The pleasures of sleeping in one's own bed

I am at home. Spring appears to be just around the corner, we have sun and above zero (Celsius) temperatures all week. There's hardly any snow around, I would love to go for a nice long walk or bike ride, it is so lovely out.

Gretel came to pick me up at St Joe's on Tuesday morning with a little bag of potato chips, my first food request after a nearly salt-free week. It was great, I truly savoured all that salt.

I signed myself out of the hospital, I did not wait for the doctor to sign me out. Several people advised me against doing that, but I was just so fed up with being there. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about why I was fed up, just to say it was a lot of unnecessary little irritants, both for me and for other patients I came to know over my time there. Somewhere along the line it got to me, I stopped trying to be polite and patient about it. When the nurse said I couldn't leave, I said, Is this a jail?

On the positive side, the cardiologist who treated me at St Mike's was wonderful, bedside manner coming out his ears. He actually came by after the procedure to apologize for causing me pain. I looked him up on the internet when I got home, turns out he is the head of cardiology at St Mike's and a professor at the U of T school of medicine.

My half-day at St Mike's was a bit of a contrast with St Joe's, I think if I ever have to go to hospital again, I will do my darndest to go to St Mike's. I saw Emmanual on Monday evening and he said pretty much the same about Western, so if I can't get to St Mike's, Western will be my second choice. St Joe's will be down around the frozen reaches of hell.

Emmanual had an angiogram and two angioplasties, he also was going home on Tuesday. I could see that he had finally reached his breaking point too, he was pretty grim about being back at St Joe's.

I still have whatever my original condition is, if anything somewhat worse. However I think I have had every possible test for heart-related problems and nothing significant showed up. So we can rule out the worst case scenario.

My breathlessness is now so bad that I cannot go outdoors without panting. Even walking from one end of my small apartment to the other is problematic, it wasn't like that before. However, I managed to see a doctor today and she's ordering a breathing test, presumably for asthma or something like that. She feels confident that I don't have any serious heart or lung issues after all the tests they ran while I was at St Joe's.

Yesterday I went to my Mimico Adult Ed classes and it was so nice to get out and about! I just popped in to the carving class because I didn't think I was up to the physical effort of carving just yet, but it turns out that another person in that class had also had an angiogram (plus three angioplasties) the same time I did. He was still at home but the instructor was passing around a card to him for everyone to sign.

I said I would be back to normal next week, and Bill, the guy that only comes for the coffee break laughed and said anybody who checks herself out of the hospital is sure to be just fine next week. Well, I hope I can live up to that.

Later that evening though I called Telehealth because I noticed a bruise forming near the angiogram site, a nurse called me back after a few minutes. Turns out he (it was a male nurse) was the same age as me and he said he'd had an angiogram too so he understood my concern.

He said, They call it the Golden Years but I think they are colour-blind, it's really the Rust Years!

Anyway, he asked some questions and gave me some useful advice, I am glad I called. He said it didn't sound urgent but I should probably get it looked at by a doctor within 24 hours. After I got off the phone, a friend of Gretel's recommended a clinic out in Mississauga (west of Toronto) as better than any clinic in Toronto for wait times, and since we live not too far from the highway it was just as easy to go there as to a clinic downtown, so Isaac and I drove there shortly after the Telehealth phone call.

However, it turned out the clinic was in a hospital and I was so turned off of hospitals that I made Isaac take me to a walk-in clinic down the road from the hospital. I just couldn't bear setting foot inside a hospital, even if it was only an outpatient clinic!

About half an hour later a doctor had examined my bruise and said it wasn't serious, so we headed home again. A spot of whiskey to calm my nerves and I was off to bed. I sure do appreciate my very own bed now.

Next time I am tempted to call 911, I'm gonna call Telehealth instead.

Unless I really do want four burly firemen on the doorstep.

Good news bad news

The doc who performed the angiogram said afterwards, I have good news and bad news.

