Chapter 3: Journey Home... Interrupted

We started out from Salt Lake City, bright and early, before breakfast, not even waking the family if we could help it. Our eldest nephew was up, and willingly carried our stuff up from the basement and out to the car. Our plan was home before bedtime, grabbing a hamburger or such on the way as needed. We thought it feasible, having done it once before. But our plans hadn't been implemented too well thus far in the vacation.

Did we foresee even a hint of trouble? Of course not!

Our first stop, shortly before we ran out of Salt Lack City suburbs and hit actual open spaces, was breakfast sandwiches at the golden arches. Plus the usual potty stop. Once again, by the time I returned to the car, I was a little short of breath.

Oh well.

Further down the road, after a lunchtime and pit stop, I was again short of breath, this time taking five or so to really get back to normal. Feeling secure, finally, I drove off again. Steve and I were deep in conversation about ten minutes later, when suddenly I got light-headed, that feeling you get just before you start to black out and faint. Luckily there was no traffic preventing me from hitting the right lane and then the wide-enough shoulder as quickly as was safe.

When I explained what was going on, Steve and I both agreed he was going to drive. His back had been seriously bothering him and he'd taken a morning pain pill. The legal time hadn't elapsed, but his "goofy" stage was over. I trusted his driving way more than mine, and we were our two choices. I opened my door and bent over for a bit until I felt capable of walking around the car to switch places. Once in the passenger seat, I stayed bent over with the door open for a while longer before feeling ready for Steve to take off. Note that there was no shortness of breath at the time of the light - headedness.

We passed an exit for a small town with a freeway sign, "No Services". And another. And another. By then I asked Steve when we finally hit a town big enough to have the blue sign with the big H on it, to exit and take me to their ER. Our next town was St. George, UT, big enough for 6 exits and a hospital. Steve drove right up to the Emergency entrance valet parking station, ran inside for help, and ran out again with staff pushing a wheelchair for me. At that moment I was seriously more concerned for his knees than I was for myself. I had never seen him move so fast.

He had said the magic words: breathing problems and he believed it was altitude sickness. We were whisked to the check-in station for about a half minute triage, then in back to a bed in the ER. They needed my ID. I tried to give them my insurance cards too, but they weren't interested until later.

In a way, I found that very reassuring: patient before payment. Had I thought a little deeper, I would have worried just how sick they thought I might be.

While they were hooking me up to O2 and cardiac monitors, a range of questions was asked. Listening to my lungs they detected rales, or crackling sounds. I've heard them myself on occasion, usually when I'm just nodding off, the house is dead silent, and my breathing is slow and an exhale empties the last bit of air. They've been interesting, not alarming, usually happening at the very tail end of a cold. The most interesting thing about them this day was the ER staff called them "rahls" while the nurses upstairs called them "rails". I've heard the first pronunciation on TV, never the other. Either way, the crackling meant wet lungs.

Since I wasn't coughing, had heard rales before, was now comfortably breathing due to lack of movement, and wasn't feeling like I might pass out, I was starting to think I'd been crying "wolf", except for one thing. The blood pressure registered 210 over ... well, I didn't really hear any other numbers after that because who the hell cares when that's your starting number? I can't even tell you if I was given a pill or a shot to start trying to bring those numbers down. My brain just sort of stuck right there.

When a CAT scan, both with and without dye, showed an "opacity" in the lower corner of an upper lobe of my lung, they did a couple more tests, and came with "maybe" news. Maybe it wasn't cancer, not looking like that usually does. Maybe it wasn't an embolus, because somehow a bi-pap machine was supposed to definitely rule that out while it was simply making me miserable, being totally incapable of breathing at my speed. Try it sometime. Just as the incoming pressure gets you inhaling and you're ready to continue, the air shuts off. It takes a second for your diaphram to reverse course, and before you can comfortably finish exhaling, it's trying another burst of pressurized air in. When I would resist that, it would stop for a second before sending another burst, which I still wasn't ready for, so when my body started to inhale there was again nothing coming through the mask.

Breathing was work!

The doc who set it up even suggested I might try napping while I was hooked up! HA!

When I complained that the machine breathed much faster than I did, he fiddled with some controls but never got it to slow down. I was informed by other medical staff that I had the right to refuse to use the machine any more, which right I immediately exercised. Anyway, something in that misery indicated to them there was no embolus. Since the heart was in normal sinus rhythm the whole time, and the labs came back with "no heart attack", they tentatively diagnosed pneumonia and admitted me, ordering antibiotics, and blood thinners since I was going to be bed-ridden.

By the time I was given a room, hooked up to everything, drained of everything they wanted, tested six ways from Sunday, Steve had returned from their wonderful cafeteria raving about their wonderful grilled salmon steak and its sauce, making me hungry. Unfortunately, the clock said it was well after when any other hospital's food service had shut down, but I inquired anyway. Some hospitals kept pudding cups or something similar.

