One Heck of a Weekend
This weekend has been a pretty stressful weekend. Liza hasn't been feeling well, she had to spend the night in the hospital for tests... it was really stressful. I heard someone say that being in a hospital is like entering a time warp, and I totally agree. There's nothing that happens quickly in a hospital - unless you're in real trouble, and that is a good sign, I suppose.
The Lead-Up
It started last Tuesday (11/10) when Liza told me she couldn't open her right eye all the way. It didn't sound good, but she's not one to run to medical help if there's not broken bones or bleeding. In this case, it wasn't warranted, and since there was no blurred vision, no outward signs of a stroke, no dizziness, she thought "I'm getting old". So she let it go.
Wednesday (11/11) it was getting better, she could open it more, still had a headache from the day before, and now things didn't taste right. The ice cream she had in the evening didn't taste right. I told her that tomorrow (Thurs) she was going to the doctor to get it checked out. And she did.
Thursday (11/12) her right eye could open up almost all the way. It was very hard for me to even tell there was a problem, but she could tell that the right eyelid wasn't opening up as quickly as the left. When she called the doctor and explained her symptoms, they wanted her in right away. She, of course, had a few things to do, and went in around 3:30-ish in the afternoon.
The doctor saw that the right pupil wasn't responding to light like the left one, and tried to get her into the opthamologist that afternoon. No luck there, but the next morning (Friday) was going to have to do. She tells me that he didn't look very lad back and happy after seeing the pupil dilatation difference. He even gave her a list of "bad things" to check on overnight. The worst of which was a ruptured carotid artery. Nice.
I knew I needed to go with her on Friday as it was going to mean pupil dilation, and that's no fun to drive home with. So we went. The doctor was very nice, and checked her out from top to bottom. He couldn't see any evidence of the differing pupil dilation, and in general, couldn't see anything wrong with here in the complete exam. So we left with no idea what was causing the problem.
When we got home, I started doing a little taste-testing with her. What was it in her taste that was really effected? Turns out, it was sweet and sour. They are connected, so that makes sense, but her sense of smell was totally unaffected. That was odd. We both remembered that your sense of smell is tightly coupled to your sense of taste, but I guess the reverse is not necessarily true. She could smell lemon juice, but it wasn't sour in her mouth. She could smell sweet cookies, but she couldn't even taste raw sugar on her tongue. Very odd.
The next morning, Saturday, we decided to go to the emergency room as waiting another two days for a chance to she her primary care physician didn't seem like a good idea any more.
The Weekend
Saturday morning we had a volleyball game to coach, and after the game we got a little lunch and then headed out to the emergency room at the local hospital. We had expected to spend the rest of the day there, but little did we know Liza wouldn't see the light of day for more than 30 hours.
We got into the emergency room, explained the story once to the nurse. She got the vitals and we started to wait. That afternoon, she got a CAT scan, and explained her story now fewer than four more times to doctors. I told her we needed to write it down before we came and then just hand out photocopies. In the end, by 4:00 pm we hadn't seen a doctor for more more than an hour, and we were convinced by their stunned silence that they had no idea what was happening.
Hey, that's OK. As long as they don't know, then it's not something like a stroke, tumor, etc. All those they'd recognize and we'd be in a lot worse shape than if we didn't know. So I took this as a good sign, and about the only thing they could do yet was an MRI. We figured, OK, that'll take an hour, let's get cookin' and get it done.
Silly me.
They had to 'admit' her, but they really didn't, we later found out. They had her as an Out Patient in-house. Very odd, but that's what they wanted to do. Still, we didn't learn this until long after, but it's interesting that they believe all these little details are "beyond" the typical patient. I say, tell me the facts, and let me decide.
Rather than get her up and going, it took several more hours of waiting, and then about 7:00 pm, she was in her room. When I returned from checking on the kids and making sure they had dinner, we found out that she wasn't going to have the MRI until the next morning. Now while some people might not mind this "mini-vacation", she and I wanted to be back at home and not sitting in some hospital room. It's not restful, no matter what you hear.
I left at 8:30 pm on Saturday to be with the kids for the night. Telling her I'd be back in the morning as early as I could.
On Sunday I arrived at about 6:45 am and she was awake and waiting on the MRI.
Finally, at 8:30, they took her to the MRI. Good. Maybe we can be out of here by noon. Sounds very reasonable. After all, this is a simple "covering the bases" test as they have no reason to believe it'll uncover anything, but OK... we go.
By 9:40 am, she's back in the room and we sit and wait for the neurologist to come in and tell us the results, and then we can leave. So we say "Noon. We'll give him to noon, and then we'll ask them to contact him."
Good plan.
So we wait.
At noon I get up and go talk to the nurses and ask if they have the ability to call the doctor and ask when he's going to come in and give us the results. Here's where my wonderful experiences with the nurses up to this point sours. They say that they can't get ahold of the doctor, and there's nothing they can do. In fact, they can't even be sure he's coming in today.
OK, I'm not an idiot, but what about some healthcare professionals thinks they can treat me like one. Do they think I'm dumb enough to think that if she goes into a seizure they will not be able to get ahold of him? Wrong. Simply silly. Of course, they can contact him... they just won't.
If it's honest, then I can deal with it. Tell me you won't, not that you can't. Then, I can say "Give me the number, and I'll call" - to which they can again say they won't (or not), and we can go from there. But the lies to save them from having to look bad or incompetent are really quite annoying when it's your health on the line.
Finally, I got a nurse that told me that if they called, the doctor would hang up on them. To which, I said "Give me the phone number", and I called him. Amazing how a little personal presence can get things moving.
He wasn't up to speed on the case, even at a different hospital (possibly), but he felt uncomfortable enough that I felt we'd gotten his attention and at 4:00 he walked in the door.
Of course, his answers were the same as we'd heard all weekend: "No idea". But the MRI was clear, and finally we got to leave. Liza finally got the prescriptions for something to kill the migraine, and that was good, but it was days late, and my poor wife had to sit in a horrible hospital bed for more than a day for an hour-long procedure and be told the same thing as the emergency room doc said.
I'm exhausted. I know she is. It's been one heck of a weekend.