The good news is, there's nothing wrong with your heart.

The bad news is, you spent a week in hospital for nothing.

Taking blood

Sunday did not start well. On Saturday afternoon my cardiologist put a nitroglycerin patch on my shoulder, and by bedtime I had a raging headache. The nurse gave me Tylenol and said the headache was most likely caused by the patch. She said I'd need the doc's permission to take it off, so when she left the room I just took it off, the Tylenol was useless and it seemed stupid to wait, a case of the cure being worse than the illness.

However the headache took a long time to abate, and when a blood technician showed up at my bed at 6am, I was in more of a mood to take blood than to give it. I snapped at her and she backed off right away and called the nurse.

In the end they got their blood, and they installed a new intravenous needle, no doubt punishment for being unco-operative. I am trying real hard to be polite, but I guess I am just tired of this whole thing, I want out. Or failing that, to inflict harm.

"Jimi" stopped by the lounge today, he no longer has his portable life support system so I guess he's getting better. He says he feels fine but the doctor tells him his kidneys are still a little shaky.

Emmanual told me that he had another reason for not wanting to be in the same room as the dying man. He said that the man was Maltese, the same as him, and everyone visiting the fellow spoke in Maltese. They didn't know that Emmanual was Maltese too, they said some things that he didn't want to hear. But on Sunday he walked by his old room and saw the dying man sitting up. Maybe he's not dying after all!

I watched the 50km cross-country marathon skiing, the Canadian Devon Kershaw came in fourth. This was a record performance for Canada, but the poor guy was devastated that he was only 1.6 seconds from gold, a fraction of a second from being on the podium at all. The race took just over two hours, two hours of all-out effort, and I imagine he had nothing left at all so the tears were probably as much about exhaustion as about disappointment. The TV interviewer was congratulating him on his great performance, but all he could do was apologize for letting everyone down. Poor guy.

The big hockey game started around 3.15pm, Isaac and Tristan came with popcorn, Emmanual's family came, a couple of other patients and some visitors and staff. It was a good game, and we had a full house. Canada was leading for most of the game but the Americans scored a goal that tied the two teams in literally the last minute of play. Quite amazing. So there was 20 minutes of "sudden death" overtime and Sydney Crosby scored the winning goal for Canada. Lots of cheering in the patient lounge, I am sure the nurses at the nursing station at the other end of the hall knew exactly what had happened.

Later in the evening some of us watched the closing ceremonies. A couple of nurses came by to see too. They said they were sorry the Olympics were over, the TV would be boring now. I agreed. I said I planned to get better and go home now that the Olympics were over.

On Monday I have my angiogram at St Mike's, hopefully some kind of diagnosis and treatment will come out of that. I may or may not be returning to St. Joe's so I am to pack up all my belongings to leave. I'm not looking forward to the procedure, but I am looking forward to it being over with. Three of us are off for our angios, and a fourth is off to start radiation for lung cancer. We have been wishing each other well because we may or may not see each other again. Who knows what our outcomes will be, but everyone has the attitude of, you do your best and what will be will be.

The heart wing reprobates

Friday night I stayed up as long as I could to watch the Canada-Slovakia hockey game, I managed the first two periods. I hear the third period was quite exciting and I missed it.

Our MC or DJ or whatever you want to call him, the guy who decided he was in control of the TV, kept everyone on track for appropriate Olympics viewing and the occasional old movie when the Olympics weren't up to his standard. He seemed to be a guy who brooked no intervention so the rest of us ambulatory heart patients just let him do his thing. He did have a certain expertise in all things TV, but maybe a tad heavy-handed.

Late at night a battered rock musician (think Jimi Hendrix) joined us, he had a mobile pole of medical paraphernalia and had apparently suffered some kind of dramatic collapse not related to drugs. He added a certain colour to our motley crew, with dreads hanging down to his rear end, a goatee, and coloured glasses perched on his nose. Not to mention his very complicated portable life support system.

