My recent hospital stay

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Not too long ago, you might have seen this update and prayer request on my Facebook profile:

I said it was a long story, but I think it’s time to tell the tale of my extended hospital stay.

Long time visitors of this blog know that our family is no stranger to emergency room visits and hospital stays. Some were quite scary. Others were planned (but still worrisome).. But in all our family’s hospital visits over the years, I’ve never been the patient.

In fact, the last time I’d been to the hospital as a patient was when I was around 5 years old and had jumped up and down on an overturned aquarium. Oh? You haven’t heard that story? It’s a doozy. It’s also the first time I’ve had an EKG, MRI, ultrasound, and even an IV. I figured that since I was doing a new thing, why not just knock out a whole bunch of new things in one fell swoop?

I kid, I kid.

In the end, I wound up spending 12 days in the hospital. My friend, Eve*, spent less time in the hospital when she had her liver transplant.

I know.

That’s nuts.

And a ridiculously long time to be in the hospital.

So…what happened?

You would think that such a long stay in the hospital would have some earth-shattering backstory. Right? Something like “I crushed my foot when the perilously-stacked boxes in our garage came crashing down on me as I was looking for that one tub that contained my favorite pair of IU socks.” Or, “I almost sliced my foot off with a lightsaber.” Maybe even “The dog next door decided to use my foot as a chew toy.” Or some other crazy, off-the-wall, memorable story.

But that’s not what happened. It’s actually a pretty unremarkable story.

One night in early October, I was getting ready for bed. Christy walked in, pointed at my foot, and said, “What’s that?” My first thought was to ask if she’d ever seen a foot before, but she really wasn’t joking so I figured I shouldn’t. The spot she pointed at was on the outside of my left ankle – a spot that you don’t normally look at on a regular basis. It was in such a hard-to-see spot that I actually had to twist around in an awkward position just to see it clearly.

This spot had to be no larger than a dime. It looked and felt kind of like a scab. But it didn’t really look like a scab. Maybe it was an ulcer of some kind? Or maybe even a spider bite? After putting on some antibiotic ointment and a bandage, I explained it away and didn’t worry too much about it. Every morning for the next week, I changed the dressing and applied more ointment.

Nothing changed

I kind of forgot about it after a while. But then in early November, I started feeling pretty cruddy. I couldn’t get out of bed. I had chills. But my temperature never got very high. I think I registered with a 100^o temperature once or twice, but that’s it. I called telehealth. Didn’t mention my foot because I’d still forgotten about it. Telehealth doc said it’s probably the flu and prescribed me some medicine to fight it.

Things didn’t get any better. And then I noticed my ankle had gotten red and that unknown spot had begun to ooze a little bit. I put some ointment on it and bandaged it up again. “One thing at a time,” I thought. “I’ll deal with that after I get over this flu.”

But then things got worse.

Over the next three days, the spot started to spread. My ankle started to hurt – a lot. And I was still exhausted and achy with the occasional chill. I remember waking up in the wee hours of the morning of November 12, realizing that the redness and swelling had started to climb up my leg, and knowing it was probably past time to get this thing looked at.

Early Saturday morning

I hadn’t really said anything to Christy about my foot. I was sleeping in our room, trying to recover from what we thought was the flu. She slept on the couch in the living room. We really didn’t see each other that much in the week leading up to my ER visit.

I came downstairs at around 6:30 in the morning. I wasn’t sure how to tell her that I needed to go to the emergency room without freaking her out (because I know I would have probably freaked out). She was already awake, so I dropped the bomb on her.

“Don’t freak out when I tell you this. My foot has been hurting really bad and the redness and swelling is climbing up my leg. I need to get it looked at. This morning.”

Me

I gotta hand it to her. She didn’t freak out. She calmly suggested that I wait until an urgent care opened and visit them first. They’d either be able to treat it or give me a referral to the ER, which might help our case if insurance happened to question why Iven went to the hospital.

So I went back to bed for about 45 minutes. Then I ate breakfast and drove myself to a nearby urgent care facility.

Urgent care

I was the second person to come in. After a quick conversation with the lady at the reception window, I was registered to be seen. The lady who checked me in was very nice. Unfortunately, she did something that is not too uncommon, unfortunately. She registered my last name as my first name. It’s OK. It’s not the first time this is happened. And it wasn’t the last, either.

