scottm

I'm certainly interested in hearing how the interview went. I own a company and one of my rules is we don't care if you have disabilities if you can do the job we'll make allowances.

I can now state with some authority that bleeding out is neither peaceful nor painless, contrary to what some people think.. The tale starts last Friday. The pool needed some chlorine tabs and a quick brushing, standard maintenance stuff. I put the chlorine in the dispenser and noticed I was more tired then I thought but carried on to brush the pool. I got about halfway done and was exhausted and my breathing was very heavy. Made it back into the house somehow, don't remember and collapsed onto the couch. I was fighting to breathe so hard I couldn't call to my wife for help. Yep, totally screwed... Somehow <insert deity of choice here> was smiling on me because my wife happened to be on the phone with our daughter-in-law who is a nurse practitioner and came out to ask me something. She saw my condition and started telling our DIL what my state was and was directed to take me immediately to the ER. ER triage routed me directly to a doctor, a blood draw and neuro exam to rule out another stroke. I'm pretty out of it but aware that I couldn't get my breath, they got the labs back and my hemoglobin was below the critical level, INR at 3.8 Took 2 units of blood before I could breath right again. From there I spent a week in the hospital while they searched for a bleed. Had to neutralize my coumadin to run a GI scope which found nothing, still awaiting the results of the camera pill. May have been blood oozing through the intestinal wall because it was so thin. No one has any idea why my INR went so high. The wife and I got alone great with the nurses (send the night shift a couple pizzas and they really take care of you). One nurse quietly informed us that the gastro doc and the hospitalist had a disagreement about my treatment. The hospitalist wanted me off the coumadin going forward, the gastro informed him that if I had another bleed they could fix that with another transfusion, but they couldn't fix another stroke. Starts the coumadin again. More tests and finally get discharged but not before the hospitalist fires a parting shot My INR is 2.8 which he says is way to high and orders vitamin K for me, which I take with my daily batch of pills...My cardiologist is livid and proceeds to savage that doctor. Now we are back to square one getting my INR stabilized and I get to spend at least a couple months having weekly blood draws.

That's awesome!

Nicely done Kay. I remember the volunteer survivor who came to see me and how much I appreciated it.

I've got some time to kill, I'll continue if no one minds... At this point,I'm documenting what I've been told happened with some 'snapshot' memories included. I'm told I was posting on Facebook that night to calm down family who were excited about the event. I've seen the posts but this will be part of my memory that is lost to me. Off to the OR, I'm told the nurses went ahhh when I said something to my wife about who owned my heart. I'm in a white room on my back, can't move but there are voices, something about a tube...Then the choking starts, a voice says he isn't cooperating, another says he isn't out yet...fade to black. Free advice, never get intubated when you're awake if you can avoid it. I won't be awake again for 3 days. The doctors tell my wife to be prepared, I had a stroke and it looks bad. A couple observations about being in a coma 1) Yes you can dream. They can be very vivid and scary as your mind tries to process what happened. Couple that with - 2) yes, you can hear sounds in your environment on some level. Your brain will attempt to integrate these into your dreams. I'm told by my wife that at one point the easy listening music in my ICU room switched to harps, I remember the harps and something about death in my dreams. My wife had words with the staff about the harps I'm told. She suggested AC/DC if they wanted me to wake up. LOL I'm in a white room again, a woman's face appears and tells me to be calm, they'll remove the respirator soon. Respirator? where am I? must be a hospital...what happened?Was I in a sudden car accident?why can't I remember? My wife appears and tells me to relax, she talks to me and calms me down. The nurse returns and removes the breathing tube. Now I can ask what happened in barely a whisper. My wife explains there were complications during the surgery. I had surgery? Yes and she explains that I had a stroke during my bypass when some plaque broke loose and that I've been in a coma for 3 days. A stroke? I can move my left arm and leg a little but that's it. Can't feel my right side at all. We'll have this discussion several times as every time I sleep the recent memories get wiped. The kids come in for a bit and visit. The only question I can answer is my name. My brain is all foggy, I'll discover in a couple weeks that this a part of my new normal. The fog is dense at times and all I have over the next week are snapshots in my memory and my dreams center around my inability to move. I remember the fall, they put me in a chair with a bunch of pillows, I fell out and landed on my face on the tile floor. Bad juju for the nurses. My wife hasn't left my side except to eat for days, she left to go talk with her therapist. The nurses call her to report the fall, the therapist gets to see my wife's wrath in action. Timing is everything. In a week they'll transfer me to an acute rehab hospital. Until then I have babysitters and strange distorted memories. Just glimpses and some are bizarre like I get moved and for some reason wake up in a foreign hospital. Friends come and go, some come often and are much appreciated. My wife stays all day and into the nights. One of our best friends is a doctor, a psychiatrist to be exact. She'll come with my wife often. In fact, she spent the first night of this adventure at our house with my wife. She'll be the one that helps us understand what is happening while learning first hand what happens to us. It finally hits home how messed up I am when they try to get me upright on my feet and I see my wifes and our doctor friend faces. They both look scared. They get me somewhat stabilized and ship me off to rehab between Afib events.

All good tales start at the beginning, who wants to walk into the middle. They tell me that this is good therapy, I need to face my demons, we'll see. The date was 14 Oct 2014, a day like any other. Sunny and warm (this is Florida after all) and I had an appointment with the dentist. That went as expected and he gave me a script for amoxicillian, I've taken that many times and it always worked well. So, I returned home from the drug store and went into my home office to do some work. Cleared out a bunch of emails and then remembered the antibiotic. I took one and went back to work. It took about 5 minutes and I was feeling flushed, then the itching all over at about 10 minutes. Now hives a few minutes later. Started thinking I must be having a minor reaction so took a couple Benedryl. (sp) About 5 minutes later I realize it is getting difficult to breath. My wife was home so I calmly walked to her den asked her to call 911 and tell them I was going into anaphylactic shock. It went downhill very quickly after that. I started fighting for air, it is terrifying when you can't breathe. Where are the paramedics? I decide I'm probably going to die laying on the bed, but not without a fight. The paramedics arrived and declared I was having a heart attack, they put the monitors on, I remember one saying my pulse was 200 but they couldn't get a blood pressure. They won't listen and tell my wife to calm down, I'm not in anaphlactic shock. At this point I black out,i can't breathe at all. My wife tells me they got me to the ambulance and realized my airway was shutdown, The breathing failure had caused my heart to run away trying to compensate and had caused my heart to go into Afib. Start injecting Benedryl...Gee I was in full blown anaphylactic shock, who knew. Unfortunately my heart stays in Afib as my my airway comes back. But Afib is throwing clots now.Arrive at the ER and off to the cath lab. They remove 1 clot and schedule me for a triple bypass the next day. Little did we realize that both my wifes and my life were about to go sideways.