Friday afternoon I met Emmanual and his wife in the TV lounge. He seems to be a slightly more advanced case of whatever I am, we are both waiting for angios on Monday. We kind of connected and throughout the day and evening would exchange glances about our strange companions, the DJ and "Jimi".

Saturday morning the DJ was discharged, sort of a relief even though he did add a certain je ne sais quoi to the place. They gave him a prescription for seven different drugs he now has to take all the time! Good luck with that one, he doesn't seem the type to stick to that kind of drug diet. Definitely one of those characters that fill a room whether you like it or not, and not shy about sharing his observations and opinions on human nature.

Emmanual went on a hunt for the Saturday newspaper. There are several newspaper boxes located around but not in the hospital, you have to find one and make a dash through the snow in your hospital gown with the correct change to get one. Emmanual was OK with that, the trouble was that apparently all the boxes were empty today. He had asked around from some of the hospital staff if they knew where he could get a paper, and one of them told him that the box at Emergency might still have papers.

Isaac came by with a new infusion of books and clothes for me, I took him down to the lounge to see our view and TV. Emmanual was there, reading yesterday's newspaper in frustration. He told us his story so far and said that he didn't know how to get to Emergency without leaving the hospital and walking around the outside, which he didn't want to do in his gown. It was still snowing out.

I told him that actually he wasn't even supposed to leave our floor with his wireless heart monitor, because the signal doesn't extend past this floor and the nurses don't like it when the monitor goes dead.

Or so they say, one of my leads came loose and I was dragging it around unknowingly for a couple of hours the day before and no one told me. I don't think they ever actually checked the monitors! Anyway, that was news to Emmanual, he had been off-floor a couple of times and no one said anything to him either.

Isaac volunteered that he knew how to get to Emerge without going outside, he did it all the time when he parked on that side of the hospital. Emmanual looks at him brightly, Really? Then he looks at me and says, Wanna go off-floor?

Hoo-wee! An adventure!

Isaac all of a sudden realizes he is being co-opted into leading an illicit activity but he's cool, so the three of us, Isaac fully dressed and Emmanual and I in our hospital gowns and heart monitors set out for the elevator. No one stops us. We go down to the main floor and start following "Emergency ->" signs through a maze of corridors. We walk purposefully, as if we belong there, and no one stops us.

Sure enough, we end up in the Emerge waiting room, the only people not bundled up in overcoats. Emmanual and I march through the waiting room looking for newspapers. I am pretending my gown is really a doctor's white coat and I am here on business, inspecting the clients. We scour the room, but no newspapers. But through the window we see, across the road, a row of newspaper boxes!

Since Emmanual and I are in gowns Isaac offers to go out to the boxes, we start pooling our coins to pay for the paper, then Emmanual says, No look, it's free during the Olympics. And sure enough, there is a big "Free" sign on one of the boxes. So Isaac dashes out across the snowy road and retrieves two thick Saturday papers for us.

We march smugly back to our ward, almost swaggering with our newspapers under our arms. As we head down the hall to the lounge Emmanual says, Let's check our monitors. We stop at the board where all the heart rates are displayed, mine seems to be normal but Emmanual's is flatlined, with the words "Not Detected" flashing red at the top. Oops.

But nobody said anything to us so apparently they don't check, the monitors are just for show. And Emmanual is flatlined.

Isaac said he might come back on Sunday to watch the final hockey game between Canada and the USA for the gold medal. He could watch at home but he likes our TV and thought it would be more fun to watch with a bunch of people than to watch alone. Emmanual said, Great, bring popcorn! So Sunday night should be fun. I am sure everyone halfway conscious will be there, hopefully there will be wheelchairs or something for folks who can't walk.

Just before supper Emmanual and I went for another walk, but we didn't go on the elevator, we behaved and stayed on our floor. We decided we would try to find "Jimi", just for something to do. We thought his problem had to do with his kidneys, so we went down the Nephrology wing. Sure enough we found him there with his girlfriend and he was glad to see us, told her we were his bro's. Hmmm...

