Saturday get a drive-through COVID test
Don’t forget, we’re now into our second month of quarantine! In the three weeks since I was admitted to the hospital for my pacemaker installation, the rules for being allowed in the hospital have changed! Unlike three weeks ago, I must now get a COVID test before I show up at the hospital door. I think this is as simple as the fact that now they have tests, Much as they might have liked to require testing before, they couldn’t because the terrible Trump administration had not planned for tests and none were available.
So Saturday morning I strapped up, got in the van, unstrapped to drive and drove over to the Urgent Care clinic on Robb Drive (formerly Scolari’s for you locals), where you can drive around to the back of the building for a drive-by COVID test.
The test itself is unpleasant but short. They stick a swab WAY up each nostril, so that it feels like they’re poking a stick into your brain, but then it’s over. The line was short, only four cars, so I was outta there in 20 minutes. I dropped by Safeway while I was out and about, and by 1:30 I was back to my boring existence waiting for things to happen.
I exist in this odd purgatory for the rest of the weekend and Monday. I wear the boot most of the time, although it probably doesn’t make too much difference what I do since the tendon will be ripped up and sewn back together anyway. On Monday I make an epic shopping excursion to Trader Joe’s to stock up on all my favorites before I’m couch-bound for a couple of weeks.
Tuesday the hospital calls, and we do my admission procedures by phone. Since I did the whole admission ritual three weeks ago, they very reasonably decided they didn’t need new photos of my id and health cards and all my info. Small victories…
Wednesday – the surgery
Surgery is scheduled for 9 am. They want me there at 7 am. That’s pretty tough for me, but I figure I’ll be half asleep for everything, so maybe it’s a feature! Good ole Gerry, my neighbor from the other stairwell says he will drive me. He’s an early riser, so it’s not a big deal to him.
I was at the admissions desk by 7:20, and that seemed fine by everybody.
I’m a veteran of entering the hospital in COVID time now. I go straight to the side door, where a fellow appears and we start the process. Screening desk –> Security desk –> Front Receiving desk –> second floor Surgery Check-in! Turns out they DID want to copy by id and cards again.
Down the hall to get prepped. Today’s nurse prefers a back of the hand vein rather than a forearm vein as the last nurse did. Either way, I’m gonna get an IV attached to my arm for the duration, because that’s how hospitals work!.
The anesthesiologist pops in to ask if I want a couple of extra shots so my lower leg will be numb when I wake up. The shots sounded painful, and I don’t want a completely dead, non-responsive leg when I wake up, so I decline. He seemed a little disappointed, almost as if he gets a commission on them. :) I’m very glad I didn’t, because I really didn’t have much pain at all. They wheel me into the operation room, and events take their course. Busy people all around me, the anesthesiologist turns the knob on the intra-venous general anesthetic and I leave this planet for an hour of so.
Waking up from general anesthetic is always a little foggy. You don’t really remember going out, then you wake up somewhere else with some major thing having been done to your body. I awoke in some sort of discharge clinic. where they unhooked my IV (my favorite part of leaving!), and assemble a walker for me.
Now that it’s all behind me, I realize now that the little kneeling scooter would have been much easier to get around in, but they didn’t have any in stock that afternoon, which determines the course of my next two weeks. The walker it is.
My friend Laurie was today’s designated picker-upper. Ed didn’t want to have to leave work. The attendant wheel-chaired me down the hallway to the elevator and out the hospital door to the pick-up area and helped me fold myself into her car, with my new nemesis the walker folded on my lap.
We drove to Safeway to pick up my meds. There were three nice cheap generics that were already prepared. But at discharge they gave me a paper scrip for Oxycodone. I think they are required to do it that way for opiates. I’ve come to discover that when Oxycodone is involved every bit procedure immediately gets more complicated. I didn’t want to wait for it, so Laurie drove me home with the first three meds.
