ICU stay
I've been writing this little by little for the past couple of weeks so that I didn't forget what I went through while I was in ICU. I'm sure there are a ton of things I missed but I wrote down what I could. I'm also the worlds worst writer and horrible at making coherant thoughts at times so you don't have to read it.
Believe it or not, everything started while I was still in the hospital after having Marissa. On Saturday, June 18th, my blood pressure continued to be high and my pulse oxygen level was around 93%, which isn’t great. They had me using something that was supposed to help me breathe (can’t remember the name at this point) a couple times an hour. I kept telling my nurses that I felt like I had something in my throat and/or lungs. On Sunday, I started hearing this whistling sound through my nose every time I breathed but decided to ignore it and blame it on the dryness in my nose because it was bleeding too. I kept telling Phil about it though and I do think I mentioned it to my nurses after a couple hours of it. They said it was probably just the dryness of the hospital. They discharged me that night with my blood pressure still a bit high and my pulse oxygen level never getting any better.
Monday I was doing fine. It was a great day that I got to spend with my daughter, my mom, and my brother. I woke up at about 4am on Tuesday morning and was short of breath. I went into the nursery and spoke to my mom for a couple hours and kept telling her how short of breath I was.
We had a home health nurse come that day at 10 am and I mentioned the shortness of breath to her and she didn’t really say anything. I decided to call my OB/GYN and went in at 1pm. By 1pm I was fine. I had taken a nap and woke up feeling much better but I went in anyways. She listened to my heart and lungs and deemed everything to be perfect. She said I probably just had reflux and gave me a prescription for Prevacid. I went home without filling the prescription because I was feeling fine.
By 10pm that night I started having a lot of shortness of breath and a bad cough. My mom was starting to get worried about me. Phil didn’t really seem to care since my doctor assured us that it wasn’t anything serious. He went to sleep and I stayed awake. My mom stayed up with me and we took care of the baby. I kept drinking a ton of water thinking it might help the reflux. Who knew that it was actually hurting me even more? I think I ate 4 Tums and my mom gave me some Pepcid AC thinking it was still reflux. All through the night I kept trying to lie down and every time I laid down I felt so much worse. My nose would start whistling and the shortness of breath would get worse to the point where I don’t even think I was breathing at times. I was crying. I couldn’t stop. Phil would wake up and tell me to calm down and then go right back to sleep. I got on my computer and made the post about not being able to breathe and right after everything got much worse. I think I might have had an anxiety attack or something so my mom called the 24 hour pharmacy to see how much the Prevacid would be and they said $160. At that point she told me to call my doctor and ask her to prescribe me something else.
So I called my OB/GYN at about 4:30 am and woke her up. I felt terrible since she was 37 weeks pregnant and probably needed her sleep. I could not stop crying while I talked to her. That’s about all I could do at that point. She told me if I was feeling so badly to go to the emergency room. So I got off the phone and told my mom what she said. I think I was continuing to break down and I think I even told my mom I didn’t want to go back to the hospital. She went and woke Phil up and we both put some clothes on and drove down to the nearest hospital. I was still crying and I could barely walk into the ER. It was causing me to be so out of breath. We got inside and the nurse saw how much distress I was in and rushed me back right away. Phil stayed behind to fill out paperwork. She took my blood pressure and it was 171/116, my heart rate was 140, and my pulse oxygen level was down to 88%. She then rushed me to the back and had the nurse hook me up to an IV and then they took me for a chest x-ray immediately. I was surprised that everything was happening so quickly and didn’t realize I was so sick yet. I had thought when I was going in that I would probably be waiting for a couple hours and then be seen and go home.
After the chest x-ray they had a doctor come in and talk to me and he told me that they would take me for a CT scan next. He said they still didn’t have the chest x-ray back yet but they thought I might have fluid in my lungs. I started getting scared because things were definitely more serious than I thought. After the CT scan, they wheeled me back to the triage type area and the doctor came and said I did have fluid in my lungs. He told the nurse to go ahead and give me Lasix through my IV and told me the medication was a diuretic and that it would work almost immediately since they would be giving it to me through my IV. Seriously, it worked within like 2 minutes and I started having to pee every 4-5 minutes. They made me pee in a bed side potty thing and then the nurse would come empty it and measure how much output I was having. It was definitely traumatic since I was still having a ton of post partum bleeding.
