Holy crap, that all sounds awful. I’m glad things seem to be working out now, though. Thanks for the update and take care of yourself, you’ve got a lot of people here that care about you!
Curious about this too, were they able to address the underlying problem here in any way?
So the hospital stay was just to stabilize me, and to find out what was making the situation worsen. Once that was discovered and addressed, they’re done with me. The longer term treatment and recovery will be a separate situation.
One potentially positive sign is that they observed a reduction in the amount of fluid while I was in the hospital. I’m not entirely sure I trust that was the case – did I mention how awful this hospital was? – but it’s what they claimed. That implies it might go away on it’s own. But whatever the case, the last several weeks were about identifying the problem and stopping it from progressing further.
From here, I move on to recovering from it with other doctors and I’m not entirely sure what that will entail. Fingers crossed it won’t be another thoracentesis. Which is the fancy word for “please be still while we puncture your lung with this needle and leave it there for a while to slowly drain gunk out of you, and by the way this local anesthetic isn’t going to be nearly as helpful as you might hope, ha ha, sorry we weren’t more clear about that”.
-Tom
Got it. Well, I hope they’re able to find a long-term solution with a minimum of needles. Fingers very much crossed.
Oh, man! Tom, that sounds awful, but I’m glad you’re out of the hospital and breathing without too much pain. Just remember that the correct answer when the doctor types ask if you’re in any pain is always 10. You can pretend to think about it, but don’t mess around. It’s okay to cut the nurse off and just say TEEEENNNNNN! Because that hows how much it hurts. Remember: Pain medication is the silver lining to all hospital stays. See if you can get one of those little self-inject button thingys.
Also, I’m glad fire is around to drop goodies on you as needed.
Good luck Tom!
My favorite part of the story is that we only found out about it because Tim Schafer responded to Tom’s tweet. Let me say that again: Tim freakin’ Schafer responded to Tom’s tweet.
Excuse, me, I’ll be in my bunk playing Psychonauts again.
Hang in there Tom. Jesus wept at the crap life is throwing at you and yours in recent months.
I’m glad you’re on the mend, horrified at what you’ve had to endure, and yet oddly fascinated by the morbid details. Not sure what that says about me as I’ve never been a fan of horror films or even scary stories told at camp fires, but thanks for sharing this.
I don’t know what to say to that, so I’ll just say I’m glad you’re mostly ok after that scare.
@tomchick thank you so much for writing up such a detailed report on what’s happening. I hate letting my mind run wild when I’m worried about one of you, because it invariably goes to worst case scenario.
Do you know if there’s anything they might be able do to to alleviate the hit or miss swallowing issue? In CF aspiration always leads to wicked bacterial pneumonia, so I was surprised to hear it hadn’t done that to you. But I worry while it wasn’t now it could in the future.
Are you going to tell us more about this awful hospital? That is of my worst fears in the world, having to go to a subpar or terrible hospital for care. If you have to get treatment again is there anything you can do to go to a different hospital?
Giving you a virtual hug. So glad you’re home, but still worried as it sounds like you’ve got a ways to go to be healed.
My god Tom, I am sorry you had to go through all that! But awesome that you are feeling better’ish.
Thanks for checking in - For some reason, I got unreasonably worried last night, and wanted to reach out.
Anyways - Internet hugs (which are safe, even in these times) from Denmark to you from me!
Glad everything turned out good & here’s hoping for a good recovery to get your voice back!
Dude, I have spent my entire professional life managing the 1 to 10 scale.
“Mr. Chick, how would you describe you pain on a scale of one to ten?”
“Interesting question, nurse. Let’s talk about the 1-10 scale…”
I launch a discussion of how the 1-10 scale is really just a 7-9 scale, and after I hold forth for a few minutes on the reasons for this and the implications for any ratings system, she just gives me morphine to shut me up.
Yep. Having me not swallow! Seems I’m on a feeding tube from here on out. It’s a possible outcome I was warned about over five years ago, before I started radiation treatment. So the way I see it, I cheated around it for five years. Sweet! :)
Ideally, things will go better via the slower process of working through my primary care physician to get referrals specific to my needs. What happened in this situation was that I was just a dude with non-covid pneumonia at an ER, and I needed to be admitted somewhere for longer term treatment, so I got chucked into a dumping ground to get antibiotics and wait it out. Which wasn’t what I needed, but they didn’t know that, so they probably picked the cheapest closest hospital.
