We just got back from an appointment with the cardiologist. It's been a month since the last one. Bill's INR is getting regular, so he has been on the same coumadin regimen for a few weeks now. Today his blood pressure was way too low, though, so doc took him off the diltiazem. I am glad. I was never comfortable with him taking that pill. They started giving it to him on the Monday he was in the hospital. All weekend, the hospitalist talked with us very clearly about his a-fib and blood pressure. The former had probably been going on for years and was unlikely to change now, he said, and although his BP was high when he came in, that's normal during a stroke and that's how they want it. He kept watching it all weekend and declared it "beautiful" on his last visit, which was on a Sunday. The next day there was a new hospitalist and suddenly there was some issue with the a-fib, his heart rate, and the blood pressure. The cardiologist was called in. The first one was OK, but I didn't care for him much in terms of his ability to be clear with his answers and recommendations. He is the one who decided to start Bill on the diltiazem. He had a dose in the evening and then another one in the middle of the night. An hour after the second one, he felt funny. He mentioned this to the nurse, who didn't seem concerned. Bill saw the current cardiologist on his last day in the hospital and he agreed with his colleague about the medication, but this guy was so much better about explaining and answering questions clearly that we stayed with him for the follow-up care.
So Bill had been taking his diltiazem in the morning and almost every day he had the same funny feeling a couple of hours afterward. He says he finds it difficult to explain, but it is unpleasant. We tried making sure he takes it after he eats and that hasn't really worked. Because of the way it all played out, I was apprehensive about this pill from the start. I understand what it is for, but no one really could explain to me why they thought it was necessary for him to take it when the first doctor did not feel he needed it. So today, the BP is too low and he is off the pill. He does not have to go back to see the cardiologist for 3 months.
Poor Bill--he was so tired as we were walking the 1.5 miles to the hospital. He is tired a lot--not sleepy, but fatigued. I told him it was probably a combination of things--he is still recovering from the stroke, even though it was small; his heart rate is slower than it used to be and his blood pressure was lower, since two of the meds he was on lower the BP. I said, "Your body probably has to get used to these changes." Who knew that his BP was far too low? No wonder he was exhausted! We stopped a couple of times on the way home and now we can wait for the drug to leave his system and see if he is less fatigued as a result.
Showing posts with label stroke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stroke. Show all posts
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
Almost Usual!
Today we went back to the hospital so Bill could have his blood test and see the occupational therapist. I walked both ways, he took the bus in and walked home. His stamina was much better today. The OT said she thinks she will probably only see him once more. She came out to talk to me as I was sitting there tatting and waiting--she wanted to ask me how I thought he was doing. She said she thought he was doing really well and I said I agreed with that. She seemed particularly impressed with the progress in his hand. She asked me if I thought things were getting back to normal and I had to say that I did think that. He goes back to work Wednesday.
We had a lovely quiet weekend and went nowhere. I am by nature a homebody. I can spend days happily doing things at home. It was nice to do that again. I did not take off my mohair slippers and alpaca socks :-)
I also watched all 6 hours worth of lectures I had from the library called Understanding the Brain. It is one of those "Great Courses" DVD sets--I used to get ads for them in the mail all the time. It was the first set of 3 and I put set 2 on hold this morning. I started watching on Saturday night and I was just fascinated, so watched 3 hours then and 3 hours last night. The prof was from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, so I had my doubts about how useful it would be for someone with very little science background--I am not a hard scientist at all--give me social science any day--and the extent of my brain background is my study of human evolution, since pysical anthropology is a subfield I had to have some background in to get my degrees. I needn't have worried--she did a great job of explaining things clearly. I learned quite a bit. Somewhere in set two is a lecture about the brain and language, which I am also quite looking forward to, being so interested in sociolinguistics and communication. Of course, since I am me, I had to look up "Great Courses" in the keyword section of the catalog search on the library website. I resisted the urge to request several of them, altough I probably will sometime in the future. But I could not resist a couple of them, so besides the brain one, I will soon be getting one on the archaeology of prehistorical spirituality/religion and one on Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalists. These are subjects I know something about, but I think they will still be interesting and contain information and ideas that are new to me.
So we are walking back toward normal. I think that the almost daily walks we have been taking have helped Bill's progress along and certainly he feels better when he gets out to walk. He left the hospital 2 weeks ago tomorrow--feels like a lifetime ago that all this started!
