kandas-adventures

5th Grade Promotion and a Trip to the ER

Forty eight hours before I was to be on an airplane taking my mother and daughters to the midwest for a 15 day vacation I ended up in the hospital.  For six weeks I had struggled with bronchitis, wheezing, lung congestion, and an inability to catch my breath.  As the trip approached with it's 1,000+ miles of driving I'd be doing once the plane landed, I knew I needed to get to a doctor.  I was able to see a pulmonologist and asthma was suspected.  After a methocholine challenge test, that was the diagnosis, and the Russian-roulette of finding an appropriate medication began. 

 Monday morning as I walked to my daughter's 5th grade promotion ceremony instead of driving, the mild exercise caused me to go into a severe coughing fit.  I fished in my purse and pulled out the Dulera inhaler I'd just been prescribed and took one puff (not even the full dose) in hopes that it would keep me quiet during the ceremony ahead.

 

My daughter was chosen by her class to give a speech, and although I was mighty proud, I noticed that I was also feeling really shaky.  This isn't like me, I'm not the nervous type.  I was sweating profusely, the room was spinning, and my hands were shaking so violently that I could hardly hold the camera.   Maybe I'd had too much coffee, maybe I shouldn't have taken the Prednisone with my coffee, or perhaps taking a puff of Dulera within 30 minutes of both the coffee and the Prednisone was a bad idea.  

 After the ceremony there was a reception, and as I walked around the crowded room I felt as if I was simultaneously drowning and exploding out of my skin.  I had to get home.  I lay down for a half hour trying to relax, ate hoping it was just a case of low blood sugar making me jumpy, and pondered what to do.  At noon I packed up the girls and picked up their friend and took them to the graduation pool party.  Surely I would feel better soon.  But no...

Eventually I had to excuse myself, called my husband to retrieve the kids, and headed to the hospital.  Sure enough, my pulse and blood pressure were off the charts for what was normal for me.   I haven't gotten the hospital bill yet, but it is going to be a whopper.  The ER doctor decided to do everything from an EKG to blood tests to ultrasounds looking for blood clots in my legs.  Six hours later my Pulmonologist appeared in the room and deemed the Dulera the culprit.  If gigantic me takes one tiny puff of this medication and has a racing heart for 12 hours, what on earth would this medication do to other people?  This episode reminded me of why I am leery of pharmaceuticals, and why I don't drink and have never taken any recreational drugs.  I guess I'll be sticking with the Robitussin and Nyquil to clear my chest, because obviously I can't handle an inhaler.

By the time my heart calmed and I returned home I was utterly exhausted from my heart pumping so wildly for so long.  I'd also been breathing hard and coughing, so my chest was deeply sore.  Thank goodness I was already packed and otherwise fully ready to embark on the trip, but now I just had to hope my body would cooperate and I'd have the stamina to go.

Vaccinations and a Tragic Death

I believe in vaccinations, but many of my friends and some of my family members are deeply opposed to them.  I vaccinate not because I'm a slave to big pharma, or brainwashed by the government.  I vaccinate to protect those who can't be vaccinated and are vulnerable, like my mother who has cancer, and newborn babies who are too young to build immunity.  It's called "Herd Immunity," where the more people in a community who are vaccinated, the less chance an epidemic will start and the medically fragile will be exposed.  I've never been one to follow the crowd, but in this case, count me in.

Like most Americans, our health insurance doesn't cover flu vaccines for children, or adult vaccines of any kind.  Sure, you could get vaccines at most any pharmacy now, but they cost about $50.00 a piece.  That's $150.00 too much for me.  (My husband gets a free flu shot through his employer).   Each year I end up waiting until the State Governor appears on TV urging citizens to get vaccinated because there is an epidemic and people are dying, and the County Health Departments respond by setting up free vaccine clinics.  I gather up the girls and we take a number and sometimes stand in line for an hour or more, waiting with the masses.