Saturday evening there was a good crowd in the lounge for Olympic curling, standing room only. Earlier Isaac had explained some of the finer points of curling to me so I understood a bit better what was going on than I did the day before with the women's curling. Canada's women's team narrowly missed the gold on Friday, but on Saturday the men's team scored gold against the Norwegians. The Norwegians wore funny pants, kind of clownish harlequin pants, but they were all very good looking. It was exquisite watching the Canadian team play, they hardly made any mistakes at all. You could see the frustration mounting in the Norwegian skip's face. But it is interesting watching a game that requires as much strategizing as skill, you could see them working out their next moves and hear them talking amongst themselves about it.

One fellow came in and tried to change the TV channel. He just walked right up to the TV, ignoring all the people watching it and started fiddling with the buttons. Emmanual and I looked at each other, another DJ?

Finally the fellow turned around and said, How do you change the channel, I want to watch the curling!

I said, Yes, that is what we were watching.

I got up and changed it back to the Olympics channel. He sat down and left the TV buttons alone after that. He said later he didn't sleep so good the night before so I guess it was getting to him.

Emmanual's roommate is dying and he is not too comfortable with that. At suppertime he started flirting like crazy with his nurse, cajoling her to put him in another room. Halfway through the curling game she came through for him, he has another room. His wife and kids arrived and he took them down to see his new digs. Emmanual's wife brought chocolate which she shared with everyone in the lounge. She asked if we were allowed to eat chocolate and of course everyone nodded Yes. She gave the last of the chocolate to Emmanual's nurse.

I hope our neighbour passes peacefully.

Freedom

Still here at St. Joe's.

Friday morning I had my stress test, the results were ambiguous. So, next step is St. Mike's for the angiogram. In the meantime, I've been moved out of the CCU into a regular ward. And wonder of wonders, I have internet access here!

I spent just over three days in the CCU, tethered to my bed. It was actually not a bad experience but kind of interesting.

Mostly it was pretty quiet, except when the nurses changed shifts, then it was like a party, all the outgoing nurses and incoming nurses exchanging information and just generally chatting and catching up. The three nurses I had most of the time were Leona, Romi and Milada.

Leona settled me in when I first arrived at 2am on Tuesday morning. She said to me, Good it's your heart, that's fixable.

She wore a big Obama button on her chest all of the time. Seeing that made me realize that for all the disappointment some of us have about his lack of achievement or follow-through on promises, he still represents something huge: the first black man to be president of the most powerful country in the world. A whole bunch of Americans just got legitimized.

Leona is from Montserrat, she said when the volcano there became active in the 1990s most of the population moved away, many to the UK (they are British subjects). Leona's family moved to New York and Toronto. Her mother diedin New York last year, and recently she went down to put a marker on her mother's grave, but it was in the middle of the big snowstorm and they couldn't see a thing so they never placed the marker. She says she doesn't want to go down again this year, maybe next year.

Romi greets me every day as "Queen Elizabeth" or "Lady Elizabeth", and the first thing she said to me when I first met her was that my hair was gorgeous. She's a keeper! Unfortunately it was on her advice that I tried that instant hair washing cap, and the results were less than gorgeous. Let's just say that there was too much conditioner in it and leave it at that. Romi is so cheery, and so energetic. She makes you happy just by walking by and smiling at you! When she was on nightshift, she would bring me juice and cookies for a bedtime snack.

Milada was slow to warm up, she has a certain East European reserve, but seeing me knitting quickly broke barriers. She remembered her mother knitting, and learning to knit herself as a young girl. She said she loved it but now with kids and a full-time job she had no time. Perhaps when her kids are grown...