We had a lovely quiet weekend and went nowhere. I am by nature a homebody. I can spend days happily doing things at home. It was nice to do that again. I did not take off my mohair slippers and alpaca socks :-)
I also watched all 6 hours worth of lectures I had from the library called Understanding the Brain. It is one of those "Great Courses" DVD sets--I used to get ads for them in the mail all the time. It was the first set of 3 and I put set 2 on hold this morning. I started watching on Saturday night and I was just fascinated, so watched 3 hours then and 3 hours last night. The prof was from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, so I had my doubts about how useful it would be for someone with very little science background--I am not a hard scientist at all--give me social science any day--and the extent of my brain background is my study of human evolution, since pysical anthropology is a subfield I had to have some background in to get my degrees. I needn't have worried--she did a great job of explaining things clearly. I learned quite a bit. Somewhere in set two is a lecture about the brain and language, which I am also quite looking forward to, being so interested in sociolinguistics and communication. Of course, since I am me, I had to look up "Great Courses" in the keyword section of the catalog search on the library website. I resisted the urge to request several of them, altough I probably will sometime in the future. But I could not resist a couple of them, so besides the brain one, I will soon be getting one on the archaeology of prehistorical spirituality/religion and one on Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalists. These are subjects I know something about, but I think they will still be interesting and contain information and ideas that are new to me.
So we are walking back toward normal. I think that the almost daily walks we have been taking have helped Bill's progress along and certainly he feels better when he gets out to walk. He left the hospital 2 weeks ago tomorrow--feels like a lifetime ago that all this started!
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Day 10 Post-Stroke
Here we are 10 days later. Bill has been home from the hospital for 5 days. We continue to be grateful that things were not more serious. Things steadily improve each day. Bill gets tired easily and when that happens, he has a moment where it seems like it is hard for him to get the words out--not that they aren't understandable and not that he cannot find the words, just that the act of speech seems tiring. He then rests for a few minutes and is fine. We have been going out for walks each day. The library is a great destination because if he gets tired by the time we get there, we can go in and sit. Bill reads a newspaper and I look at a magazine. The other day I left him there and went grocery shopping. I shoved about 25 pounds of food in my large backpack, went back to the library to tell him I was done, and off we went home. Happily, the library and post office are right across the street from one another and the grocery store is a block away. All of these things are close to home. On Friday morning, Heather and I set out on foot with the dirty laundry--once again I had my large backpack stuffed and Heather had her things in a tote bag. We put them in the washing machine and I crocheted for the half hour it took for the wash to be completed. Then wet clothes got stuffed back into the backpack and hauled home to be hung on our drying rack. I thought I was missing an alpaca sock, but discovered that it had never made it to the laundromat at all--it fell under the chair as I was moving the dirty clothes from the laundry back to the backpack. I will either handwash it or put it in the next load.
One of the interesting things about this whole experience now is that it requires both Bill and I to work on things that are hard for us. For him, learning when to stop and rest is important. He has a tendency to just keep going, even when he is tired. He can't do that now. I tend to want to jump in and fix things for people and I have to step back from that impulse now. Bill does not need me to do everything for him--he needs to do it himself. If I do everything it will actually hinder his progress. So I have to learn to stand back and let him proceed. Once in a while, things get annoying or too many things happen at once and he gets tired. So I am getting practice with observing, understanding when I do need to help, and only then offering assistance.
We each have an opportunity to work on improving skills!
Both of us are so grateful for the support we have received from people. Our neighbor has been great--giving rides to and from the hopsital and offering other assistance. A friend and her husband brought over supper the first day he was home. People have gathered information, shared expertise, and offered words of encouragement and support. It has all been so helpful and appreciated!
One of the interesting things about this whole experience now is that it requires both Bill and I to work on things that are hard for us. For him, learning when to stop and rest is important. He has a tendency to just keep going, even when he is tired. He can't do that now. I tend to want to jump in and fix things for people and I have to step back from that impulse now. Bill does not need me to do everything for him--he needs to do it himself. If I do everything it will actually hinder his progress. So I have to learn to stand back and let him proceed. Once in a while, things get annoying or too many things happen at once and he gets tired. So I am getting practice with observing, understanding when I do need to help, and only then offering assistance.
We each have an opportunity to work on improving skills!
Both of us are so grateful for the support we have received from people. Our neighbor has been great--giving rides to and from the hopsital and offering other assistance. A friend and her husband brought over supper the first day he was home. People have gathered information, shared expertise, and offered words of encouragement and support. It has all been so helpful and appreciated!
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
You Never Know
On Friday, Bill came home from work in the midst of a stroke. I called 911, we hopped in the ambulance and went to the hospital. He was admitted, spent a night in ICU for observation, 3 nights in a regular room, and came home yesterday. His stroke was small and the effects relatively minimal. Nonetheless, he will now be on medication for the rest of his life--blood thinners and a heart medicine that treats his atrial fibrillation. Not the way we'd planned to spend the weekend, but since things could have been astonishingly worse, we choose to be grateful that things are as mild as they are.
As we began this journey into the medical system, I sort of shut out all extraneous stuff and put all my attention on understanding what was happening, listening and asking questions of medical personnel, and trying to maintain my composure so I could make good decisions. Once it was clear that this was not a life threatening event, the focus changed to more information gathering so that we would know what to do as we proceeded.