The doctor came back and told me that they were going to do an echocardiogram of my heart. I was shocked and asked him if they thought there was something wrong with it and he said he didn’t know but they would like to check. A technician came into the triage area and proceeded to do the echo. She wasn’t talking much and I could tell she was focusing on one area a lot. At the end I asked her if everything was okay and she said she couldn’t say but that the doctor would come back and talk to me about it.
The doctor came in and said he didn’t have the results from the echo just yet but that they were going to go ahead and admit me to the hospital. The register person had told Phil that our insurance didn’t cover this hospital so I asked the doctor if I was being transferred to Good Sam (where I gave birth) and he told me no. He said that this was a qualified emergency and that my insurance would pay for it. Then they said they were admitting me to ICU, which totally freaked me out because I still didn’t think I was as sick as I really was. It was at this point that Phil and I looked at each other and I started asking him repeatedly if I was going to die. I asked the doctor, asked the nurses, and no one would give me an answer. They kept saying, “I don’t know.”
I was set up in my room and attached to a ton of monitors. The monitors checked my blood pressure every hour and constantly kept track of my pulse and pulse oxygen level. I had oxygen on 24/7. I had a cardiologist come in to see me pretty early on and he told me that he had my echo results and that my heart was very weak and enlarged. He told me that my heart was only working at 30% when a normal heart works above 55%.
After the cardiologist left, Phil kept asking me if I would call my mom and let her know what was happening. I kept crying and saying I couldn’t handle calling her just yet. I wasn’t handling the news very well. It didn’t help that no one would tell me if I was going to die or not. I couldn’t face talking to my mom because I knew I would just cry and cry and cry. Phil tried to call my mom but instead dialed his mom’s number. She answered and he said while he had her on the phone he would go ahead and tell her. He broke down and started crying really hard. I know his mom got really worried at this point. Phil managed to call my mom and let her know and my mom was just thankful that we went to the hospital and that I was getting help and to not worry about Marissa. We settled in and since the Lasix had gotten some of the fluid out of my lungs I was able to breathe a bit and started going in and out of sleep. I think at some points I was just delirious because I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. This was my third hospital stay in less than a month.
They also started me on antibiotics for the pneumonia. The antibiotics were so hard on my veins that I got a new IV at least twice a day.
After awhile my OB/GYN doctor came over to visit me. Her office is attached to the hospital so it was a quick walk over. She came to see how I was doing and I could tell she felt awful that she had sent me home the day before. She checked my c-section incision to make sure it was okay. Then she left since there wasn’t much she could do for me.
When I was first admitted, I couldn’t remember my family doctors name so they had to pick someone to come see me. I really liked her. She was nice and would tell me straight up what was happening. She told me I was in congestive heart failure. That I had a lot of fluid in my lungs and that I also had pneumonia. She said if I hadn’t come in when I did that I would have died. She also told me that due to the medications I was going to be on that I wouldn’t be allowed to breastfeed. I was really upset and started crying. Call it hormones or whatever you want but I broke down. I couldn’t stop crying. The doctor almost started crying. I could tell she felt really bad for me because I was so young and because I had just had a baby. She told me that I would be in the hospital for awhile. She said I would have a stream of doctors coming in to see me once a day to check up on me and see how I was doing.
The nurses would check me over each time a shift changed and at one point they noticed I had a really bad rash on my back. No one really knew where it came from so they decided to start putting antibiotics on it to see if it got better.
Later that first day my doctor came in and told me that they were going to do an ultrasound of my legs to make sure that I didn’t have a blood clot. When the technicians came in to do the ultrasound of my legs, they lowered the head of the bed and told me to lay down. The second I laid down I started feeling really nauseous. I told Phil to grab the garbage can and I started throwing up so hard into it. I couldn’t control my body and it was shaking so hard. I know I scared the shit out of Phil. The nurse came in immediately and gave me a shot of Phenergan into my IV and it started working immediately. I fell asleep and don’t even remember the ultrasound of my legs. I was out for the next several hours and people attempted to visit me but I was deeply asleep. My doctor came back and said the ultrasound was inconclusive. They started me on blood thinners just in case. I was on heparin with twice daily shots into my belly for the first 2 days and then on Lovenox for the rest. I’m still not certain of why they changed it.
The rest of the first day was a blur for me. Phil stayed by my side while my mom took care of Marissa. Phil had to go home around 8 because the ICU visiting hours were over.
