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
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Rude
Damn, Flickr. That's some cold shit right there.
posted by Kate at 12:15 AM link/comments
Sunday, January 22, 2006
2005 Fucking Sucked: Part 1 - Marc vs. Employment
Yes, right, I did say I'd start this series on Friday, but there were extenuating circumstances that prevented me from fulfilling that promise. Those circumstances included spending several hours at a local bar singing karaoke. If anyone tells you that I stood in a roomful of people with two other women and that the three of us performed a rousing, white-girl rendition of Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back," I will deny it. You cannot prove anything.
Anyway, back to 2005 ...
Although I would like to tell you that Marc and I are the sort of people who have scads of cash lying around in savings in the event of an emergency, we have not yet reached a place in our lives where we can subsist without two incomes. For Marc, the year had started out well in the Gainful Employment category. He had a gig as a restaurant manager at a local university, was making decent money, and was generally happy with his job apart from the fact that it often demanded his attention for upwards of 12 hours a day. Then, one Spring day, Marc decided to have a serious conversation with the company's head chef. Head Chef was in the habit of chatting up the restaurant's female staff in wholly repulsive and inappropriate ways. One of the female cooks came to Marc and said she was becoming increasingly uncomfortable, and my husband thought perhaps he could nip the situation in the bud with a brief man-to-man conversation with Head Chef. Head Chef seemed to take it well, but then, most coincidentally, Marc was called into his manager's office two days later and told that he was being laid off. No explanation was given.
The search for work began, and after a month of juggling finances to ensure that the lights stayed on and that we could keep the dog in kibble, Marc accepted a job in management training with a local restaurant chain. What we didn't know at the time was that "manager-in-training" was restaurant-speak for "slave." The deal went thusly: Marc was salaried, not hourly, so there were no limitations on the number of hours the company could require him to work. Most weeks, he was working between 60 and 70 hours per week. He was exhausted beyond comprehension. One evening, he came home looking spectacularly awful. "Look," he said, showing me his forearm. There was a pink blister approximately 3 inches in diameter where once had been perfectly healthy flesh. He'd burned himself on some kitchen equipment at work, and when he reported the incident to the manager, the manager shrugged it off and sent him back to work. After three or four days, the wound had taken on a rather disgusting countenance. I am not a medical professional, but I was fairly certain that "red, swollen, and weeping featuring some sort of eery, darkened epicenter" was something that might do with a doctor's look-see. The doctor took one look at it, declared it a third-degree burn, and sent him away with a prescription for antibiotics. Then, because the situation had not already become ridiculous enough, Marc had a reaction to the antibiotics and spent the next two days cacooned in blankets on the couch between trips to the bathroom to rid his stomach of any pesky food or liquids. Obviously, he was too sick to go to work, and even though he procured a note from the doctor stating something like, "Marc's arm is all buggered to hell and he's been barfing up his guts for two days, so please excuse his absence," the restaurant saw fit to terminate his employment. Marc subsequently learned that the company's upper management referred to managers-in-training as "LSD," or "Labor-Saving Device." It works like this: For every one manager you intend to hire, hire ten people as "trainees," work them halfway to death whilst looking for any possible reason to terminate their employment, thereby ensuring that only 10% of all trainees complete the program. We were suitably enraged.
Another six weeks of unemployment ensued wherein we were forced to use credit cards to pay for some of our basic living expenses. As someone who, in her early 20s, made some serious errors in judgement when it came to the use of credit, and as someone who worked very hard to get out from under the mess she made, using credit for groceries felt like someone was removing my appendix by way of my ear canal.
Eventually, a new job offer came down the pike. Marc was offered a job as a cafe manager at a gas station/convenience store, and while this would hardly be a glamorous occupation, it seemed to compensate in benefits for what it lacked in luster. He was told he'd work a 40-hour week on a regular 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. schedule, that he wouldn't have to work weekends except in case of emergency, and that he'd be able to take advantage of the company's tuition reimbursement program to finish his degree. It seemed like a great solution. He'd be working a regular schedule, we'd get to see each other, he wouldn't be exhausted, and he'd finally get to go back to school. Swell, right?
