First, going backwards, I'm home from Florida as of this afternoon in the back of the Conquest as a passenger. The C-45 is on the ramp at Lakeland waiting for Glenn to bring it back to Indiana. The weather was too bad for me to fly the C-45 home on Sunday and I HAD to be home on Sunday for a bunch of Monday flights, so I got airline tickets home for me, Steve, Morgan and Jim.
Sunday morning we were packed up, at the FBO, I had an Uber on the way to take us to Tampa, to get on an airline and get home around 11 pm that night so I'd be ready for Monday. Instead, I canceled my imminent Uber. Morgan and Jim got their own and went home, and I had Steve drive me to the closest ER in our airshow car rental vehicle.
When we got to the ER, they were going through my purse at security at the front door while I leaned over the table. Gave that back and I walked to the front desk to check in. Steve went outside to park the car. The guy behind the tall front desk was asking me check in questions. I don't even remember the questions past name and birthdate. My legs were weak and going out, and the desk was too tall to lean on. I locked my legs to try to stay standing, but you know what happens when you lock your legs? They used to warn us about that in choir. ;) Finally I just heard some 'wa wa wa' talking and everything was pale and washed out and I looked at him and said "Well, I'm going down", and I turned around and sat on the floor before it became involuntary.
Everything happened a lot faster after that. A nurse half caught me on my way down. They got a wheelschair and two people got me up in it. My blood pressure was 70/40. They got me onto a gurney, and then tried to get an arterial blood gas. I had been vomiting and unable to eat for 2 days, so I was badly dehydrated and they had no luck on the left wrist. So they went for the right. No luck. So they went BACK to the left and finally got something. They wanted a urine sample asap. Same problem. Badly dehydrated. I told her there was nothing in there. She said they'd have to cath me to get a sample because they had to have one. So I got to have a urine catheter put in, which is degrading and awful. She said "Wow, there really isn't much of anything here". They got barely enough to do their required tox screen. Next up they needed blood. Getting an IV was just as problematic as everything else. Nurse #1 couldn't do it after a couple tries and called in Nurse #2, who also couldn't get it. Nurse #3 succeeded. I was informed that I have tiny, sunken veins. Gee thanks.
I was hooked up to an EKG. They wanted to do a head and face CT scan, they said because I "fainted and fell" and they wanted to check for damage. I said "I did not faint, nor fall. I sat down. I did not hit my head. CTs are expensive and I don't need that" and I refused it. They were annoyed at me for that.
Later Robin convinced me to get the head CT. Said it wasn't because I fell, but because of the massive infection in my jaw. They needed to see where it had spread to, and the risk was that it could have gone to my brain. If it did, I was in a whole other world of hurt. So I got the CT scan, and as Steve likes to joke, they found there IS a brain in there. But no infection. They also did a chest X-ray and found that to be clear as well. So...good news there.
They get me up to the PICU, which is one floor up from the ICU but is still Intensive Care. They said they have to have two IVs going at all times because it's critical for me to not have interrupted flow, and they had a lot of stuff to give me, too. It doesn't take long before every IV they get in me leaks, blows, or blocks, one at a time, and they keep moving them and starting a new one. Shortcutting this, I ended up with 7 IVs. I'm hooked up to a constant heart monitor EKG with 5 probes stuck to my chest, a pulse ox taped to my finger, multiple IVs, and a freaking annoying blood pressure cuff. My blood pressure stayed low, kept alarming at anything under 100, which meant it alarmed All The Time. For days. 90/50, 86/45, it really bothered them. And days of having your arm squeezed repeatedly by that cuff, it gets painful. And Suuuper annoying.
Because of all the wires, I can't go to the bathroom by myself. I am being pumped with dextrose/sugar water and sodium chloride and stuff for hydration too, and antibiotics, so even though I'm not eating or drinking (haven't been able to eat since Thursday night), I still have to pee. So every time I have to pee, I have to page a nurse, who has to come in and unhook my blood pressure cuff, my EKG probes, my pulse ox, and either unhook the IV and block it off, or take the pole into the bathroom with me. Do my thing, then shuffle back to the bed, call the nurse, and get hooked all back up. This is tedious.
