Well, Now What?

As of tomorrow, I am medically cleared to return to work.  Unfortunately, there is no work available this week.  In the meantime, I decided that I needed a less stressful source of income.  So, I'm starting my own business.  Since I haven't worked in 6 weeks, there isn't much starting capital.  But Denise and I pulled some books and DVDs out of our personal collection and headed off to the flea market.  All in all, we managed to clear about $10 more than we paid in rent for the booth for the day.

In the course of the day, I learned that some flea market shoppers get really annoyed at vendors who obey the law and charge the required sales tax.  Looks like we're going to have to shift to tax-included pricing.

If you are curious about just how stressful my day job can be, you might want to check out another blog, Tales of a RGIS Auditor.

Home at Last

Moved back into my own home and my own bedroom last night, and it's great being back in my nice comfortable bed.  The place is still a bit of a mess, but it is starting to come into some kind of rational order.  We're putting a priority on the kitchen, because it's kind of hard for me to eat healthy when all I have to work with is paper plates and a microwave. 

In other news, I saw the doctor yesterday, and I will be cleared to return to work on September 1st.  Not that I particularly like my job, but I like starving even less.  I have also been permitted to resume driving and light sexual activity. 


Another benefit of being home is that I now have the adapter for the memory card in my phone, and the card reader for my computer.  So, now I can post a couple of pics from shortly after my surgery.  

Working Towards Recovery

So, there I was, recuperating in my mom's house, and sleeping in a recliner.  To be fair, I should note that the hard mattress wasn't the sole problem.  For many years I've had trouble sleeping on my back.  I have a tendency to wake up unable to breathe, to the point where even after waking it is sometimes a matter of 10 seconds or so before I can get my lungs going again.  I used to think it was sleep apnea, but recently my doctor suggested that I have an unusually broad tongue that can block my airway. 

That wasn't a problem in a hospital bed where I could elevate the head end.  On a flat bed it's a major issue, but sleeping on my side was too painful unless the bed is pretty soft.  After all, I'd just had my chest split open. 

To continue, I had been sent home with a list of followup doctor appointments, one fairly shortly after my release, and a referral to a local cardiac rehab center.  So, Denise took me to the appointment, only to discover it didn't exist.  Not only did the office not have a record of the appointment, the doctor I was supposed to see was on vacation.  Turns out the hospital gave me the wrong month, it was supposed to be in August, not July.  But we did get in to see one of the other doctors and he was able to answer all of our questions, questions that he was rather annoyed to discover we hadn't gotten answered before I was discharged.  I believe I noted in a previous post that we trouble getting my doctor at the hospital to hold still for more than a few minutes. 

Later in the week, it was off to look into rehab.  That visit was fairly short, as it wouldn't be covered by my insurance and would run $1500 a month.  Since that was only a bit less than our average monthly take home pay before my heart attack, and our income has been cut in half because I am not yet medically cleared to work, that was not an option. 

So I embarked on a home exercise program, primarily walking.  I started off making sure that instead of vegetating in one place all day, I frequently moved around the house.  I shortly started walking about the neighborhood, moving from a short trip up the street, then walks to the corner store, incorporating walks around the block, then covering multiple blocks.  I also started doing light stretching exercises.  As of now, i can walk respectable distances without difficulty, and have recovered most of the range of motion in my arms.  Reaching across my body is still a bit uncomfortable, though. 

In our last episode...

I was booted out of the hospital and made my way home. 

Well, not exactly. 

There were some issues with going home.  To start with, the driveway has been washed out by various floods in recent years, and is impassable passenger cars.  My truck could make it, but it is not currently running.  Plus, it's a stick, which my wife has only a little experience in driving, and I am not yet medically cleared to drive myself.  Besides, bouncing over the rocks would be extraordinarily painful after my surgery. 

And the house is in the middle of 5 wooded acres.  So, just getting home would involve walking roughly the length of a football field.  A rutted, rock-strewn, tree-choked football field. 

The house is 2 stories, with the bedrooms and full baths upstairs.  Not a climb I was looking forward to.  Even worse, due to certain pressures at the time, we moved into the house as soon as it was marginally habitable, but before it was completely finished.  So, some of the frills are missing, like the front steps.  Due to terrain and cost considerations, the house in on piers, placing the front porch around 5 feet above the ground, with only a ladder allowing access.  That's not something my wife was willing to let me tackle yet. 