Um. Well.
Until Marc took that job, I had no idea that "regular schedule" meant "totally erratic schedule"; that "6 a.m. to 2 p.m." meant "2 a.m. to 11 a.m., then 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.;" and that "you'll be able to take advantage of our tuition reimbursement program" meant "we were just kidding about that tuition thing, because your schedule will be such that there is no way for you to attend class on a regular basis." For extra kicks, the man who was his immediate supervisor was possibly the most mentally incompetent man in North America, a man whose pathological lies included the following:
- That he'd once been a U.S. Marshall
- That he used to work for an insurance company making large sums of money in subrogation work
- That he played football for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1980s
We began to receive phone calls at all hours of the day and night, including one notable example in which an employee phoned at 3 a.m. to ask, "What time do I work tomorrow?" I don't know about you, but in my world, a phone ringing at 3 a.m. means one of two things:
- Someone is dead; or
- Someone is dying
"What time do I work tomorrow" is not a question that is permissible at 3 a.m., a fact Marc reminded the gentleman on the other end of the phone after he'd gone out and rented an industrial winch with which to pry my trembling body off the ceiling. This, however, did not stop a young woman from calling the house at 1:30 a.m. the next week to declare that she couldn't figure out how to OPEN THE STORE'S FREEZER, and Marc had to get up and drive across town in his rubber-ducky pajama bottoms to show a grown woman how to gain access to the contents of a major appliance.
Two months of this went by and the holidays were upon us. We had our usual plans to go to my parents' house for Christmas, but a dejected-looking Marc came home one day to announce that he might have to work on Christmas. I was done.
"You are going back to school," I said. "Full-time. You are not going to work. Your occupation will be 'student.' We will take out loans for living expenses, and you will get your degree. Enough of this."
And so it went. We borrowed a lot of money to compensate for the lack of a second income, but something had to give. I couldn't watch my husband being miserable any more, and it was important to me that he get the same chance to have an education -- full-time, without major employment obligations -- that I had.
He started classes on Tuesday, and he's the happiest I've seen him in a long time. Here's hoping for 2006.
Tomorrow -- 2005: The Year of the Hospital
p.s. I've finally upgraded my Flickr account and now have a reasonably large photostream going on. I'm still working on sets and tags, so it's not finished being organized yet. Feel free to take a look.
posted by Kate at 1:54 AM link/comments
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Suck: An Introduction
Well hi there! Happy new year. Unless of course you follow the Chinese calendar, in which case, forget I said anything.
Christmas happened recently, which meant, typically, that it was High Drama Season in the Foster family. There were some notable occurrences of dysfunction perpetrated by members of my extended family, but I’m not at liberty to discuss those because if I did, my mother would fly directly out of this computer screen to gouge out my eyes.
The … erm … highlight (if you want to call it that) of the drama began on Christmas Eve, when my mother received a phone call from my grandmother, who announced that she’d just fallen down her basement stairs. Mom looked at me and said, "Your grandmother fell down the cellar st …," by which point I had already put on my coat and grabbed the car keys.
Before I continue, though, I really must share something: I was telling this story to someone at work, and when I got to the part where Grandma fell down the stairs, this certain person said, "Oh. You mean your other grandma," thereby verifying that I was referring to a grandmother other than the one who recently sashayed off to the Great Evermore, and I had to jam my entire right leg down my throat to prevent myself from replying, "No, no. It was the dead one who fell down the steps. Imagine our surprise."
I arrived at my grandmother’s house 10 minutes later to find her prone on the couch, holding a bag of Ore-Ida frozen French fries against her right knee. Didn’t she have any ice, I wanted to know. No ice, she replied. She doesn’t "use" ice, so why make ice? She shrugged dismissively as I began inspecting her for damage.
The right knee was bruised and swollen, the left leg was lacerated in several different places, her lip was bruised, her ribs were sore, and she had some swelling on her left eye which indicated to me that a major shiner was imminent. I went to the kitchen to find something frozen for her to put on her aching side and came back with a bag of succotash. The woman doesn’t have ICE, but she sure as shit has succotash.
