Oh, this should be fun.

Actually, I’m looking forward to it. So is my wife. Especially my wife, if it works.

After eight months of acute back pain that has rendered me unable to drive or do much of anything else, I finally have a chance to get rid of the pain and ditch at least some of the pain medicine that comes with it. I finally have a chance to drive again.

If it works.

The “it” I keep referring to is an implant that will stimulate my spinal cord at 10 KHz. It’s called Nevro HF10™ therapy, and it’s implanted over two surgical sessions. The first operation inserts it in a “test drive” mode to see if it works at all. If it does, they go back in and implant it permanently.

If I understand correctly, it blocks the pain signals coming from certain parts of your body by sending a high frequency signal that overrides them, preventing them from ever reaching the brain. I may be a tad bit off on my explanation, so read the above link if you want to see exactly how it works. The important part is that it’s supposed to keep my back from hurting. If I’m lucky, it’ll help with the pain left from the ankles I broke severely in 2009 as well (but that’s on another blog).

I’ll have some sort of control device hooked to me, I assume, to fine-tune the output of the contraption. If I decide to keep it permanently, I’ll be given a remote control, which I’d better not lose. (I have visions of my spinal cord reacting to someone’s TV across the street.)

The first operation is scheduled for October 25th, so I don’t have much time to prepare myself mentally. That’s compared to the eternity it took for the hospital and insurance company to approve the operation in the first place. I swear, it was at least a month, maybe longer.

Anyway, please wish me luck. It’s not going to get me off of disability, but it just might give me back a bit of quality of life.

If it works.

As with all things, there are always a few loose ends left to tie up, and such is the case with my recent hospitalization. In my case, they came by the way of a follow-up appointment with my primary care physician.

I got lucky in that the hospital had sent him a copy of their records concerning my visit. He was able to work with those to rule out the possibility of a heart attack. Instead, he believes I had a problem with my ulnar nerve. He said it can mimic the symptoms of a heart attack at times, thanks to its location. That explains why the paramedics didn’t pick up any of the stabbing pains I experienced on the night I was admitted to the hospital. In other words, wonderful—no heart attack.

If you’ll recall, I picked up a couple of injuries during my stay at the hospital, from the blood pressure cuff and from nearly blowing out my IV line trying to get out of bed. Well, it turns out that I also injured the back of my right leg, and I wouldn’t have caught it if my wife hadn’t noticed it. It started out as a two-inch bruise and has mutated into the monster you see on the right. It now covers practically the entire back surface of my calf. My doctor diagnosed this as a hematoma. I’m supposed to sit on a heating pad to make the main lump break up so that the whole thing can dissipate.

There was one other issue that my doctor dealt with which was not related to the hospital. I don’t remember if I mentioned it before, but I have been dealing with an itchy, peeling bump on my right ear since around December of last year. It’s just a couple of millimeters wide, but it hurts. My doctor thought I might have a basal cell carcinoma (a form of cancer) and sent me to a skin cancer specialist to get it biopsied. The results came back the day after I got out of the hospital, and it’s not cancer (whew!). Instead, it’s a spot with the unfortunate name of a picker’s nodule. A better name for it, which my doctor used, is neurodermatitis. Because of the delicate location it’s in (right on a piece of cartilage), I’m supposed to put lidocaine on it, cover it with a liquid bandage product, and most of all, resist every urge to scratch it. I’m even supposed to put a cool compress inside my pillowcase to keep me from scratching it in my sleep.

It’s a lot of loose ends, like I said. I’ll find out if I have any others when I go to see my hematologist on Monday.

The night in the ER room left me near tears from pain in my back and in my tailbone (those gurney cushions are thin). I also suffered another attack of the upper chest stabbing pains. The nurses gave me another nitro pill in response. It helped, but not as dramatically as the one the paramedics gave me earlier. Finally, they finally gave me a 10 mg hydrocodone pill, which was a mixed blessing: I normally take 15 mg every six hours, and the extra 5 mg I take threw a monkey wrench into their works. They couldn’t figure out how to give it to me, thanks to their wonky computer system. As a result, I only had partial pain relief, which contributed to making the night a living hell.

Just as I began to think the night would never end, a doctor showed up. He smiled, shook my hand, and explained what was likely going to happen to me during the day. One procedure I would undergo would be a nuclear chemical stress test (for which I was fasting—more on it later). I asked him what time it was: he said 7:00 a.m., or something near it. The fact that I hadn’t slept for so long shocked the hell out of me. Anyway, I did get him to have a nurse to check on my pain medicine before he left, which finally resulted in a proper pain medicine dose. It also resulted in the arrival of my wife, who helped to finagle a cup of ice chips for me.

The testing started with chest X-rays, followed by an ultrasound of my heart. It’s hard to explain the pain caused by a heart ultrasound. The technician had to get his probe in between my ribs—hard—and scan while I kept a steady rate of breathing. I couldn’t hold my breath at all, not even from the pain, since it “made my heart go away,” according to the tech. It took what seemed like forever, and it covered three different areas of my chest. I was very sore afterward.