The first night I was there, they did a glucose check on me. It came up 197! I was like "No, that is not right. My glucose levels are NOT high!" She re-did it and now it came up 239! I fuh-FREAKED out. Those are diabetic numbers! I can NOT be diabetic! My whole future flashed in front of my eyes. Yes, you can be a diabetic pilot now but not on Monday. It's months, and months off of work. To say nothing of the whole health thing. I was seriously freaking out, and I was in there for a life and death thing already. The nurse said "Infection and stress can raise those numbers" and I'm like "I'm not stupid, not THAT high" and she said "That is really high" and I'm like "THAT IS REALLY HIGH". Then she looked over and said "Oh. I got it!! You're on dextrose! That's" and we both say "SUGAR WATER!" Shew....scared a good 5 years off my life. The rest of my stay there the blood sugar levels were still over 100, but I was still on dextrose the whole time too. They did an A1C on me to verify my sugar status and it came up 5.2. Good enough for now.
My first night nurse was a guy named Robin. He became my favorite, and he'd sit in the room and talk to me over night shift sometimes too. He was a former Army medic, a Mensa member, and very knowledgeable in the field. No-nonsense, thorough and organized, kept everything on the right schedule, and spoke to me like an intelligent person and not just a patient. My first night there, he let me know what my numbers were, what they needed to do, what *I* needed to do. The next day when the docs came in, they let me know that I was very sick, that my numbers were bad and getting worse, and that if they kept getting worse they were going to send me to Tampa for a specialty hospital where I could get more experienced-in-this care. They said the #1 sign that would get me moved is if I became altered, confused. On top of if my numbers kept going up.
Day two there, my numbers kept going up. They contacted Tampa and requested a bed to move me to. I didn't want to go. All I can think about is how much money this is going to cost us as is. However, I was also having issues with that whole altered thing. I couldn't stay awake. I was muddled and thick and foggy and could. not. stay. awake. I sat in the room all day dozing, staring straight ahead, no TV, no reading, just...dozing and staring straight ahead. Each of 3 doctors would come in once a day for 30 seconds and tell me I was in bad shape and they were moving me to tampa. The nurses would come in every few hours and draw a bunch of vials of blood. Someone would come in to unhook me and let me go to the bathroom. Food service would drop off a tray and I'd tell them to take it away.
I couldn't eat. Everything I ate or drank came back up. Which was another one of the signs I was in trouble. Robin got me a mocha coffee one morning. I drank it down, and 30 seconds later barfed it right back up into one of their bags. Robin took it away and said "Man, it's still warm". Later on even when I could watch TV, when they had food commercials on, which was constant, the sight of the food made me super queasy. I would gag. I smelled food they brought in, and I'd gag. I tried to eat crackers, rice, applesauce, threw it all up. Eventually I started keeping small amounts down, and it was a victory. I'd call the meal service thing and instead of having them bring me big trays of food, I'd get a thing of pudding. Or grits or cream of wheat. And I'd have to choke down every bite, and hold it there, and not barf it up, and wait, and then take another bite, and another, until eventually I could eat a tiny little something at least twice a day. It was a victory that was harder than it sounds.
I had gone so long without eating that I could feel my stomach sticking to itself inside. If I breathed hard or coughed, it hurt. I couldn't lie on my side because of the pressure it put on my insides. Fortunately I could keep the back of my bed way up so I could sleep sitting up.
Because this was a PICU floor, my bathroom didn't have a shower. They said nobody on that floor is ambulatory, I'm an outlier. So each morning when I got up and got unhooked, I'd wipe myself down with orange strong antibacterial wipes for some things, and purple gentle wipes for other things. Brush my teeth. Try to get a comb through my rats nest of hair, put a little make up and deodorant on. Then get back in bed to try to make it through the day.