After I had assembled soap, water, clean cloth, and triple-antibiotic ointment, I sat down on the floor and began wiping away blood and cleaning the impressive assortment of scrapes, cuts, and puncture wounds she’d sustained. The poignancy of the moment wasn’t lost on me. Here I was cleaning her wounds the way she used to clean mine. I stopped the thought before it turned into a blurry Lifetime TV moment. I was in no mood for a reverie.
"How in the bloody hell did you fall down the stairs?" I demanded. Grandma replied that she was standing at the top of the stairs and was reaching down to pick up a roll of aluminum foil that was on the landing. Why, you may ask, was the aluminum foil on the landing? Because that’s where she keeps it! That’s why! I opened my mouth to argue the complete foolishness inherent in keeping aluminum foil on the basement stairs when it clearly belongs in the kitchen, then decided against it. Have you ever succeeded in arguing logic with an 86-year-old Lithuanian woman? You have? Can I interest you in a career in the exciting field of cat-herding?
I got on the phone to Eric, my cousin, the doctuh, who’s in his first year as an emergency room resident at a hospital in Philadelphia. I told him she was complaining of rib pain; should I take her to the hospital? He suggested I place my fingers at the epicenter of the painful area she indicated and then press as hard as I could on her ribcage to see if I heard any "crackling or popping." That way, he said cheerfully, we’d know whether she had any broken ribs.
Let me explain something: There’s a damned good reason why I’m not a medical doctor. Put simply, internal human processes make me ill. I can’t even watch fake blood on TV without diving behind the sofa. As someone who has enough endocrine and psychological conditions to warrant the swallowing of 10 prescription pills per day, I am constantly sitting in a lab somewhere at the behest of some doctor who wants to check my blood for antibodies and levels and weevils and whatnot, and even though this has occurred at least 15 times per year since 2002, I still have to look the other way when the lab tech sticks the needle in.
"Eric, you know me. If something pops, I’ll pass out."
Eric laughed -- he who once returned my phone call saying, "Hey, sorry I missed you before. I looked down and saw it was you on my cell, but I couldn’t answer ‘cause I was up to my elbows in some guy’s chest cavity," -- and told me to suck it up.
I did as ordered, feeling all the blood drain from my head as I assaulted my Grandmother. "Where does it hurt? Here? Okay, apparently I need to STAB you there." And then pressed like hell on the indicated area while she howled in pain. Great fun, really.
Reasonably satisfied that she didn’t require emergency medical attention, and really not wanting to subject her to a hospital stay over Christmas, I loaded her in to the car and drove her back to my parents’ house, where my mother spent most of the three following days sighing melodramatically and reminding me every half-hour that she hated Christmas and couldn’t wait for the new year, because 2005 had really fucking sucked.
I couldn’t argue with her.
Two days after Christmas, my grandmother went to a doctor who took x-rays and said, "Hey! Looky there! A whole bunch of bones in your face are broken! And oh look! You have several broken ribs on the right side of your body! By the way. The broken face bone thing? Yeah, you’re going to need a bunch of surgery to fix that."
She got through the surgery without a problem and is currently recuperating at my parents’ house, where my mother is attempting to stuff food down her throat and threatening every 12 minutes to move permanently to Maui.
So yes. That was the last ball of gooey nonsense that 2005 threw at us. And while I am somewhat reticent to criticize 2005 because I’m afraid that if I do, 2005 will get pissed and talk to its friend 2006, and then 2006 will be like, "Oh, you think that was bad, motherfucker? Just wait," I’m going to say this: 2005 fucking sucked.
So, for the next seven days, I’ll be running a series of daily entries here at Six-Layer Kate entitled "2005 Fucking Sucked." Join me, won’t you? I’d love for you to read about the entertaining, unending parade of clusterfuck that caused the worst nervous break I’d ever experienced in my life. See you tomorrow!
posted by Kate at 2:04 PM link/comments