The whole time I was in a four-person room with patients almost constantly cycling in and out, most of them suffering dementia, or some mental disability, or too decrepit to walk, or just laid out unconscious on ventilators. My first night they brought in a guy with skin the color and texture of asbestos and dotted with sores. He was obviously very old and very broken, but he had a huge shock of thick white hair, like Old Testament prophet hair or even God Himself hair. They dumped him on the bed, fully clothed, wearing a surgical mask they’d obviously put on him, and left him there. After a while, he sat up and pushed the surgical mask up to his forehead, like a bandanna, and I could see he was smiling crazily. Just this mad grin and weird gleam in his eye, like he had secret plans. He stood up and kind of teetered for a second before shuffling over to talk to another man in the bed next to him.
“Sir, can you please sit back on your bed,” I said, pressing the button to call the nurse. “If you need the nurse, let me call her for you. She can help you.”
He turned his crazy look to me, and then as his body shuffled forward, it swiveled in line with his gaze, like a tank. He headed toward my bed, muttering something, but as near as I could tell, there were no actual words. Just whispered syllables. I’m not even sure if he was speaking English.
“Sir, I need you to stand back. And please pull your mask down over your face, to keep us all safe. The nurse will be here in a moment. Just go back to your bed, okay?”
I have no idea how long it was before the nurse showed up, but it felt like forever. I had to maneuver one of those rolling trey tables between us to keep him at a distance, and the whole time he was grinning and muttering, his hands trembling and softly tapping the far end of the trey table. He showed me bleeding slits between his fingers, where he’d either cut himself or his skin had cracked. When the nurse finally showed up, she was having none of this “sir” stuff. She barked at him to sit down and stay in bed, and at this he got all deferential and sheepish, but he still shot me a crazy look as if to say, “You and me, we know what’s going on…”
“I think his hand is hurt,” I tell the nurse. She couldn’t have cared less.
He got up again and she had to come back a second time before they strapped him into his bed. I never did see any kind of treatment administered to him, or overhear any admittance process, so I have no idea if he was just a drunk, or senile, or gravely ill. Almost everyone else’s admittance process was done in full voice, in a room full of other patients, regardless of the hour or the patient’s circumstance. One guy was there because he needed to dry up again after going on a drinking binge. He called a friend on his cell phone the next night, sobbing, begging his friend to bring him a pack of cigarettes because he’d run out and he needed to smoke to deal with his anxiety. I’m perplexed at the number of patients who kept going out to smoke. What the hell kind of hospital lets people go smoke? He eventually got a prescription for Ativan, and I don’t think I’m being too cynical to suspect that’s the main reason he was there.
Another guy was from a nursing home where he’d been refusing his dialysis. He sounded reasonable at first, but he couldn’t say more than two or three things before it was obvious he was delusional. He would talk constantly, whether anyone was listening or even present, about how he was Mike Tyson’s dad, and he had a turtle in his stomach, and someone shot him in the back of the head, and he played Prince in that movie Purple Rain, and his blood could cure AIDS, and he used to live on Venice Beach with Tom Cruise, and he lost too much weight because he’d been eating only lemons, and he was in the movie Armageddon with Bruce Willis.
At one point, as one of the nurses was going by, I called after him because his voice sounded familiar. “Hey, do you know who you sound like? Do you ever get told you sound like a famous person?”
“No,” the nurse said.
“Your voice is a dead ringer for Mark Ruffalo.” And it was. “If you were just standing behind that curtain talking, I would believe it was Mark Ruffalo.”
He wasn’t sure who that was so I said, “The Hulk, from The Avengers.”
“Bill Bixby?” pipes up my delusional friend from the other bed. “You mean Bill Bixby?”
“Well, that’s one Hulk,” I conceded.
“That was me,” he said. “That was me. I played the Hulk. I used to be white.”
These statements were that spontaneous, and they were spoken with utter conviction. He wasn’t lying. He believed these things. He needed people to know these things. He needed to vocalize them. Just watching TV, he’d get a running commentary going about the things he’d done in his life, the people he’d been, his accomplishments, who had wronged him.