Now, the nuclear chemical stress test turned out to be a different level of discomfort. They gave me a shot of a radioactive tracer first, then scanned my heart. Immediately afterward, nature called, and she had a lot to say. (Have you ever had to use toilet paper with a heparin block and with an O2 Saturation Monitor wire hanging from your index finger? Not an easy task.) Shortly after that little circus finished up, the doctor arrived, which was the cue for the techs to put me on a table and inject me with something called Lexiscan to perform the actual stress test portion of the procedure. The Lexiscan immediately caused my blood flow to increase, making me short of breath, dizzy, and slightly sore in my gut, leaving me generally worn out. For some unknown reason, I had a bad case of hiccups as the tech wheeled me back to the ER room. When I arrived, (*gasp!*) lunch was waiting for me. I ate some of it and finally got some sleep afterward. Several hours later, the same crew came for me and ran the heart scan again to see what changes had taken place due to the stress test.

My wife and I spent some time watching a TV with no remote control after the second scan. Later, my main nurse managed to find a real hospital bed and wheel it into my ER room in place of the gurney bed. I fell asleep again almost instantly, as did my wife (she got a nasty crick in her neck from leaning against my pillow). I almost missed dinner and my pain medicine dose from both of us being asleep. Nice as the bed was, I learned later after my wife went home that it was up too high. I had hell getting out of it to go to the bathroom, nearly blowing out my IV plug.

Speaking of IVs and other connections, I should mention the torture device called the blood pressure cuff. I’m no stranger to auto-measuring cuffs: I lived with one on me back in 2009-2010 when I broke both my ankles and nearly died to to blood loss from a botched surgery (a different story entirely). The one in last week’s ER trip was set to go off on the standard 15 minute interval, but it did so with incredible force. I still have bruises on my arm from the compression, as you can see in the picture on the right. That picture was taken on September 29th, 2017. It’s now October 3rd, and the bruises look even worse.

Back to the story. My wife returned the next day at about the same time that the main hospital doctor came into my ER room. The doctor said that all of my tests had come out—wait for it—negative. Yep. Go figure. At least I wasn’t experiencing the chest pains anymore. So, the doctor released me to go home that morning.

As the nurses prepared my check-out papers, my wife helped me out of my hospital gown, scanned me for stray electrode stickers, and helped me get dressed. We left as quickly as we could, with instructions to see my regular doctor sometime this week. I’ll be seeing him on Wednesday.

Now comes the task of letting my other doctors—including my pain management doctor—know about my little two-day run-in with an emergency room. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled.

The past few days have been no fun at all, and that’s putting things mildly. Very mildly.

Tuesday morning, I began to get pains in the upper left corner of my chest. Just a brief stab, about a five on a scale of one to ten. They happened about every thirty minutes or so. I wasn’t very worried by them, because I’d had similar pains in the past.

As the day went on, the pains grew more frequent. The intensity and duration remained the same: they just happened more often. By nighttime, they were happening in bouts of every approximately every five minutes, separated by approximately 30 minute breaks.

I hadn’t said anything to my wife about this all day, but then during dinner I started getting constant numbness down my left arm toward my smaller two fingers. The stab bouts became more frequent and lasted longer. I figured that was my cue to talk to my wife about the situation.

We hemmed and hawed about what to do for a few minutes, thinking of how expensive an ambulance ride would be if I was sent home. Finally, we gave in and called 911, figuring they would know best whether or not if I even needed to go to a hospital.

The ambulance arrived within minutes. EMTs began taking my vital signs immediately afterward. After they talked to me about my symptoms and medical history, they decided to take me to a hospital. They loaded me into the ambulance, started an IV, gave me a nitro pill, and hooked me up to an EKG machine. After that, it was off to the nearest hospital that had room available (more on this later).

I had to wait a little while at the hospital while they got a room ready in the ER. During that time, the nitro pill kicked in and the pains stopped happening. The strange part of the pains is that they never showed up on the EKG, despite the symptoms.

Skip forward a bit to me in the ER room, with me on an ER gurney bed (important fact). They continued the IV and EKG and started running blood enzyme tests. Later on, they decided to admit me for observation and testing. The only problem was that they were stuffed to the gills and had no regular rooms. I would have to stay in the ER and sleep (ha!) on the ER gurney.

To add to the fun, they put me on NPO (nothing by mouth) for testing to follow the next day. That meant they couldn’t give me the pain medicine I take for serious pain in my back. On a scale of one to ten, my pain shot up to an eight overnight. Also, I was hooked up to the IV and so many wires that I couldn’t get out of bed to go to the bathroom. I had hell trying to swing myself over the side of the bed to use a bedside urinal, especially considering the pain level, and I’d always have to call the nurses afterward to reconnect something that had come loose in the effort.

I got no sleep that night.

(Continued in an upcoming post)