Hospital

I know you guys haven’t heard from me in awhile and this is why.

One year and eleven months after my 3 day hospitalization in June, 2009, I was hospitalized again, this time for 2 weeks.  I’ve learned that when you are hospitalized for that long, outside temporal time ceases to exist.  You have no access to a calendar, or appointments, or even what your family has done that day.  There becomes only Hospital Time, which is spent in pain and waiting.  Waiting for the doctor to come, waiting for them to decide on what treatments they are going to try next, waiting for them to start the new treatments, waiting for the nurse to come in so you have someone to talk to, waiting for the next round of meds that will help to lower your pain, waiting for visitors, and waiting for some sort of normal structure and familiarity to come back to your life.

This time it was not bronchitis and my inability to breathe that put me in the hospital, although everything started on February 8 as bronchitis and a sinus infection.  Rather, sometime between the beginning of February and the beginning of May, the sinus infection became simultaneous with, or morphed into, a migraine so severe that I was hospitalized straight from my neurologist’s office.  Let’s just say that the pain level was high enough that normal therapeutic amounts of morphine weren’t doing a thing.

I had 2 IVs going with migraine meds, and the meds were really not doing much. The trouble with that level of pain is that you can’t do anything to distract yourself because you can’t concentrate on anything else.  You can’t read, you can’t pray, you can’t watch TV.  You’re just kind of stuck.  And you are in too much pain to care about anything else.

Next:  the things that really helped.