Let me just say, if you have a choice of where you want to get stuck in a hospital, go for St. George, UT. I was brought in a laminated tri-fold menu, and their room service could bring me whatever and as much as I wanted any time, except limited hours for breakfast dishes. Since I'd been drooling over Steve's salmon, I ordered my own. Everything was marked on the menu with both calories and carbs, so I could, that first night, have my salmon, delightful perfectly steamed broccoli, cottage cheese, and the most wonderful chocolate cake/pudding/whipped cream concoction.

Heaven!

The next morning I was NPO, because the staff cardiologist wanted to see my echo (think cardiac ultrasound, and I told the guy doing it that if he found a fetus in one of those chambers I'd be royally pissed!) before deciding if he wanted to do "another procedure", not explained until later as an angioplasty or angio-whatever, i.e. surgery. The echo showed no cause for one, so I got to order lunch. Mmmm. And supper. Mmmmm. And breakfast. Mmmm.

I kept hearing reports of what wasn't wrong with me. No heart irregularities, no blood clots, no fever, white cell count, or coughing to indicate pneumonia, etc., etc. I was to continue the course of antibiotics because you just do after you have started. They were assured that I peed enough, and finally pulled out the catch cup so I could be totally on my own in there. My blood pressure came back down, so that extra medication was discontinued. I was moving around my room, even up and down the hall, without being hooked up to O2, so even with panting on the longer trek, since my blood oxygen didn't drop, there was, ultimately, nothing they could treat. The only lab result not back because it takes a few extra days was one for Valley Fever. They will let us know.

So go home, check in with your own docs. We can't figure out what to do for you.

Lest Steve get lost in all this, he got to stay two nights in Jubilee House, their equivalent of Ronald McDonald house, but for family of out-of-towners while they had to stay in the hospital. He loved it, having two comfy beds in a good sized room. The cost to him was a mere $25/night, and pulling the dirty linen off his bed after those two nights. I tried to get him extra food off my tray, since we couldn't order a second tray, but my carbs limit wasn't helpful. He ate either in the cafeteria while visiting me, or whatever from a local fast food or convenience joint.

With both his knees doing their usual to plague him, plus his back acting up, he was very appreciative of both their valet parking and the golf carts with which they chauffered him to his parked car or back and forth to Jubilee House. I was assigned a room at the other side of the hospital from emergency, fairly close to the front door, so that helped when he visited me.

They sent me home with a stack full of orders and prescriptions, plus a verbal prohibition against driving. So Steve drove. It meant he couldn't take the "good stuff" for pain, settling on 4 ibuprofin while we both kept our fingers crossed. It also meant he had to drive freeways through Las Vegas, and if you don't know how much he hates city driving, you haven't met Steve. I promised to navigate.

We spent an hour in backed up traffic before reaching Vegas for what we finally found out was three lanes squishing to one for the exit ramp, competing with cross traffic on that busy highway to make a couple turns to get onto the 6-mile-long frontage road before returning to the freeway. We did get a glimpse about the third mile along the frontage road of the rolled over semi and the four tow trucks that weren't seeming to have any success righting it. While in our back-up, a few motorcycles passed us on the shoulder, then a couple cars, until both in front of us and behind us there were semis pulled partly out on to the shoulder to keep any other greedy idiots from trying the same thing.

Thanks, guys. If we gotta suffer, everybody's gotta suffer!

Once we approached Hoover Dam, another pit stop did nothing to make me out of breath, so I offered to try driving for a bit. We switched, and made it a mile before I was again light headed and needed to pull over. Dang! I hadn't been light headed once yet this leg of the trip till I got behind the wheel, and Steve was starting to need a break. On the plus side, for a while the scenery I got to study instead of the road was breathtaking, like it had been at the start of the day's journey through the Virgin River canyon. There were distinct advantages to being in the passenger seat.

Once we'd hit Kingman, we stopped for a sit-down in a restaurant and a short nap in the shade of a sign. Then I tried driving again. This time I made it 30 miles before needing to turn the wheel back over to Steve. But the combined rests had refreshed him enough to finish the way home.

We were both too tired by then to do anything besides airing out the house of leftover noxious fumes after removing the no-pest strips and one found cockroach, bring a few bags in so we'd have PJs and pills. Electricity had to be turned on, fans blowing, and once the house was closed up again, the AC turned back on. There was agreement not to bother with filling prescriptions or stop to buy food until morning. We each had the last bits of an MRE to scavenge, and chairs to put our feet up and lean back in. No Wi-Fi yet, no TV, no gas. The fridge could start to chill some bottles of water, and be ready for filling on the morrow. We had shelter, comfort, water and food.

Other things got taken care of in the next days. We even heard there was an eclipse out there somewhere, though our safety glasses were tucked away somewhere. As far as we knew, it happened while I was in the post office, picking up our held mail and restarting delivery, evidenced by it seeming just a shade dimmer outside than usual. The TV coverage on PBS was great. After everything else, I guess that was OK.

We Were Home!