By Day...5? When Robin came in I said "Robin, I am not far away from losing it. I haven't had a shower in days. My hair is disastrous, dirty straw. I am moments away from really actually whining here." Robin says "Hey, I can do something about that." There was a maternity ward down the hall the wasn't open yet. With rooms that have showers. He got a female tech to walk me down there so he didn't have to be the one to pull probes and tape off IVs and do all the see me naked things. Because we'd become sort of friends. Unless of course I was going to die and then he'd have not given a shit, but he was respecting my privacy, not his own stuff. I walked down there and was able to wash my whole self for the first time in 6 days. I didn't have hair conditioner, so my hair was still as dry as straw, but at least it was clean and it was untangled, for one glorious evening.
I was an anomaly on the floor, because I could get up. One nurse stopped and backed up to watch me because I was up fluffing my pillows. She said "people on this floor don't do that, never seen that before". I was polite and friendly and cracked jokes and only bothered them if my machines were alarming or if I had to pee. Otherwise I never asked them for anything. They came in to draw blood, to administer meds, to help me get to the bathroom and back, and to update me on any labs or info. They liked me and I liked them. They said most of their patients up there were angry bitter non-mobile people who insisted they come in and lift and lower their beds and change TV channels and do all sorts of stuff you can do yourself. I became kind of a floor mascot. I heard over and over at shift changes "This is Laura. She's the best patient on the floor. Super easy, fun to work with, and she's mobile. She's a pilot, too!" So that was nice. I was the young chick on the floor. ;)
When they would draw blood, I'd wait about two hours, then whenever they came back in for something else I'd ask for a labs update. They needed 3 of my numbers to go down. 1 started going down right away and became normal/reasonable. The second two kept going up for awhile. Then the second one plateaued, and then slowly started coming down. The third number was a problem. It leapt up, jumped again, jumped again but at a slower rate. Robin was telling me "it's not climbing as fast so that's good", but it was still climbing. When it finally did start dropping, we all celebrated, because even though I wasn't out of the woods, at least I could see the edge of it.
See, Robin told me the night before I was discharged, that he'd been optimistic with me, and everything he'd told me was true, but that I really HAD been in serious trouble and he wasn't sure how it was going to go. He said that if I hadn't gotten to the ER when I did, if I'd gotten on the Uber to go to the airline instead, I'd probably be dead. He also said that even as it was, it was touch and go for awhile there, and behind the scenes they were telling Steve that there was about a 60-some percent chance of my survival. He didn't tell me that until today, and now he's no longer confident in the number he heard. He's not sure if he misheard or made it up, but I'm guessing he did hear it. He said "I know that that sounds like a higher number, but" and I said "But we've lost a LOT bigger odds than that, repeatedly." I know that Day 2 was a tipping point. The day I couldn't stay awake, the day they were wanting to move me to Tampa. Tampa was waiting for a bed to open up to admit me. Every time the doctor would come in, I would concentrate very hard to be lucid, to speak coherently, to act engaged, to stay awake. Fortunately they were only in there for 30 seconds so I could pull it off. They would leave, I'd go back to sleep. For 2 days people kept trying to get me to turn on a TV. Didn't care, couldn't concentrate, just wanted quiet. My body was quietly fighting, they were giving me the meds to do it and I was trying to give it the rest and fuel it needed as best I could.