I didn’t wait very long before I was taken back to a room. The lady was thorough with her questions. I explained the situation the best I could. The sore was already oozing through my sock, even though I’d just changed the bandages before I’d left home. She took a quick glance at my ankle and said the doctor would be in shortly to see me.

Again, we went through the same questions and explanation after the doctor came in. “Oh, honey,” she said after she took off my bandage.

“You need to go to the ER and get some antibiotics. You also need some bloodwork to find out what’s causing that infection.”

Urgent Care doctor

There was no need for me to stick around very long after that. She bandaged my foot, told me it was cellulitis, and sent me on my way. So off to the ER I went.

Emergency room

Things happened pretty quickly once I arrived. The staff quickly checked me in and wheeled me to a room. I didn’t wait too long before people started coming in, asking me questions, and poking around on me. IV. Blood draw. EKG. Everything seemed to happen at once. Somewhere during this organized chaos, they wheeled in an x-ray machine and took pictures of my chest.

The ER doctor came in and explained that they wanted to make sure that this infection hadn’t traveled into my blood, that it hadn’t gotten to my bone, and that there weren’t any blood clots^{^}. So I was going to have to have an ultrasound and MRI and be admitted to the hospital. This was going to take at least a few days to treat before I was sent home.

Not too long after that, the doctor came back in.

“Well, we have one answer. You have diabetes. Your blood sugar is at 500.”

ER doctor

Nope.

I had no idea. But I do. And I’ve probably had it for a while.

If I understand it correctly, high blood sugar attracts bacteria, which can lead to higher blood sugar because your body’s trying to fight off an infection. So it kind of becomes a vicious cycle. And that’s what I was caught in. It doesn’t really explain what that small dot was in the beginning, but it does help me understand why things got so out of control so fast.

My hospital room

Eventually, I was off for them to do an ultrasound on my legs. And as I was on my way to my room, they called me down for my MRI. They had me listen to pandora during my 20-ish minute MRI ordeal. “What station would you like?” they asked. “How about Gustav Holst?” I’m a big fan of The Planets. I had to chuckle as I was listening. The first three songs were three different recordings of Jupiter: The Bringer of Jolity. That’s one of my favorite songs. It just makes me so…well…it makes me jolly. Besides, it was fun trying to pick out the differences of each recording.

These results turned out fine. Ultrasounds showed good circulation and no clotting. MRI showed that the infection was not in my bone. Apparently it was pretty close, but we’d started treatment in time.

After my ultrasound and MRI, they wheeled me up to my room on the third floor. I had no idea that this was going to be my home for the next week and a half.

Can I go ahead and say that the food was pretty good? It was much better than the reputation hospital food has earned over the years. I was put on a diabetic diet. That means limited carbs. But protein is a-OK. And as an added bonus, protein is great for helping wounds heal. And boy, did I have a wound.

While I chose different meals for my lunches and dinners, my morning breakfast became routine: ham, egg, and cheese omelet, two strips of bacon, cottage cheese, some fruit (either pears or peaches), and some small servings of juice. I occasionally added toast. See? Protein!

In case you hadn’t figured it out by now, I can be a creature of habit sometimes.

The staff on the third floor of Community Hospital South was pretty great. They were helpful, informative, and compassionate. And they gave me the best care possible.

Three(!) surgeries

Surgery #1

Monday morning, the podiatrist came in and looked at my foot. He decided he needed to clean out some of that infection in order to allow new tissue growth. So, that afternoon, I got to have another new experience – surgery. I’d had my wisdom teeth removed almost 30 years ago. That’s the closest I’ve come to actually having surgery. But this was much more involved than that.

When I was on the operating table, the anesthesiologist put a mask on me and told me to breathe. This wasn’t unexpected, but I didn’t like it. It felt like the room was collapsing around me and I was getting claustrophobic. I panicked just a little bit and reached for her arm, attempting to ask her to give me a moment to stop the room from collapsing. The next thing I knew, people were calling out my name, trying to get me to wake up and I was sitting in the post-op recovery room, coughing quite a bit. They had to intubate me, which was a surprise, so recovery was a little longer than I’d thought it would be.

Once I was back in my hospital room, I took this post-op selfie and sent it to my brother and my dad.

Maybe they should reconsider letting people have phones right after surgery.

The next day, they put a wound vac on my foot. At some point around this time, they determined that my wound was a staph infection, so they adjusted my antibiotics accordingly.