One day a young physiotherapist came into the CCU to see a woman in a bed down the way from me. She spoke loudly, as if the woman were deaf, or slow-witted. Apparently this woman was due to leave but she needed to practice walking as she had been in bed for so long. So the physio wanted to get her up and walking with a walker up and down the CCU.

The woman didn't sound very happy about the prospect. The physio was cajoling and carrying on, eventually getting the woman out of bed and propped up in the walker. They started walking down the hallway toward me and I could see the really sour look on the woman's face. She definitely was not happy about this.

They walked as far as my bed and then turned and went back, the physio helped the woman back into bed. Then she said she would be back the next day to do it again, I heard the woman mutter something.

Finally the physio said her good byes and brightly said, It was nice meeting you!

The woman replied, I can't say the same, and I heard a nurse snicker from the nursing station.

Red-faced, the physio beat a retreat and was never seen again.

I kind of got a kick out of it. Listening later to one of the nurses talking to this woman, it was clear she was neither deaf nor slow-witted, but kind of snippy. They exchanged snippy remarks and then they both laughed.

When I got back from my stress test, Leona said they had found a bed for me on the regular ward and she packed up my stuff and took me over. On this ward I have a roommate, an older Polish woman who fell down one day and couldn't get up, her legs just stopped working. She came to Canada after the war because it was better than going back to Russian-occupied Poland. During the war she and all the other young people in her area of Poland had been rounded up to go work in Germany. Her mother told her, there is nothing here for you anymore, go somewhere nice. So she came to Canada.

My bed is by the window and I have a view of Lake Ontario, just across the Gardiner Expressway from St. Joe's. We have the window open because it is very hot in here, but the highway is noisy and we will probably have to close it tonight just to cut down on the noise.

But the best thing is, I now have a wireless portable heart monitor, I am not tethered to my bed. And, there is a patient lounge with an even better view of the Lake and a TV and tables and chairs and couches. And people. This afternoon I spent a few hours watching a great old movie from the '30s and some Winter Olympics.

My angiogram is scheduled for Monday, so I am here over the weekend. The nurse says they will transport me to St. Mike's for the angio, then bring me back here afterward. I will need to stay another day at least after that. Or longer, depending on the results.

Down the hall is a place where all the readings from all the heart monitors on the floor are displayed. I go down sometimes to see mine, and how it compares with some of the others. They are all so different!

I miss the quiet womb-like atmosphere of the CCU, I felt positively coddled down there. But being able to walk again is great! It is good to be able to go down to the lounge and chat or read or watch TV.

Heartburn

I am tied to my bed. Literally. I have a six-foot tether that lets me reach the toilet but not the main door of this room. This morning I washed my hair with a kind of haircap that washes, conditions and rinses your hair all in one! It's still wet now, we'll see how good a job it does when it's dry. Things are quiet now, breakfast is over, there are no visitors and lunch has not yet arrived. Meals are the big events of my life right now.

On Monday I had a busy day: I got email from my brother to say that our Aunt Ruthe had died on Sunday morning. It was also my son Sam's 33rd birthday. And I was getting together with WiseWebWoman for another blogger's lunch at a great little Indian restaurant on Bloor near Bathurst. The first major snow storm of the season was just starting (I gather it was a bit of a dud, but I can't see outdoors so I have to take other people's word for it).

I had my regular writing workshop in the early evening, and since it is close by I usually walk to and from there. I got home around 8pm and my chest was achy. This has been going on for awhile, and was particularly bad over the weekend, somehow on Monday night it just seemed like enough was enough. I just didn't know what to do about it. I really hate the idea of going to Emergency, it just seems like such a waste of time and on a snowstormy night I'd far rather stay home and tough it out. But I was wondering if maybe this might not be the most sensible thing to do.

My compromise was to call 911 and ask their opinion.

Kind of dumb in retrospect, what do I think their opinion is going to be? Man, they don't mess around! They didn't want any details, just the address. And minutes later, siren blaring and lights flashing, there was a big old firetruck sitting in front of our house blocking traffic in both directions. Very discreet.

