the passionate ailurophile

Sorry for no update for the past few days, but I have been so frakkin’ tired!  Mike has been in the hospital this time for less than a week now, but it feels as if he’s been there for much longer.  Having to go there every day is taking a lot out of me.  I am so glad that there is public transportation to this hospital, because driving…not always able to do it.

Mike is doing much better, but he will not be coming home this week.  His new cardiologist, the one who replaced the quack that he fired, came by today and said that he thinks that Mike should get an implantable defibrillator.  This is not exactly the same thing as a pacemaker, but it’s similar in some ways, and the implantation procedure is the same.

It’s minor surgery, they only make a small incision of about two inches.  They don’t even knock him out completely, they just do a local anesthesia.  Recovery time is quick…if they do it on Thursday or Friday, as they want to, he should be able to go home a few days after that.

We agreed that this was a good idea, told the doctor this, and so it will be done.  The fact is that medication alone is no longer working for Mike’s heart problems, but the defibrillator together with the medication would be a vast improvement, and would keep the old ticker going for a lot longer.   As long as it will enable Mike to go back to a normal life, and not end up in the hospital every few months, we’re all for it.

Here is more info about the implantable defibrillator.

It will be done at Lahey, no need to move to another hospital.  If he’d gone back to the hellhole, he would have been sent to Tufts Medical Center to have it done, and it would have been a pacemaker, not a defibrillator.  The consensus of the doctors at Lahey who have seen Mike say no pacemaker, it has to be the defibrillator.  I tend to trust them a LOT more than the quack and any of his pals.

Switching hospitals is a royal pain in the ass, it’s good that he can just have this done where he already is, and get it over with.

As much as we like this hospital, it is getting old being there, and some people are being wicked annoying.  There was this one nurse’s assistant today who wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.  She came in a couple of times to do Mike’s blood pressure, etc., while I was there, sipping away at a bottle of iced tea.  After I left, she came back and rooted through the garbage can in Mike’s room, and accused him of drinking the iced tea and not telling anyone (they do need to keep track of how much he drinks and how much he pees out).

He told her that it was my iced tea, that I was drinking it when she was there, and that he didn’t have any.  He said he wasn’t sure if she believed him.  But sheesh, how dumb can anyone be?  She SAW me there, with the iced tea right in front of me.

I just hope that the nurses and doctors don’t start giving him shit about this.  And I hope to hell that no one finds that bag of potato chips in the drawer of his bedside table.  If I had known that this assistant was gonna snoop, I would have brought the chips home.  I left them there because I had bought them, then didn’t feel like eating them, figuring I’ll just have them when I come back tomorrow.  Mike knows he shouldn’t eat them anyway, too much salt.  But I’m not the patient here, I can eat what I want to.

I think that starting tomorrow, I will bring a plastic grocery bag along, and throw my personal food trash into that, then toss it into one of the big garbage cans in the lobby downstairs.  That way, no one will see it in the room trash and accuse Mike of eating shit that he’s not supposed to have.

It would really suck if I were told that I can no longer bring my own food from the cafeteria into the room.  I don’t want to have to eat it downstairs, I want to eat with Mike.

I do confess that I have snuck in some food for him, because he’s been complaining about being hungry in the middle of the night.  But it’s mostly been healthy things like fresh fruit, which he can explain away by saying that he’d ordered an apple or whatever with a meal, and saved it for later.  He was actually doing that until it occurred to me that I could just buy fruit in the cafeteria as if it were for me, and stash them away for him.  This helps get him through the night, he can’t sleep if he’s hungry, but they are restricting the calories too much.

It is a really good sign that he is so hungry, though.  He was barely eating when I first brought him in.

I hope it’s just this one assistant who is being obnoxious about rooting through the trash, I hope she doesn’t complain and cause problems if I want to eat in the room with Mike.  I realize she means well, but DUH!

I’ll be happy when this hospital thing is over!