So, I moved in with my mom.  As she always sleeps in her recliner, the bedroom was available.  The problem is the bed.  It has the hardest mattress I've ever tried to sleep on.  It brings to mind an old mattress commercial that used the phrase "basic highway material".  I was tired enough the first night to sleep fitfully on it, but not a chance the second night.  I ended up taking the other recliner in living room, and managed some sleep in between bouts of one or both of the cats walking across me. 

So, the next day we got my son-in-law to move that recliner back into the bedroom.  I still had trouble sleeping, mostly due to pain, but for the most part it worked.  I look forward to getting back home, to my own bed with the memory foam mattress topper. 

Some Shout Outs

I want to take this opportunity to thank the people who made this experience something less than the living hell it could have been. 

My wife, Denise, who was there for me every day, even taking a lot of time off from work.  As previously mentioned, she was the one who found a way to soothe my dry, ventilator-abused throat after I came out of surgery, when the nurse couldn't be bothered.  She also brought me clothes, snacks, and soft drinks, little touches that made it all more bearable.  I don't know what I would have done without her.

My stepdaugther, Kim, who also took some time off work to be there for me. 

My mom, who has gone through more hell in hospitals than I can imagine, and is not as mobile as she used to be because of it, but still made the effort to visit. 

My dad, who flew back from El Paso in time for the surgery, and brought me new books and his old laptop to help me pass the time. 

My younger stepdaughter Amanda, and her husband John. 

My good friends and family-by-choice Kitty and David. 

The unnamed maintenance man, who managed to get the TV controls working in the ICU. 

Carrie, April, Glenda, and all the other nurses (with one notable exception mentioned earlier) and CNA's who took care of me with warmth and compassion.  (Even the ones that kept waking me up every couple of hours to take my vitals.)

If I have forgotten anyone, please forgive me, I wasn't exactly at my best that week.  Feel free to call me out on my forgetfulness in the comment section. 

Don't Let the Door Hit You in the Ass on the Way Out

So there I was in IMCU, no longer tethered to any arcane medical gimmickry, free to move about the room on my own and even walk down the hall with an escort.  I was already back on a solid diet, and was beginning to dread mealtimes.  Not only was my highly restricted diet rather boring, but there were other reasons I'll address in another post. 

I even managed an extremely cautious shower.  My respiratory therapist was unhappy with my progress with the spirometer but admitted I was doing much better with the easy-PAP treatment.  The spirometer you can see at the link, the easy-pap is similar to a CPAP, except that you exhale back into the mouthpiece, which measures the strength of your lungs. 

On my 2nd day in IMCU I even got to talk to my surgeon, and managed a couple of questions before he hurried back out.  Over the course of the day they were working on my discharge papers, setting up follow-up appointments and referral to rehab, and writing prescriptions.  And they removed the stitches from my chest tube incisions.  The incision where they split open my chest and the ones in my legs from where they harvested veins for the bypass were sealed with superglue, no stitches needed.  Then in the afternoon they hustled me out the door to free up the bed for another victim. 

Yep, barely a week after my initial visit to the hospital, and less than 5 days after having my ribcage split open, I was free to go home.  I would have left even earlier, except that my surgeon pulled another one of his abrupt departures in the middle of finalizing my discharge paperwork, so I had to wait for him to return. 

Post-op Fun

I managed to get some sleep the night after surgery, only to be rudely awakened in the morning by a nurse insisting that I move from my bed to a chair.  This seemed a little rushed to me, and was a fairly complicated process considering that I was intimately connected to multiple pieces of equipment. 

First off there were the wires running from the monitor above my bed to various patches on my chest and the pulse oxygen monitor on my finger.  Then there were the multiple IV bags connected to the central line on my shoulder.  I had 3 tubes coming out of my chest to drain excess fluid from around my heart and lungs, leading to 2 reservoirs that collected said fluid.  And finally there was the tube running between another device and my genitalia. 

And that was how I spent the weekend, into the chair first thing in the morning, back into bed at night, fighting a plethora of tubes and wires the whole time.  I had frequent visits from the respiratory therapists, and an initial visit from the physical therapist with exercises I could do in my chair.  There was talk of getting the chest tubes out the first day, but that didn't happen, one of the few things that wasn't rushed.  I understand they were anxious to move me from ICU to the Intermediate Care Unit (IMCU), but there weren't any beds available over the weekend. 

However, on Monday a bed became available in IMCU.  So, my chest tubes were removed, and it seems I seriously shocked the staff by actually watching the tubes as they were pulled out of my chest.  Then the IV and the central line were removed, and control of my own urination was returned to me.  Finally, I was wheeled down to IMCU and installed in a room, where my chest leads were hooked up to a transmitter.