Monday, December 13, 2010

Armed and Ready

Hello my friends!  I keep trying new formats on the blog here, to see what works and what doesn't.  I wish I knew what I was doing.

It's the middle of the night. I am up again. So I figured I would stay up and look for my funny bone. Where has it gone? I used to wake up, poking fun at the day.

I'm so cold, maybe I should turn the heat up. Good grief. I just checked the thermometer. It's 42F degrees outside and 55F degrees inside the motorhome. No wonder I am cold.




When I first came to America, last winter, my teeth would chatter whenever the temperature dropped below 70F.  I've learned to wear lots of clothes instead of running around in my Caribbean sarongs.


I think I am getting better. Brrr... But my bed was cozy and warm. Just that I couldn't sleep. My mind is too busy for sleep, yet I have bags under my eyes.

I'd like to pack those bags up and deliver them to the airline to lose.

Even though my job is running out 5 months early (county permit problem) I continue to work 7 days a week, even when I was flying pie on pain hills.
 I stopped taking the pain pills, I decided to deal with the pain again. Maybe a foolish thought. I worry they are destroying my kidneys and liver.


These meds have made me unbalanced me thinks. Like so many, I used to take prescribed pills with never a second thought. But when I got out out of the hospital last fall, (or was it summer?) with a mountain of prescriptions after being told I would need them all for the rest of my very short life, I decided to use the power of the Internet.

 
I did tons of research on the prescriptions handed me. The more I read the more I wanted far, far away from the drugs.


Did the doctors even read up on these prescriptions and what they did to the human body? I have problematic liver and kidneys from past chemotherapy that went awry. Yet I was being handed drugs that caused further liver and kidney damage.It sure didn't make sense to me. The way I understand it, one needs liver and kidney(s) to function. Sure I remember the uproar over a rock star who paid for a new liver transplant, after destroying his with self drug abuse.


But it's not considered drug abuse when the doctors prescribe you drugs to destroy your body. Why is there such a difference, if you destroy it with drugs, with or without the sanctity of prescriptions?  I don't have a drug problem, but I think the doctors want me too! 

When I was a young teenager, I played with drugs, but I had a serious death wish.  I thought I had succeeded, but I woke up one day. My mother was standing over me. I told her I was late for school. She informed me it was Saturday afternoon and I  had been in a coma since the previous Sunday. So much for the death wish!  I quit all drugs. Now, decades later,  I'm very obviously still alive.  I've managed to outlive my mother by many years. How I miss her so much.  She visits me in my dreams.  I'm not sure she knows I am there, but she seems immensely happy. Some days, while wide awake,  I hear her talking quite clearly to me, as if she is very much alive.


But I'm not a rock star, so I  can't pay for a transplant, I have to take care of all my remaining original parts. Which by now, I am missing a few parts, but I keep puttering along, like an old car that makes a lot of noise, but just won't die.


I've been fighting to get my weight back down, yet I was being prescribed drugs that promoted weight gain. The more I studied, the more irate I became. I had normal blood pressure, but I was prescribed drugs that reduced my blood pressure.


Indeed in the hospital, I was often told my blood pressure was too low on some days. So why was I prescribed drugs that lowered it even further? To put me in another coma?

Why was I being prescribed drugs to make me sicker instead of better?

I left the hospital without the doctors initial consent, they wanted me to stay longer, but no one was treating my arm. I had hollered about my arm for weeks as it steadily got worse, and nothing was being done about it. Sure I had a mountain of other pressing health issues, but watching my arm deteriorate day after day, was alarming. When I woke up in the emergency room, the first day at the hospital, my arm was fine. But over the next few weeks, it took on a new frightening life form.
 Weeks later, once the doctors realized I was really leaving the hospital, I had to ask three, four, five times, about treatment for my arm.


It took another two months for most for my arm to get back to normal. I am just so glad it didn't fall off.  The scarring is minimal now,  it functions pretty nicely. I still don't know what happened to my arm, to make it deteriorate. The blogs I typed while hospitalized were largely done with one hand. Small wonder they are full of typos. I have no excuse for my bad typing now, I'm just a bad typer I guess.


I was constantly complaining about this bloody I.V. situation.  My complaints were largely ignored.

My arm swelled up so fast, my hospital bracelet broke off, leaving marks.  I continued to complain about my arm, but I was told to quit worrying about it.

The day I left the hospital, I finally received some ointment for the arm.


My mind is all over the place today, tonight? Is it 4am in the night or 4am in the morning?  It was 4am when I woke up, now it's almost 8am. Where did the time go?  It's now 40F degrees outside and 65F inside. The sun came up and the outside temperature dropped. Very odd.

My arm is fine, but my feet are cold. Puppy just got up, shivered, then climbed back into his cozy bed. It is so tempting to go join him. But I have so much to do today, is there really time for sleep?  My body doesn't want to sleep at night and by day I just want to work making everything better.

A Big Thank You To The Angels Watching Over Me
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2 comments:

  1. What a horrible looking arm. What kind of hospital were you in? I can't believe they didn't treat you for that. Was it mersa?

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  2. I was in Peebles Hospital on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. The staff was pretty nice, but so many things were just constantly overlooked. Sometimes I had to beg for clean sheets after days of sweating in the old sheets and hide my pillows so they wouldn't take them. They took my light weight blanket away and I never got it back, no matter how much I begged. The wall behind my bed had blood splatters that desperately needed to be cleaned or a paint job to hide them. Often they ran out of toilet paper or paper towels or both. My friends had to drop off yogurt for me, because the kitchen never had any, I needed the yogurt because the IV's were tearing up my stomach. The hospital blog is in July and August 2009. See archives. Some of it is pretty funny because I was on so many drugs and IV's. They ran out of IV's for me, so I was switched to pills, then those ran out and they asked me to call a friend to go buy more at a drug store. I had to be careful taking pictures, as the staff would yell at me not to take any pictures, but I did whenever I thought nobody was looking. They saved my life and I did get out alive. The recovery has been a slow uphill battle, but I am still alive to day to alternately rejoice (and whine.)

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