Like I said, they had to have two IVs going at the same time, so when another one was compromised, they were now running out of locations to put one, so they called in an ultrasound tech and did a mid-line port, basically. They told me about it, and said it's this giant several inch long plastic piece that goes right into one of your bigger veins deeper in the inside of your upper arm. It sounded terrible, and needles don't even bother me in general. The tech came in, it's late at night, and he says "Wow, your veins are deep, and small". I said "Oh great, thanks". Just what I need, another tough stick, and if it's deep, they can't numb it enough to not hurt, right?! I'm lying there on my back while he's prepping to do this, and I feel a tear running down the right side of my face. I'm sick, I'm starved, I'm tired, I'm alone in there, I'm strapped helplessly into a bed, I'm trapped, I'm uncertain, and a little scared. I had another night nurse, Michele, on another night. She was kind, quiet, gentle, and very sweet. She wasn't my nurse that night, but she stuck her head into my room to see what was going on, saw my face, walked over and snapped on a pair of latex gloves, walked to the other side of the bed, gently wiped the tear off of my face with her thumb, and took my right hand and just held it and rubbed it without saying a word while the tech did his thing. That was probably my biggest moment of weakness in all this, and she stepped in and took 5 minutes out of her night to make sure I had someone and would be okay.
When I checked out of the hospital, I scanned a QR code and I submitted both her and Robin for a "BEE" award, as a thank you for their dedication and help. There were others, Claudia, Alita, even Jordan. But those two took me on, and they cared above and beyond, and I am grateful.
Robin also warned me that I would at some point probably feel internal pain, swelling, that it was normal if it happened. I never felt that--until I set to be discharged. Now my insides would spasm every time I ate something, or had any gas. It really, really hurt, and if he hadn't told me that ahead of time, I'd have thought I needed to stay there. Nobody else told me about it, so it's another thing I'm thankful for. It took two days for that to stop hurting, and finally it's better.
I also swelled up like a sausage. Fortunately one of the nurses caught that my hands were swelling and said "We need to get those rings off of you right now!" I got one off, but the other required lube and fighting it. We barely got them off before they'd have to be cut off. My whole body swelled up and I looked like a caricature of myself. Little piggy hands and feet and thick ankles and my abdomen was so distended it was sticking out past my chest. When I was released, the swelling was down in some areas, but I couldn't even zip up my pants. And I hadn't eaten hardly anything for a week or more in total. Seems rude. I'm still swollen, but it is going down, slowly.
My potassium was low and that bothered them, so I had to take two doses of it, huge horse pills, once in the morning and once in the evening. They gave me my melatonin at night to help me try to sleep, but then would wake you up every hour and a half or so anyway, so not sure what the point of that was. ;) They ran non-stop IV antibiotics the whole time I was there, and even when I was discharged I still had an elevated temp of 99.4 so they sent me home with three more days of oral antibiotics to continue with on my own. I am supposed to go back to a local doc here and get more labwork done in a week and verify that my numbers have continued to come down to normal. When I was discharged, two out of three numbers were still elevated well past normal, one 17 times higher than the high end of normal, but the trend was right so they let me go, and now it's up to me to make sure the trend continued and the numbers keep dropping and everything continues to heal up and recover like it's supposed to.
