The thing about being in ICU is that while you are there to be healed and rest, you actually don't get any rest.
As from part one of this story you will recall that I had a rather unpleasant Sunday evening and was given some medication to help me sleep through the night. Had I been able to sleep through the night that would've been awesome, however due to the nature of ICU you are constantly woken during the night to make sure that you are okay and still alive.
Plus I had a blood pressure cuff that was set on automatic and connected to the vitals monitor which would check my blood pressure every 15 min. To start with this didn't bother me that much, but after a while hearing the initial buzz and the beep of the machine and knowing that once again the cuff was going to strangle my arm became rather annoying.
The other issue I had with the blood pressure cuff was that it would slide down my arm while I was laying there in bed so when it started to inflate it often couldn't find the correct pulse and would keep inflating and inflating and inflating to the point of cutting off my circulation and making it feel like my arm was about to fall off. There were several times when Alice had to go and stop the machine because it was hurting so badly.
So even though I had been given some very cool medication to help me rest, between the nurses coming in every half hour and the infernal blood pressure cuff I didn't get much sleep at all that first night.
Monday morning started for me around 4 AM, when the daily plethora of medication that I had to take, started to be bought into the room and administered.
At this point I'm still nil by mouth, so I'm hungry and thirsty and I can't have anything, they were even reluctant to allow me to have free access to ice chips which was the only respite I got for my thirst. Oh, and another thing, you'll probably recall from my original post regarding the catheter that was inserted before I went into the MRI, well let me tell you, this thing was so comfortable, NOT.
It turns out that they hadn't secured the catheter correctly to a clip that was attached to my leg, this clip was supposed to keep the catheter tube from moving when I shifted my body or when the nursing staff moved me around in the bed or transferred me to carts etc. Well it wasn't secured, and and as my last name is Tarrant, and Murphy's law is the law that governs my life, of course every time anybody came near me, moved me, touched me, did anything within 3000 linear feet of the bed, my catheter bag would of course get hit, which in turn tugged on the catheter tube.
Now I don't know how many of you readers have had a catheter inserted, but after it's been in there a while, if the tube starts to move, it's about as pleasant as throwing salt on an open wound, and as uncomfortable as listening to Richard Harris sing MacArthur Park..... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHS8hj4TdT8 anyway I digress..
Now it's early morning Monday, my nystagmus is going 100 miles an hour and making my eyes look like Marty Feldman on crack, my head is thumping like I've been on a bender with Oliver Reed, Richard Burton and George Best, and the bloody blood pressure cuff kicking in every 15 min., oh yeah life is just grand :-)
I soon get a visit from the first neurologist that saw me, I don't mean to be rude nor denigrate this Dr's skill, but Marcus Welby he wasn't. He proceeds to show up in my room and effectively he tells me that I didn't have a stroke.
Now call me old-fashioned, and I'm no doctor, but if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then there's a good chance, ... it's a duck.
Dr. Sherlock, whose bedside manner was well let's just say weak at best, tells me that all of the scans taken showed nothing other than that I have a brain in there, but there is nothing wrong with it.
Now in full disclosure, prior to Dr. Sherlock, that's not his real name by the way, coming into my room, the procession of nurses, attending physicians, hospitalists etc. that had come by my room and bedside, all pretty much said, man that looks like a stroke... except of course the good Dr.
I think Dr. Sherlock had been watching too episodes of House, and as the evidence was not empirical, he had deduced,that I must be suffering from any number of weird and wonderful diseases other than a stroke.
In defense of Dr. Sherlock, I understand his reasoning, here was a young, obviously very smart neurologist, who looking at scans saw no evidence of a crime. So to use parlance from the TV detective shows, I had all the MO and signs of a stroke, but the perp had left no evidence at the scene.
Now to describe Dr. Sherlock's bedside manner, getting a complete coherent sentence from Dr. Sherlock was very difficult, my case was obviously flummoxing him and he was struggling for an answer. He would make a statement similar to this "er, well uhm, yeah, hmmm, I don't see anything, er, well, hmmm" and so on and so forth.