This year the girls were able to avoid the needle and try the nasal spray for the first time.  They had none of the possible side-effects in the week following.  I had a trans-dermal instead of an intramuscular shot.  I hardly felt it at the time, but I developed a painful rash in the days after.  Still, I will do again.

The cost of non-vaccination was brought home to us this week when a dear friend died at age 56 of Pneumonia.  Jeffrey, above with the girls at a Christmas gathering a few years back, had diabetes, but otherwise appeared in robust health.  He ate well, maintained a healthy weight, exercised... but he had an undiagnosed heart condition, and together with his diabetes, when he was exposed to pneumonia while visiting his mother in the hospital, he couldn't fight it off.  Had he received the pneumococcal vaccine he'd might still be alive.  What a tragedy that this caring, vibrant man had to die so young of an illness that might have been prevented with a simple vaccination.

My dad and I argue this topic regularly.  He's completely committed to alternative medicine, and has full faith in herbal remedies, acupuncture, and an assortment of vibrating little devices.  The thing I don't get is how one can be against vaccines when they are so similar to the theory of homeopathic medicine, where exposure to a dilute, minute amount of an illness causing substance triggers the body to build defenses against it.

I guess everyone is responsible for their own views and choices, but as a parent and a member of the community, I feel compelled to do my part to prevent the spread of disease and do everything in my power to prevent needless death.

Swedish Hospital Issaquah Grand Opening

Here are some photos from a few weeks back, when I was recovering from bronchitis bout #1, but before bronchitis bout #2.  This was a festival celebrating the opening of a new hospital (yes, yet another one!), Swedish Issaquah.  Unlike most medical open houses that have a few things for the kids to do, this one had a whole outdoor carnival!

This one ride was called "Monkey Madness" and you were suspended from bouncy poles above inflated pillows.  It was like being on a trampoline except you stayed up in the air much longer, and could safely do sommersaults.

It looked like great fun and really made me want to be a kid again so I could try it, too.

Another fun activity was the "Rope-a-Phobia" challenge course, where you climbed up and then walked tightropes and ladders high off the ground.  

Little K was terrified most of the time, but she made it down in one piece, and A was tentative and slow, but she also succeeded in completing the course.  There were some nice young men up there to coax along any kids that got stuck or started panicking.

Rent-a-ruminant was there with baby goats to pet.  They'd been hired to clear vegetation nearby, so it was fun to see the baby goats up close.

The hospital open house was the worst one we'd ever attended (apart from the carnival next door!).  It had been heavily publicized and the date had been on the calendar for months in advance, but construction did not keep pace, and the hospital was not ready.  Since so many wings were still studs, they decided to have the "tour" of just the ER and imaging department, and have tables set up representing all the other departments in the 5 story main corridor, keeping the wings tightly shut.  They were expecting about 8,000 people, but close to 30,000 showed up.  At first, they kept the stairwells locked and tried to get everyone to use just the 4 main elevators.  It was insane!  Wall-to-wall people!  I started screaming at every staff and security person I saw that they were violating fire code and needed to get the stairwells open so people could take the stairs, too.  Within five minutes of me opening my mouth about the fire code, the stairwells were unlocked and the bottlenecks eased.  Below is a photo I took just before they closed at 5pm, when most people had left.  you can see the display tables set up on the right -- 5 levels of them.  

It just wasn't the same fun to "tour" a hospital and not see a patient room, a therapy room, the surgical suites, the nurses stations, etc.  Just filing past tables with brochures about joint replacement and gastric bypass services didn't do it for us, not when we'd been to so many more comprehensive, and hands-on, open houses before.

They plan to have another open house in November, when phase 2 is (hopefully) ready.  It will be smaller, and there won't be a carnival, but we'll be there to give them a 2nd chance to impress us.  I look forward to actually SEEING the hospital next time.

Adventures in Medicine

We've spent a lot of our summer in doctor's offices, hospitals, and clinics.  The weather has been unusually cool and damp, so I don't feel too cheated about missing spectacular summer weather, but with September fast approaching, it's starting to hit me how much time we've spent indoors.