It was funny to hear various doctors and techs try to get a medical history from him. His answers would start plausibly enough. Maybe he did get shot in the back of the head. Maybe he was in Armageddon. Maybe he did subsist on lemons. But at a certain point, he would say one outrageous thing too many and the interlocutor would realize, ‘Ah, so that’s what’s going on’. They’d normally disengage and ignore him, getting the information they needed elsewhere while he carried on. But one of the really cool things I saw was when a young Asian dude rolled in a giant dialysis machine. It was an extended process, the set-up of the machinery, hooking up my delusional friend, the actual process. The whole time, the young Asian dude let my friend talk and talk and talk, and he would respond with an energetic “oh yeah?” or a convincing “that’s really cool!” He actually let himself connect with the guy.
When I was eventually rolled into a different room, he seemed disappointed. “You leaving?” he asked as they started prepping my bed to roll me out. “Y’all taking my home boy?”
“Yeah, I’m getting discharged soon and they’re moving me to another room first. You take care of yourself. Let them help you, okay? Let them give you your dialysis.”
“Okay.” He watched them roll me out with a dejected look on his face. I don’t understand why he cared.
Also during my stay, a nurse was attacked. The air conditioning broke and it was sweltering hot. Several rounds of my pain medication were skipped because my blood pressure was too low for morphine, and whoever was supposed to come back with an alternative just spaced on it. I was routinely brought meals, even though I was on “nil by mouth” orders, so here comes someone with a trey of delicious smelling food, thinking he’s making my day, and I’m thinking, “Dude, that is NOT helping”. I was frequently told conflicting things. Calls to the nurse could take up to ten minutes to get a response. The staff would hang out right outside the open doorway, talking at full volume in the middle of the night. So many alarms beeping on machines just allowed to keep beeping for so long. A TV blaring some dumb-ass sitcom even though everyone in the room is asleep.
Worst of all, given the way things were run there, I’m pretty sure I must have been exposed to covid-19. After the first day, after verifying I had tested negative, I was moved to a room supposedly limited to people who had tested negative. But at least twice, I saw them come in and administer tests. Why would they be testing someone who’s already spent a day in a room for people who tested negative? I asked for a test before being discharged, but they said they can only test people being admitted. Makes sense, from a liability perspective. If they can show I was negative when I was admitted, why would they want to provide me with evidence that I was infected while I was in their care? I don’t know if that’s too tin-foil-hat to consider, but I’m definitely looking to get retested when I see my doctor on Monday. Honestly, that’s my real worry at this point. Five days in that mismanaged, run down, and under-staffed dump?
So, yeah, I’m probably going to be pretty harsh in my Yelp review.
-Tom
Holy shit Tom. Your experience sounds like a ring of hell. I’m not sure which one, but it’s gotta be up there.
Have you considered just filing a complaint with the actual hospital? This sounds terrible, like completely unacceptable. I am not aware of any hospital down there so overwhelmed with COVID19 that they can even come remotely close to excusing that sort of treatment and care.
Most hospitals have systems and people chasing around patients trying to get a survey out of them, and yes, the powers that be absolutely care about those stats.
Sounds like the VA hospital my dad was in toward the end of his life. Jesus, I wouldn’t leave a dog there.
I’ve always wondered whether there’s any harm in playfully indulging these people while you’re forced to be near each other. I assume if they had the capacity to be reasoned with, they would have stopped acting like that a long time ago.
I’m glad you’re out of that place and okay :)
Glad you’re ok, Tom. Woulda been pretty dumb for me to subscribe and give you money and stuff just for you to exit stage left a month or so later.
I mean, as a patron don’t I at least get a vote or something?
Thanks, @tomchick for the updates.
Considering all you’ve been through, at least we got some awesome stories out of it. Thanks for taking the time it took to put these down for us. Any time you feel up to telling us more, I think I can speak for us all when I say that we’d sure appreciate them.
Is that from the movie, or do hospitals actually use that term? I’ve actually never heard that phrase before, but my girlfriend is telling me it was a Gary Oldman film. Heck, you’ve probably already covered it and I missed it.
And I have to ask you: How are your spirits holding up after all of that? It doesn’t seem evident in your writing tone, but I imagine that it might really weigh a person down. We care about you, Tom.
Gah, glad you’re back home, and I hope it doesn’t happen again, feeding tube sounds not great but much better than a dice roll choosing where your food is going to end up.