Please don't take this the wrong way, I'm not second-guessing his reasoning, at all, I understand and I applaud the fact that he wanted to try everything and anything to find out what was making me sick, I am no web M.D. expert that tries to tell doctors what is wrong with me, so this is in no way a criticism of Dr. Sherlock and his attempts to figure out what was going on with me.
BUT, had he listened to me and Alice he could've saved two days and some expensive and unnecessary testing, and more importantly a painful process that I had to go through later that day.
We tried in vain to explain to Dr. Sherlock that I had experienced the true stroke while I was in the first MRI given, and that there was a great chance that the initial scan had occurred just as the stroke was happening or just prior, so that the scan showed no damage, because at the time of the scan there was none. Had Dr. Sherlock given me an MRI on Monday as we had requested, he would've seen the damage and the cause of the stroke, which was not evident on the first MRI.
So, Dr. Sherlock had informed us to our incredulity that I had not had a stroke, now call me old-fashioned again, but there I was lying in bed, half of me not working, and slurring like Harry Carey after a few beverages, though I knew instinctively what had happened to me although I could not prove it definitively.
Therefore Dr. Sherlock determined it was time for me to have some more tests, oh happy days, I couldn't wait to be moved around on carts again and have my catheter tugged on by random strangers.
Radiology sends up a cart and wheels me on down for another couple of CAT scans of my head and neck and also some chest, back and neck x-rays. All of which came back showing nothing.
Funny thing CAT scans, they are awesome and very precise and show great amounts of detail, however, they are often not detailed enough without using contrast to find small or imperceptible damage. They are great for finding bleeds and large detail, but my pesky damage was eluding the cat scans once again. And of course the x-rays were negative.
And here I go again, wheeled back up into my room, everybody and their brother having a tug at my catheter tube, and I am rolled back into my bed.
So, my nystagmus is going full bore, my head is thumping, and the old feller is getting pretty sick of having his catheter tube used as a bungy cord. Thank God for Dilaudid... obviously by this point I was having a rough go of things, so they gave me some medication to help with the dizziness and my headache, the problem with Dilaudid is that it's very strong and it knocked me right out, so the majority of Monday daytime was somewhat of a blur from here on out.
Late afternoon comes around and Dr. Sherlock appears in my room, and sure enough nothing was found on the CAT scans or x-ray so sniffer of the yard decides that he has to investigate other paths to find out what's wrong with me. Again I will caveat that the doctor was trying to find or think of anything that could be wrong with me to save my life, so I have no complaints about that, what I do have a minor issue with, is that once again he would not listen to my wife or myself with our suggestion of retrying an MRI based on the fact that I had had the stroke in the MRI.
Dr. Sherlock decides that or thinks that, I might have Spinal Meningitis, or some other infection or problem with my spinal cord hence the paralyzing. The problem is that to find out if you do have an issue with your spinal cord they have to do a wonderful procedure known as a Lumbar Puncture, or otherwise known as a spinal tap. "There's a fine line between stupid and clever..." sorry couldn't resist a spinal tap reference...
Anyhoo... Dr. Sherlock informs me that the best way to have a lumbar puncture is to have it done in radiology because they can precisely pinpoint where the needle needs to go and thus get it right the first time with supreme accuracy.
However, once again in true Tarrant fashion, Mr. Murphy raised his bloody head and of course radiology was too busy to do it, so Dr. Sherlock was going to have to do it bedside, in other words going in blind. Again in Dr. Sherlock's defense as a neurologist this wasn't his first rodeo so he assured me that it would be as close as if I had the alternative. I did bleat and whine significantly about the fact of the pain, and that I was quite concerned about having THIS inserted into my spine :
I actually surprised myself and took the needle in my spine like a champ ( I was expecting to scream like a baby) and while it hurt significantly, it wasn't unbearable, it was more uncomfortable I would say than truly painful, and thankfully the pain medication I was on from earlier also took away some of the sting of the spinal tap. The after effects however not so much, and I will be going into that in a future post.
So to recap my Monday, I had been in and out of bed more times than Wilt Chamberlain, I had been prodded, poked, scanned, injected and everybody and his brother had somehow managed to snag and pull on my catheter tube all day.
Tell me why I don't like Mondays.
to be continued.
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