I jinxed myself when I wrote last week that I had hoped to never visit a hospital again. That’s exactly where I found myself two nights ago, in the dreaded emergency ward. I’d been able to stay out of there for almost two years, but unfortunately my body conspired against me.
It was a very difficult decision to make in the middle of the night (Suzanna was away at her father’s for the night, upon my urging to give her a break from caring for me). I’d been feeling particularly unwell for the previous few days, a fever that’s stuck with me for weeks was getting worse. The chest pain had migrated to a new spot in my chest, and dehydration was setting in. By the time I called for help (first to my on-call nurse who recommended that I call 911 immediately) it was hard to even blink my eyes or swallow for the lack of moisture in my body.
What happened next might seem funny in the future, but not just yet. The paramedics were given my lockbox code to get into my apartment, they said that they’d had to fiddle with the lock in order to get in. Once they’d gotten me settled into the stretcher, an IV running (finding a viable blood vessel was fifteen minutes of stress – more so for them) we tried to leave the apartment. The door wouldn’t open.
A second fire truck/team had to be summoned to break the door open from the outside to let us out. A very long fifteen minutes for all of us. In my experience, I’ve never seen an emergency professional lose their cool in a stressful situation, and these gentleman never let on if they felt for even a moment that they were losing control of the situation.
Feeling so ill, I didn’t care in the least that we were leaving the apartment open. I just needed to feel better if it were at all possible.
Our local emergency department, save for one very impressive doctor who took over my care in the morning, lived up to my expectations based on previous visits to that ward. It didn’t start out well, the first doctor to see me was the same one who three years ago asked me if I had “decided” that I had ECD by researching symptoms on the internet after I landed in emergency with severe breathing difficulties. Coincidentally one of the paramedics who picked me up this week remembered that he was also with me on that night three years ago. He was so sweet on both visits, this time holding my hand while his partner did my intake work with triage.
While the ER was letting me down, my body wasn’t exactly living up to my expectations either. One nurse was able to get a small amount of blood out of a vein a few hours after I arrived but the quantity was insufficient for the lab. Four nurses then made a total of close to twenty attempts to access a vein without success, until the second doctor finally put a stop to it. It didn’t hurt me, but he just couldn’t watch it any longer. Who knew that they could try to draw blood from a thumb?
I could write chapters on what went wrong at the hospital that night and yesterday. First hand experience as to how my palliative status altered what many will already know to be a challenging situation visiting the emergency department. The worst part was the look in my daughter’s eyes when she arrived the next morning, seeing first hand the pain and indignities that I was experiencing. Fear that this visit might not be the last to the emergency ward despite my wishes to avoid it. If I thought that I dreaded it before, it’s nothing compared to how much the thought of a return visit scares me now.
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