Okay I had increased my steroids to 40mg a day yet I was still struggling to breathe and getting exhausted doing the least thing. After 3 weeks of this I got to see my consultant who suggested being admitted into hospital, well of course I said no but I did go for an x-ray. This was on the Thursday and by Sunday I was .. yep you guessed it.. in hospital. I got pains in my chest, shoulder and arm which got so bad I was in agony. By the time the paramedics arrived I was in a critical state and at hospital further x-rays showed a... oh no not that.. pneumothorax. So after a few attempts, lots of pain and bringing up mouthfulls of blood a chest drain was finally inserted.
Now I am expecting 2 days and I will be home, nope two weeks later the drain was taken out but my lung collapsed again so another drain had to be inserted. this took another few attempts then it was found the drain was not in correctly so it was removed again and another inserted. So with 8 atttempts of putting in 3 drains my lungs were pretty sore and then I got a really bad infection on the drain area and on my chest. the drain got infected as staff did not change the dressing and it just got really bad. Things were terrible in hospital, left for 2hrs in excruciating pain, antibitotics missed as well as important injections. no results of Scans, Echo's etc would be given and no one would keep me informed of what was going on. Had two days of physio which was temporarily stopped due to chest pains then nothing and no one bothered to reinstate the therapy once I was well enough again. And boy forget about hospital meals being bland and tasteless, every meal for 4 weeks was wrong, cold or only parts of the meal given, complained and for 4 days all was fine then it started again. In 3 months I got the right meal about 10 times. pretty bad considering you get 2 meals a day (not counting breakfast).
Then a nurse did somehting that could have killed me, I was lucky that I only sufffered about 3 hrs of bad chest pains, nause and dizziness. The nurse is under investigation as I put in a formal complaint and it was revealed to me how negligent and abusive she has been with other patients. I say I was lucky as I never died.
My discharge, what a joke, I must have spent about 3 weeks longer in hospital purely because no one spoke to each other. Brian finally got everyone together (Consultant, OT, ICT, Physiotherapists, Doctor, nurse, me, and him) in a meeting and a week later I Escaped....
Now at home and on so many tablets its a joke, have the care team come every morning to help me, they did come on an afternoon but for me it was so inconvenient that I stopped it. I also have a nurse come to flush my hickman line and check my dressings and the physio come every so often to give me exercises to do.
I haven't seen the horses since the 12th December and I miss them loads but the dogs keep me company which is great. had to cancel a beach ride but do have some one day dog shows I can go to so hopefully I am off the oxygen by then. Oh did I not mention the oxygen.. I am on 24/7 oxygen which is a pain and if I go out to Tesco's or anything I have to use a wheelchair and a portable oxygen tank and Brian pushes me around. I also can't manage stairs that well so for the past 3 weeks I have been sleeping downstairs on the small bed.
So to date, still got the Hickman Line to my heart inside me, stuck in the house unless Brian takes me out, trying to get off the oxygen, trying to remember to do my exercises and eager to get back to some sort of normality.
Things can only get better... :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment