Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Wow! What a day.

Monday started out all normal, like Monday's should be. I went to work, organized my day, got ready for staff meeting ... 8:23 am I got a call from my husband telling me that he was on his way to the Emergency Room but he didn't have time to talk. I told him I was going to staff meeting and he could call me back in half hour, but he could call anytime if it was an emergency. I didn't really think much of it because he's accident prone and this call isn't really new to me, but when I asked what he did this time he just told me that he didn't DO anything and that he'd have to call me back.
I was a little exasperated but thought whatever he'll just call me back. Never-the-less I had my phone in hand during the meeting just in case it wasn't just the usual accident. 9:18 am I'm back from my meeting shuffling papers on my desk when I get a second call from him saying that he needed me right now and I needed to come to the hospital.... That was unusual so I packed up my desk cried for my supervisor and took off for LDS Hospital where he said he was at. After the frustrating parking game that I always play at that hospital, I finally found him around 9:45 am, all sickly and pale in exam room 6 covered in wires with an oxygen tube.  
Back to 6:30 am getting out of the car he had had the strange pressure headache that he'd been getting periodically over the last few months.. He yawned and relieved the pressure and went about his business as usual. Not too far into the morning he was sitting in the morning meeting suddenly lost all feeling in the left side of his body. Head to toe. His tongue went numb, he was missing bits of his vision and hearing. He waited until the meeting was over and grabbed his Lead-man and was taken to the nurses station where they checked his blood sugar and looked him over.
There was nothing they could do for him so they called him an ambulance. He was taken to the hospital by ambulance SW1 and they did a CAT scan before I ever got there. So what was it?? a stroke? an aneurism? a tumor? nothing showed up on the CAT scan so they had to do a Spinal Tap - Just a side note, in case you didn't know, John is TERRIFIED of needles - at this point he had had blood taken and sugar levels taken several times all involving needles. So the Spinal Tap was just a topper to the fun. The doctor in the ER gave him a lot of drugs to calm him down and to numb the pain of the Spinal Tap, but it seemed like it didn't really kick in until she was already done.
THANKFULLY, there was no blood in the Spinal Tap so there were no small aneurisms that may have evaded the CAT ... but there was a high white blood cell count and some puss cells in his spinal fluid - - leading the doctors to say it's Meningitis so John was admitted to the hospital for 24 hours of antibiotics. They sent us up to the 8th floor where we were basically quarantined for like 4 hours until another doctor came in and said that it wasn't meningitis after all ... But they still didn't know what was wrong with him so they ordered a MRI and an MRA to check for anything that the CAT had missed again. 
Just as John was being wheeled away for his MRI the Neurologist decided to stop by and diagnosed him with Pseudomigraine with Lymphocytic Pleocytosis - what does that mean?? I have no idea really, but it wasn't going to kill him and that's what is important. All I could find when googling was some studies and no really good definitions. So basically it is just a False Migraine with Neurological Effects. Duh. That doesn't mean anything to me.
So we got to spend the night in the hospital. I slept on a squeaky cot at the end of John's bed and I still had to get up and go to work in the morning because I have NO TIME OFF. grrr. I hate that. 
The Neurologist came back and talked to John on Tuesday morning and let him know that the MRI and MRA were clear and they wanted to do a EKG on his head before releasing him from the hospital to make sure his brain waves were okay.

All in all it was a super frustrating couple of days toping off with the fact that I had to work late to make up for the time I had missed so there I sat at work on Tuesday with no shower and in the clothes I had put on Monday morning and I just wanted to go home and clean my hair. In the end this is all going to end up being really a expensive trip to the hospital with nothing to show for it ... all because there is nothing they can find wrong with my husband
Then I have to work over time again this week to make up for the time I missed. I hate the real world!

So whether there is some thing wrong with him that the doctors couldn't find or not we don't know. All I know is that his little sister had/has a brain tumor and now has cancer so I'm very relieved that they found nothing but a brain inside his head but I'm still terribly worried that it may happen again. I joke with him that with the insurance policy I have on him he's worth more dead then alive to me, but in the truth of it all I can't lose him that would just kill me I think. Now I'm just a worried wife who is frustrated, extremely tired and close to tears.
Life is so unfair sometimes.

1 comment:

Becky said...

I am happy he is doing o.k. I have spent many nights in the hospital with kids and my mom. A shower is always nice and I always want my Tolet paper from home. I hope it was just a passing thing.