The summer started for me, as it so often does, with a bad cold, which turned into a 4 week case of bronchitis, which really slowed me down.  Thankfully I got fully better just in time for my husband to go into the hospital for spine surgery, and I was able to be by his side as his full-time caregiver for 3 weeks as he recovered.  Then this past weekend, on the day that my husband was able to shower by himself for the first time, I felt that tell-tale pressure in my chest, and boom, I have bronchitis again.  I may have underlying asthma.  Anyhow, this time I went straight to the clinic and started on antibiotics and an inhaler, so hopefully it won't last 4 weeks like last time. 

I was with my husband for most of the time while he was in the hospital.  I slept (not well) in a chair by his bed.  The spine and joint replacement ward that he was on was overcrowded, and the first day he was in a double room.  The person in the other bed had about 12 family members there chattering away loudly in Spanish while the television blared.  A thin curtain was all that separated us, and I was squashed up against a non-opening window in just a metal folding chair in a room that was about 85 degrees.  The hospital had been heavily promoting its joint replacement program for the last year, and given how overcrowded the ward was, I think it's time they cut the advertising budget for that department.  I was NOT happy with the hospital on that day, to say the least.  Luckily my husband was still loopy enough from the anesthetic and pain killers to not be as angry as I was.

Around 10pm the patient in the next bed went home.  An odd time for discharge, but I was celebrating!  Now there was enough room for me to have a semi-recliner chair instead of the metal folding chair!  Then the parade of interruptions began:  11:40p housekeeping comes to change sheets. 12:17am someone comes in to mop the floor. 12:54am lights on again for vital signs check. 1:22am time to change position with the help of 2 nurses. 1:48am alarm sounds on IV - bag needs replacing... on and on...no sleep here, even for the highly sedated one.   My biggest task during my husband's hospital stay (other than keeping my temper) was dealing with the staff.  He is hard of hearing, and combine that with the drugs and being surrounded by pillows in bed, and he could hardly understand a word that the nurses and aides were saying.  It didn't help that many of the nurses and aides were foreign born with soft voices and thick accents.  I had to keep reminding them to get close, look him in the eye, and not mumble directions from across the room while looking at their charts.  There was one nurse we had a really hard time communicating with, and I ended up repeating everything that was said, at a shout, so the two of them could understand each other.  

My husband had six giant screws put into his spine, and on the second day he had a really hard time.  A combination of uncontrolled pain, drug side-effects, and monstrous amounts of abdominal gas had him sweating, swearing, hallucinating, and screaming.  At one point he was singing the "Mickey Mouse Club" song, interspersed with swear words.  If he weren't in such agony it would have been funny.  By late afternoon the "Rapid Response Team" flooded the room because his heart rate went through the roof, his oxygen sats took a dive, and his eyeballs looked like they were about to pop from their sockets.  They did an EKG in the room, then decided to send him down to the first floor for a scan.  Instead of transferring him to a gurney, they transported him in his bed, which barely fit in the elevator.  With every bump as the bed hit walls and went over changes in flooring, he screamed bloody murder, and at one point he grabbed the arm of a nurse in a death-grip, probably bruising her deeply.  He was completely out of his mind.  The elevator was too small for me to fit in as well, so I took the stairs.  From in the stairwell I could hear him screaming 2 floors away.  It was awful.

After the scan the surgeon came by and assured us that the swelling was simply gas, and not a bleed.  He also changed the medications and within 2 hours my husband was sane again.  What a relief!  Two more nights and two more days in the hospital, and then my husband was discharged home to my care.

At home I'd gotten most everything ready.  A walker, a toilet topper with grab bars, a shower seat, a recliner, and more.  For the first week home he needed help with everything: sitting down, getting up, dressing, bathing, using the bathroom, even rolling over in bed was impossible without my helping him.  Every day I counted out all his medications, changed his bandages, kept him fed and hydrated, and tried to keep his spirits up.  Likely an effect of the drugs, he cycled through sweats and chills, soaking bedding several times a night, so laundry was a constant in my life.  Neighbors stopped by daily with meals, and flowers, and offers to take the girls out for adventures, for which I was so grateful. I was too busy to get cabin fever, but they were starting to go nuts from staying home day after day.