Four burly firemen crowded into our tiny entrance hallway, they wouldn't let me move or try to pack or anything. Just step this way ma'am, into the ambulance.

So much for asking questions.

I got strapped into a stretcher in the back of the ambulance, something intravenous hooked up to my left hand, and we were off to St. Joe's. A few moments later they had me at Emergency and were negotiating a bed for me. I was unloaded onto a bed in a curtained off area of the hospital basement, surrounded by other curtained off beds and the various sounds of people in not great shape coming from behind those curtains.

Very quickly I was hooked up to a machine that recorded my heart beat and took my blood pressure automatically every hour. Blood was taken. Someone came by with a portable X-ray machine and aimed it at me for a chest X-ray; he came by half an hour later to do it again, saying that he had cut off the bottom of my lungs with the previous X-ray.

Someone identifying himself as a doctor asked some questions and left, someone else also identifying himself as a doctor said they were keeping me overnight and then transferring me to St. Mike's the next day for an angiogram.

Can I go to my Aunt Ruthe's funeral on Wednesday? He gapes at me. Are you nuts?

Amazingly, I think I actually did manage to sleep for a few moments during all this, but not much more than that.

Around 2am I was wheeled up to the Cardiac Care Unit (CCU) where Leona tucked me into a little bed in a little room with real walls. She said, You're new at this aren't you? I can tell by the way you're looking around, your eyes are just all over the place! I said I hadn't been in a hospital overnight since my son Sam was born, 33 years ago. She nodded and said, You've had a good long run. Meaning I suspect, it's over now.

Today is the funeral. I really wish I could be there. Ironically, I was unhappy that it was going to be on a Wednesday, my Mimico Adult Ed day. But all that's irrelevant now. The doctor (another one) came by yesterday to talk to me. So far I have talked to I don't know how many doctors, and none of them mine. I don't think mine even knows I am here.

This latest one said she was going to run a stress test on me, then she was gone. I found out later from Milada my nurse that the test was scheduled three days away and I was expected to stay in bed until then. I asked her why the stress test, why not the angiogram, and she very carefully avoided expressing an opinion, only that one, the angiogram, is more specific and more informative than the other. But also more invasive.

I talked to my sister-in-law later in the day and she said that in the same situation my brother her husband had been offered a choice and he had chosen the angiogram. In retrospect he's glad he did that. Maybe this doctor chose the stress test because they don't do angiograms at St Joe's, I'd have to be moved to St Mike's for that. I asked Gretel where St Mike's is, she said it was also close by and closer to where Isaac works.

The Saints preserve us!

The doctor just came by and I asked her why she wanted the stress test and not the angiogram. She says my situation is a bit unusual, she thinks it may not be heart pain at all. I must admit I am wondering that myself, but the exhaustion and fatigue I feel makes me lean more toward heart issues than something else.

Wouldn't it be funny if the firetruck came with the siren blaring and all lights blazing for a case of heartburn?

Isaac brought me some knitting and books and my netbook to entertain myself. He also put a couple of videos on my netbook. Tristan brought me a chocolate bar.

Yesterday they admitted an older man to the CCU at the other end of the unit. In the evening a whole bunch of young people, high schoolers, came to visit. There were so many of them that they couldn't fit into the room, they overflowed into the hallway. I wondered if that person was their teacher. Anyway, those kids were worried and concerned, they seemed relieved that their patient was able to talk to them and even to joke with them.

You'll never lose your sense of humour, one of them said. I didn't hear the reply, but then the kid said, I'll never lose mine either.

Isaac and Tristan arrived a little later, Tristan was fascinated by the monitor showing heart rate and blood pressure above my bed. There is one line that doesn't appear to move, Tristan said it must not be working, and I said, No, watch. Then I waved my arm around and that flat line jumped all over the place. Maybe it measures my arm rate?

This is not what I had planned for this week, but what can you do.