So how did I get there? Shorter version. I had a cavity, lower right. I had an appointment to get it fixed (for last Tuesday, actually). It didn't even bother me. I went to Sun-n-Fun. Tooth started hurting me. I ignored it. Hurt more. I popped Tylenol and ignored it. By Friday I couldn't actually eat anything. I did drink a shake for dinner that night, last thing I had to "eat" for almost a week. Saturday I did three rides, got oral numbing drops from the pharmacy nearby. They didn't seem to do a thing. I canceled my last flight of the day, a full load of riders, which we needed the money for, but I know myself, and I'd reached my limit on ability to safely concentrate on what I was doing at a busy environment. So I made the tough call for everyone involved in the whole thing and called it off. Once I called it off, it's like I gave myself permission to crash, because I went downhill FAST. I felt awful. Terrible. I called my own dentist and marked it "urgent" while the Blue Angels were screaming overhead. I went on the hunt for emergency dental places. I googled, I called, I found places, and 99% of them weren't open on the weekend or after hours, which I thought was super ironic considering they were supposed to be emergency dental places "any time". I found one place and got a 9 pm appointment and then got a text that the doc wasn't in until Monday after all. I was desperate and that made me feel sick, because I didn't know how to make it through to home like this. I didn't stay for the night airshow, which we love and we sit on BOB's wings and watch from right there, me and Morgan. I went to my cabin and went to bed and slept fitfully and terribly all night and tried to just make it home. The next morning we packed up and I was leaning on the tail of the airplane while everyone else did all the work. Leaning back in my seat in the car. We get to the FBO, I've got the Uber on the way, and I have to go throw up. I'm throwing up, and I feel So Weak. So bad. I'm shaking. I'm one cab right and one airline flight from home, and I can power through, but the voice in my head that I always try to listen to came out of my mouth before I really knew what it was going to say and I turned to Steve and said "You need to take me to the ER". His jaw dropped because he's never heard me say that. Ever. For anything. I avoid it like the plague. I've had to be carried into ERs before. He blinked and stared for a split second, and then he jumped into action. He told Morgan and Jim to go home. He canceled his rental car return. And he threw me in the car and drove me to the nearest ER on Google Maps. And it was the perfect place to go, too...
Those numbing drops, I'd tried them out during the day to no effect. And then I was pushing on the tooth from the outside, and I realized my lip, gum and chin were numb and tingly, but my tooth still hurt like a mother. I thought, wow, it worked on everything but the tooth. I was very careful with the next application, right on the spot. No good. But a couple hours later I'm pushing on it and my face is numb again. I thought...those stupid drops don't last that long! I was right, they don't. That numbness? One of my doctors let me know that that was a nerve in my face. One of the nerves associated with Bell's Palsy. What I originally figured happened was the hole in my tooth got food down in it which irritated the nerve down there and that's why it felt like a throbbing lightning bolt of doom and agony. What I DIDN'T figure on at the time, was that it was infected as hell, and I was in a different kind of trouble. I had no idea.
Going down to Florida, we had to go at 9500' and 10500' for awhile to get on top of some clouds. I never thought about my cavity, but dental issues are known problems for high pressurization areas, and this plane isn't pressurized. The pressure difference, if it didn't start the pain (pain was shortly thereafter), it sure didn't help anything.
Steve was scared too. They weren't telling me the bad news they were telling him. He would work at the hotel, then come in around lunchtime and hang out for a few hours. Go back to the hotel, come back for several hours in the evening. They basically told him that he could lose me, and it hadn't REALLY occurred to him that it could be me, because he's 12.5 years older, so he always assumed if anything happened to one of us it would be him, first. He didn't expect to see his (much) younger wife hooked up to a ton of monitors and going blood draw by blood draw on survival potential. It's been an unwelcome slap across the face to us both, I guess.
Well, it's 1 am and that's only one facet of the story. There are a lot of other things to talk about, but for now, I think it's time to wind down and head to bed. I'll have a couple of days in which to try to catch up here. I didn't take a bunch of photos, but I've got a few photos of Sun-n-Fun and a lot of photos of my bruises, which I'll warn you about so you don't have to look. lol But that's for tomorrow, I think.
Anyway. I'm alive. I'm home. I feel mentally pretty good, physically like I lost a fight with a Mack Truck. I'm lucky to be here, or supposed to still be here, or something. Not the first time I've said I'm lucky to still be here, but I'm okay if it's the last. ;) I shan't be so...careless in the future.
Goodnight...
Me and Jackson, Sun-n-Fun Riders
Taking off past Lakeland Tower
Me giving a pre-ride briefing
Steve and Jim pulling the props through
The pamphlet for our cabins
BOB first thing in the morning
Hot sweaty me
Taxiing past the airshow line
Sold Out
Mass Exodus out of Sun-n-Fun
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These next are all hospital photos with a lot of IVs and bruising, so don't look if don't like
A couple of my alarming blood pressure settings
Home away from home for 6 days
Isn't that pretty?
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