Several times a day I took my husband outside to walk.  At first he was really unsteady, and I had to support him with a gait belt, and be ready to catch him properly if he fell.  He was motivated to get off the painkillers, which I think were contributing to his dizziness, so after weaning off of those he was much more steady, and soon was walking solo, first with the walker, then with trekking poles, and finally very carefully without any support at all.  I'm so proud of his progress!

But wait, there's more!  For months we've been winding our way through the specialists at Children's Hospital for A.  Finally the day arrived when she could have a test that one of the specialists ordered.  My husband was less than a week out of the hospital, so one of our neighbors generously offered to care for him while I took A to the big Children's Hospital in Seattle.  She endured the test that was ordered, but the specialist came in during it, requested a second run, and then sent us down the hall for two more tests, which hadn't been on the original agenda.  He had seen or suspected something more...

Next up was an ultrasound.  It went on and on, the technician stroking up and down, across and back.  A loved it, said it felt like a massage, and was more than happy to lie there as long as needed.  It was a breeze compared to the painful and invasive test she'd endured earlier.

As I watched the screen, trying desperately to decipher what I was seeing, I knew something was up.  Of course the technician could say nothing about what she was looking for, but she did show A her different organs, because curious A kept asking, "Can you see my liver?  What does it look like?  Where's my spleen?"

Next up was an xray.  Thankfully we then returned to the waiting room and were told that the specialist would see us shortly.  I was so grateful to not have to go home and wait to find out what was going on, because clearly something was found that wasn't expected.  For years I've suspected something, some structural problem, something that just wasn't right.  There were lots of little things, but overall A fell within "normal" range, so the doctors put me off.  But now, in addition to these other issues, A was feeling some pain, so I was more determined to get an answer. 

Finally our turn with the specialist came.  In the room were several other doctors and nurses.  The specialist said that more tests were needed: an MRI, which had to be scheduled for another day.  However, he could tell me what he saw so far.  A had Spina Biffida Occulta, which you can see in the above xray.  Where that little red "S" is are overlapping bones which should have fused into one solid bone before she was born.  Consequently the nerves in that area may be pinched, deformed, or otherwise compromised.  Other (possibly unrelated) clinical findings are leg length discrepancy (one leg shorter than the other), and one kidney almost twice the size that it should be.

 Two weeks passed and I took A in for her MRI.  She spent 20 minutes strapped down on the platform and stuffed in the tube, as the magnet thumped loudly round and round, with intermittent buzzing.  I wasn't allowed to take photos, but I was able to sit in the room with her, about as far from her as possible.  A "halo" with a mirror was placed over her head, so as she lay there on her back, she could look up into the mirror and see a television screen at the foot of the machine.  Noise-cancelling headphones were placed on her ears and she was able to watch Disney's "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" during the proceedure.  I was so proud of her for being still and calm througout.

Now we wait.  There is team of specialists involved now, and they need to confer over all the test results.  Will there be a further diagnosis?  Treatment?  Surgery?  How will her growth spurt and puberty fit into all this?  

For now I am taking my goopy lungs back to bed in hopes of beating back this bronchitis before it takes any more out of me.  I just don't have the energy for this.  I'm supposed to be the caregiver around here, not the sick one.

Lead up to Christmas 2010

We've been busy, so here's a look at the week leading up to Christmas... above, a fun Christmas tree maze at a new hospital open house...

 

Checking out the stroke assessment room in the ER.  A is wearing her scrubs, and still hopes to be a doctor someday.  Whenever there is a new medical clinic or hospital opening, we ALWAYS have to attend the open house.  Little K goes along for kid activities. 
Finger casting.  Her pet kiwi bird also got a beak cast.
Checking out the pediatric training dummy.  It has soft pockets in the limbs for giving injections, and a weak computerized voice says "ouch" and "I want my mommy."  It would be more realistic if it screamed at high decibels and kicked and bit.