Surgery #2

Two days later, my podiatrist looked at my foot again. He wasn’t super happy with the rate of new tissue growth, and was concerned that there was more infection lingering around somewhere in the wound. So…surgery that afternoon. But first, another MRI was required, just to make sure the infection still hadn’t gotten into my bone.

I figured I’d change things up with my MRI pandora playlist this time. I asked for Queen. It was a good variety of songs. But the first song that I heard kind of got to me. It was We are the Champions.

Now, I’d been pretty upbeat throughout this whole ordeal. I’d kept things in perspective and realized that things could have been much, much worse. I knew we were on the right track and I had the best care available to me. But, as I waited for the MRI, I started feeling a little defeated. I felt like I was in this endless cycle that was just never ever going to end. Doctors and nurses had just started talking about going home. It started to sound like that might be happening in the next day or two. So this felt like a huge setback.

It all came to a head while I was listening to We are the Champions. A single tear rolled down my face as the MRI whirred and clanged and banged while it took images inside my foot. This was definitely my lowest point during my hospital stay.

MRI results were fine. And I was ready to take on the world.

I had the same anesthesiologist that I had in surgery #1. During our pre-op meeting, I asked her if she remembered me from a couple of days ago. She said she did. No idea if that was true or not, but it doesn’t really matter. Anyway, I asked if she remembered me reaching for her hand. She did. I explained my experience and how I was feeling claustrophobic. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t know why we used the mask. We won’t use the mask this time. We don’t need it.” And she didn’t. She just held the hose up to my nose and told me to breathe deeply.

It was a much more pleasant experience.

I get the feeling that this second surgery was a little more urgent and maybe even a little more extensive. The infection had traveled between my joint and tendon and he found a small pocket of infection on the other side of my foot. So he cleaned all of that.

The next day, a wound vac was back on my foot and was told not to put any weight on my foot.

Surgery #3

The following Monday, I went back in for one more surgery. This one was less invasive than the previous two. He did a final wash out of the wound, sutured the incisions that he had to make on the right side of my ankle during surgery #2, and attached some type of mesh to cover the main wound. I think he said it had stem cells and other good stuff to help promote new tissue growth and wound healing.

The wound vac returned the next day and the wheels started turning for me to finally go home.

Home before Thanksgiving

No one wants to spend the holidays in the hospital. I think the staff doesn’t even want to spend the holidays in the hospital. I was fortunate enough to be able to go home the day before Thanksgiving. It was a rough transition, but I was very, very happy to be home.

Still recovering at home

So now I’m home. I’m doing well with my new diet (who needed all those sugary drinks anyway?), and I still have the wound vac attached to my foot. I’ll have the vac for at least another month. Probably more. I check in with the podiatrist once a week. He’s been very happy with the tissue growth and I’m definitely moving in the right direction.

I’ve heard it said that for every day you spend in the hospital, it can take up to a week to fully recover at home. I can believe it. There are moments when I feel really good, like I have all the energy in the world. So I hop on my knee scooter and drive around our house like I own the place⁺. Other days? Wiped. out.

I was in the hospital for 12 days. That’s a lot of weeks of recovery.

I can’t talk about all of this without mentioning how amazing Christy has been throughout this whole ordeal. She was my rock, even when she wasn’t visiting me in the hospital. She came and hung out with me every day, she waited with me in pre-op…all three times, and hung out in the waiting room all three times. In the midst of all of this, she was able to manage everything at home, including getting Mihret ready for school every morning. See, that’s usually my responsibility so Christy can get to work on time. And speaking of work, she continued to juggle all of her work responsibilities throughout this whole ordeal^#.

And she’s been a rock star since I’ve come home. I have no idea what I’d do without her.

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Endnotes

* Back before all of this happened, Eve had agreed to be a guest on THE MattDanToddcast. We’ll get that on the books in early 2023. I can’t wait to talk to her and share her story with y’all!

^{^}There’s a family history of complications from blood clots, so I was especially concerned about this, too. Fortunately, they didn’t find any!

^#At work, we call the time before the pandemic shutdown “The Before Times” because it was such a pivotal time in our organization’s history. Everything changed during that time. I’m thinking I need to have some kind of reference for this time of my life, I’m leaning towards something like “The Lost Days” because I basically lost the whole month of November due to my hospital visit.

⁺Ahem. I do own the place.