $400 to do so, and they will not relent, no matter how hard you fight. So, eventually, you book a one-way ticket to Pittsburgh on Hooters Airways (yes, Hooters.) and your brother will pick you up at the airport and drive you home to Cleveland. When you get home, you will realize that you’ve never been happier in your life to see your husband and your dog.
Photographic evidence of my Hooters flight, staffed with real Hooters girls:
Click on the nice girl to see more pictures from my Hooters Air Experience.
After the South Carolina cardiac episode, my mother went home and made an appointment with her cardiologist, who prescribed a drug called amiodarone to prevent her heart from going back into A-Fib. The drug definitely did away with her arrhythmia, but it had a few side effects, namely hypothyroidism, fatigue, mental confusion, and congestive heart failure.
When I saw her on Mothers’ Day weekend, Mom looked like someone had inserted a hand pump into her belly button and inflated her. She was puffy and couldn’t walk up the stairs; instead, she scooted up step by step on her backside, and when she got to the top of the stairs, my dad would lift her to her feet.
The day after Marc and I went home, Mom woke up in the middle of the night unable to breathe. Dad called the ambulance, and after another trip to Pittsburgh, it was determined that she was carrying around 20 or so pounds of extra fluid due to congestive heart failure caused by the amiodarone. She stayed there for a few days being pumped full of IV diuretics until she was well enough to go home with orders to stop taking the drug.
One of the other extra special things about amiodarone is that its side effects don’t go away when you stop taking the medicine. They hang around for about six months, so about a month later, Mom was back in the hospital once again being drained of fluid, and I felt like every precious ounce of sanity I manage to maintain was being drained, too.
Somehow, by some miracle, that incident was the last to occur, and Mom has managed to avoid inpatient medical care ever since (KNOCK THE HELL ON WOOD). It was not, however, to be my last hospital visit of the year.
To be continued …
posted by Kate at 2:05 AM link/comments