Riding the new CT scanner at the hospital.  Our neighbor is the technician who installed it and was proud to hear that we enjoyed his handiwork.

While at the hospital we got to see Santa.  The REAL Santa.  I couldn't help sneaking in the photo, since I love the dear old man so much, and wanted to be near him!
After the event the trees were given away free, so we took our tree home to decorate for the animals in our backyard.

The next day we had an early Christmas at my Dad's 5th ex-wife's boyfriend's house.  My dad, his ex-wife, and her boyfriend were there, as we had the usual blended family celebration.
We know the circumstances are a bit odd, so we all play along as oddballs.

Not hard with my dad around.

As always, the food was spectacular.  We had king crab this year, and even though I'm allergic, I had some and then about 10 antacids as a chaser, because it was too good to pass up.

Grandpa and his girls under the Swiss Christmas tree.

The next day we tried ice skating at the outdoor rink.  It had been 4 years since the girls were on skates, and they did pretty well, despite the crowds, pushing, and obstacles.
We attended the Magical Strings concert and A was selected for the juggling act -- she's at the far right, looking dazed.

My dad joined the fun, too.  Here he is at intermission, being himself.  He was sitting on the end of the handrail cycling his legs, pretending to be a bicycle riding donkey.
I coordinate community service at a nursing home for our Girl Scout service unit, so I arranged for us to sing Christmas carols to the residents.  They are always happy to see us.
A went back to the endodontist and the news is not good.  Her tooth has died and a root canal is scheduled.  Poor kid!
We went to the Pacific Science Center with friends and the kids found an old phone box at a restaurant, made "cell phones" from paper cards, and pretended to make calls.
I took A into the city for some one on one shopping (so she could buy presents for her sisters), and we ended up playing board games at Blue Highway games on Queen Anne Hill for a couple hours.  They have an extensive library of games to play, and we bought 3 games from their salesfloor.
And at home we played lots of games.  We love being able to stay up late and play hour after hour of strategy games.  SO that's our busy week BEFORE Christmas.

Hospital Junkies

 

Following K and A's interests, this past weekend we attended another hospital open house.  Our family has become "medical open house junkies" since A wants to be a doctor someday, and now K is considering social work.  Fortunately we live in an area with many competing hospitals, and at least twice a year there's some big shindig going on.

 
Here the girls display their "finger casts" in one of the ER rooms.  Actually, the hospital calls it and "ED" for Emergency Department, since it's not technically a "room" anymore.  I find it humorous, though, because in medicine ED also stands for that male condition that is so heavily advertised on TV these days by certain pharmaceutical companies that I'd like to strangle.  The girls see the ads and innocently ask what ED is, and I get the fun of explaining.  Thanks, big pharma.

 
The Ambulance tour is always a hit.  Thankfully they've never had to ride in one for real.  Yet.

 
A new Imaging device is explained, and the girls want to go for a ride!

 
Instead, there's a mini model and a "child life specialist" there to play with.

 
And how can you pass up a free flu shot?  Little K was nervous and crying, but A stepped right up for hers. 

 
But soon it was over and she was proud to be done with it!

This weekend another hospital is having an open house, but it's at the same time as a friends' birthday party, so a choice will need to be made.  I wonder what the girls will decide, especially since there will be not be a shot associated with the one this weekend.

Back in the Hospital

I was doing so well, and then woke at 1:00am sweating profusely, dizzy, nauseous, and shaking uncontrollably.  So now I'm back in the hospital and the reason for my decline is still unknown.  Could be a bowel obstruction.  Could be my heart.  Could be toxic shock or septicemia.  Could be a kidney stone lodged in my utterer.  So we wait and see while I'm back to an IV and an all liquid diet.  Yum.