Getting out of her car on the sidewalk outside my condo and hobbling across the parking garage to my elevator was exhausting. My first introduction to what a pain in the neck using the walker will be. Laurie very kindly helped me with getting all the necessities handy to spend the next two weeks on my sofa. Then, got bless her, she drove BACK to the Mae Anne Safeway to get the Oxy. Goodness above and beyond the call of duty. I really appreciated it. I popped the first installment of all the pills I was prescribed and passed out.
That afternoon I did a fair about of hobbling back and forth getting everything situated so the sofa can be my command center for the next two weeks.
- an extension cord to charge my phone and laptop,
- a little table for water and pills and magazines.
- For water intake … I filled a Gatorade bottle with water to save a few trips to the kitchen faucet.
- For my water outgo … I am the proud owner of two hospital pee bottles from my two recent operations. They will allow me to greatly reduce the number of times I have to hobble to the bathroom. The journey down the hallway of my large-ish condo to get to my bathroom is a 22 hop marathon, something I want to do only twice a day, once when I get out of bed, and one before I go to bed.
Then I slept for a long time.
The drugs
The mix of drugs I was prescribed was pretty interesting:
- an antiibotic – cephalexin – the usual, take every six hours till it’s gone
- pain killer 1 – oxycodone – every four hours as needed
- pain killer 2 – gabapentin – once before bed. For sharp pain and “anxiety”
- an antihistimine – hydroxyzine…. – 1 or 2 every eight hours – for itching, discomfort, and anxiety.
This makes me think that some people must have a much harder time with this procedure than I did. I never felt much pain, certainly never felt anxious. Some nights the splint would feel sweaty and annoying. I would take one or both of the latter two pills just to mellow me out and fall asleep. One of them (the antihistamine I think) gave me weird dreams. Actually every pill but the antibiotic seemed to have weird dreams as a possible side effect.
Ditto for my balance. I already have dizziness sometimes from heart issues (the pacemaker should help that), but this was different, even with both hands on the walker I felt like I might just fall over. So when hopping down the hallway to the bathroom I would kind of lean on one wall. I actually did fall over a couple of times. Not cool.
The antibiotic made me tremendously constipated, as antibiotics tend to do. The Oxy also, I guess. So there was a while about 4-5 days into recovery where the Most Important Thing In The World was a bowel movement. When I took the last dose of antibiotic I stopped taking all of the pills until I had a breakthrough in the poop department. It all worked out … so to speak. The balance issues also went away, so hurray for that.
Note that each pill had a different schedule – 4, 6, 8, 24 hours – so I had to keep a little chart to remember when to take what. Good thing I had nothing better to do than chart my drug usage.
Two weeks of never leaving the house and hopping around with a walker.
Yes it sucked, and yes it was pretty boring. But in retrospect it passed by fast enough and was so featureless that it kinda just seems like one long day. I made a point of keeping up my journal just to differentiate the days. “today I made coffee and had a donut from the freezer” “today I warmed yesterday’s coffee and had lox and a bagel from Trader Joe’s”. Exciting stuff like that.
For those 13 days, I never went outside my front door. After I stopped the pills and started feeling a little perkier I would gather my reading material and hop out top sit on the deck in the late afternoon. I carefully navigated the walker through the runners on my sliding glass doors to my lawn chair.
I thank my lucky stars that I have a deck so that I can at least sit outside and breathe the outside air!
As for other human beings, I saw exactly two:
- Good ole Ed, who dropped by my beloved Sunday Chronicle those two Sundays, and
- Gerry the downstairs neighbor. He is the de facto manager of our condo. There was a water leak above our storage units, so one day he needed my key to check on the inside of my unit. Then two days later after the plumbing repair he needed the key again to squeegee out water puddles. By the time of the second visit I got smart and had him to take down my kitchen trash to the bin when he came up to get the key and bring up my mail when he came back up to return the key. So Gerry is a hero too!
Ed also did some grocery shopping for me the first Saturday. I had planned pretty well and didn’t really need much except for that unanticipated requirement for probiotics to get those bowels moving. Sauerkraut and kefir. A couple of more uncomfortable couple of days ensued, but eventually they did what they’re supposed to do. :)
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