Now that he is home and the crisis is past, I have started to analyze more. This is typically me and I felt that I had entered a new phase of this experience the other day in the hospital when I began doing an analysis of the communication that was going on from the perspective of gender. For me, that is a normal thing to do. In more general terms, though, I am thinking about people who find themselves in the hospital and may not have someone who can be there all the time with them when they talk to all of the medical personnel who come in and out of their room. Monday was a particularly tiring day. There was the usual stuff that the nurses and CNAs did every day. Then the hospitalist came in--a different one because it was a new week. He was interpreting things differently than the previous one, so the information he was giving us was different. Then there was the occupational therapist, someone from patient services, a different physical therapist, and a speech therapist. Later in the day, a neurologist and a cardiologist came in separately and then together. These people were not finished until after 6 p.m. Bill had been awakened at 5:30 a.m. for a blood test. That is a long day for anyone, let alone someone who is sick in some way. Both of us are smart, well-educated people (and several of these medical people asked about education level). But one of us had had a brain trauma and was exhausted. If there had been no one else there, how on earth would he have been able to understand what they were telling him? How could he evaluate it? I realized at some point that I was witnessing the intangible benefits of my education and life history. I have always had really excellent verbal/reading skills and that helped me a great deal in terms of understanding what was being said and interpreting it. I have taught many different kinds of students and interviewed many different kinds of people, so I know how to keep asking the same question in a different way if I have to until I get the information I need--and to ask someone else, if necessary. My anthropological research has sharpened my natural skills of observation and analysis and my ability to engage in cross cultural communication (and this was a kind of cross-cultural communication). Because I have always been interested in social institutions, I knew how to quickly and pretty unconsciously evaluate the system that is in place and the information that was coming from the institution. I have a good memory, so I could retain most of the important information that I was digesting. In other words, a great many things came together to allow me to effectively understand what was being said, when people were contradicting each other and themselves, and to generally get a clear picture of what was going on. But what about people who have a different skill set, or not as much education, or no one there to take over when they get tired? It must be incredibly difficult. I cannot imagine being ill and trying to make sense of everything that is swirling around you. I was noticing an incredible amount of repitition, both in terms of the same person saying the same thing and different people saying the same thing. I guess part of that is so that the patient will hear it many times at many different times of the day and it will be more likely to stick!
It's funny, this life thing. You never know what's going to happen. You never know what skills you have that will come in handy in a completely unexpected way. You never know how your strengths will rise up and maintain you in a crisis. You never know what's gonna come in handy. You just never know.
As we began this journey into the medical system, I sort of shut out all extraneous stuff and put all my attention on understanding what was happening, listening and asking questions of medical personnel, and trying to maintain my composure so I could make good decisions. Once it was clear that this was not a life threatening event, the focus changed to more information gathering so that we would know what to do as we proceeded.
Now that he is home and the crisis is past, I have started to analyze more. This is typically me and I felt that I had entered a new phase of this experience the other day in the hospital when I began doing an analysis of the communication that was going on from the perspective of gender. For me, that is a normal thing to do. In more general terms, though, I am thinking about people who find themselves in the hospital and may not have someone who can be there all the time with them when they talk to all of the medical personnel who come in and out of their room. Monday was a particularly tiring day. There was the usual stuff that the nurses and CNAs did every day. Then the hospitalist came in--a different one because it was a new week. He was interpreting things differently than the previous one, so the information he was giving us was different. Then there was the occupational therapist, someone from patient services, a different physical therapist, and a speech therapist. Later in the day, a neurologist and a cardiologist came in separately and then together. These people were not finished until after 6 p.m. Bill had been awakened at 5:30 a.m. for a blood test. That is a long day for anyone, let alone someone who is sick in some way. Both of us are smart, well-educated people (and several of these medical people asked about education level). But one of us had had a brain trauma and was exhausted. If there had been no one else there, how on earth would he have been able to understand what they were telling him? How could he evaluate it? I realized at some point that I was witnessing the intangible benefits of my education and life history. I have always had really excellent verbal/reading skills and that helped me a great deal in terms of understanding what was being said and interpreting it. I have taught many different kinds of students and interviewed many different kinds of people, so I know how to keep asking the same question in a different way if I have to until I get the information I need--and to ask someone else, if necessary. My anthropological research has sharpened my natural skills of observation and analysis and my ability to engage in cross cultural communication (and this was a kind of cross-cultural communication). Because I have always been interested in social institutions, I knew how to quickly and pretty unconsciously evaluate the system that is in place and the information that was coming from the institution. I have a good memory, so I could retain most of the important information that I was digesting. In other words, a great many things came together to allow me to effectively understand what was being said, when people were contradicting each other and themselves, and to generally get a clear picture of what was going on. But what about people who have a different skill set, or not as much education, or no one there to take over when they get tired? It must be incredibly difficult. I cannot imagine being ill and trying to make sense of everything that is swirling around you. I was noticing an incredible amount of repitition, both in terms of the same person saying the same thing and different people saying the same thing. I guess part of that is so that the patient will hear it many times at many different times of the day and it will be more likely to stick!
It's funny, this life thing. You never know what's going to happen. You never know what skills you have that will come in handy in a completely unexpected way. You never know how your strengths will rise up and maintain you in a crisis. You never know what's gonna come in handy. You just never know.
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