The next morning I was told by a nurse that one of Phil’s cousins tried to visit me in the middle of the night but didn’t want to wake me up. I knew Jeff was a nurse but I didn’t know he was an ICU nurse at Mercy. He was there trying to check up on and get news about me to his family. (His dad is Phil’s boss at work) The second day was pretty boring. I started taking a ton of medications and was bored out of my mind. The hospital didn’t have internet access so I was completely relying on television to get me through the days. I had books with me but I couldn’t concentrate on reading, too many thoughts racing through my head.
Later that day around 8 pm they decided to move me down to one of the regular rooms. They thought I had stabilized enough to be down there. I definitely preferred the ICU treatment because they would give you a cell phone and you could call your nurse and they would be there right away. Downstairs it took forever for a nurse to come find out what you needed/wanted and they didn’t watch you as close. As the hours passed I started feeling shortness of breath again. I told myself it was nothing and tried to sleep. I told my nurse around midnight that I was having problems and she took my pulse oxygen level and it was down a bit but it wasn’t anything too worrisome. At 3am I called my nurse to tell her I couldn’t breathe and she decided to call my lung doctor. He told her to take me immediately back upstairs and they gave me more diuretics up in ICU. He told me that I would stay up in ICU until he felt I was better.
I stayed up in ICU until the 4th day and they finally thought that I was well enough to go downstairs. They moved me downstairs at around 5pm on the 4th day and I stayed there until 5pm on the 5th day when they finally let me go home. My doctor told me that if my lung doctor had his way I would have been there indefinitely. She said he was very overprotective of me and didn’t want to send me home yet. She talked him into it though and they let me go home. I remember getting to see Marissa as I was leaving was a huge emotional ordeal. I cried every single day I was in the hospital for a long time because I couldn’t see her. Mainly because I was in ICU and there were some very sick people nearby and she was only a couple days old. When they moved me downstairs they still wouldn’t let her in because my nurses were taking care of someone that had shingles. Bad luck, I guess.
I still have a bruise from where one of my IVs leaked fluid into my arm. 7 weeks later and it is still there and a horrible reminder of what I’ve been through. I’m starting to wonder if it will ever go away.
I am now on 4 different medications; Coreg, Lasix, Spironolactone, and Vasotec until further notice.
Believe it or not, everything started while I was still in the hospital after having Marissa. On Saturday, June 18th, my blood pressure continued to be high and my pulse oxygen level was around 93%, which isn’t great. They had me using something that was supposed to help me breathe (can’t remember the name at this point) a couple times an hour. I kept telling my nurses that I felt like I had something in my throat and/or lungs. On Sunday, I started hearing this whistling sound through my nose every time I breathed but decided to ignore it and blame it on the dryness in my nose because it was bleeding too. I kept telling Phil about it though and I do think I mentioned it to my nurses after a couple hours of it. They said it was probably just the dryness of the hospital. They discharged me that night with my blood pressure still a bit high and my pulse oxygen level never getting any better.
Monday I was doing fine. It was a great day that I got to spend with my daughter, my mom, and my brother. I woke up at about 4am on Tuesday morning and was short of breath. I went into the nursery and spoke to my mom for a couple hours and kept telling her how short of breath I was.
We had a home health nurse come that day at 10 am and I mentioned the shortness of breath to her and she didn’t really say anything. I decided to call my OB/GYN and went in at 1pm. By 1pm I was fine. I had taken a nap and woke up feeling much better but I went in anyways. She listened to my heart and lungs and deemed everything to be perfect. She said I probably just had reflux and gave me a prescription for Prevacid. I went home without filling the prescription because I was feeling fine.
By 10pm that night I started having a lot of shortness of breath and a bad cough. My mom was starting to get worried about me. Phil didn’t really seem to care since my doctor assured us that it wasn’t anything serious. He went to sleep and I stayed awake. My mom stayed up with me and we took care of the baby. I kept drinking a ton of water thinking it might help the reflux. Who knew that it was actually hurting me even more? I think I ate 4 Tums and my mom gave me some Pepcid AC thinking it was still reflux. All through the night I kept trying to lie down and every time I laid down I felt so much worse. My nose would start whistling and the shortness of breath would get worse to the point where I don’t even think I was breathing at times. I was crying. I couldn’t stop. Phil would wake up and tell me to calm down and then go right back to sleep. I got on my computer and made the post about not being able to breathe and right after everything got much worse. I think I might have had an anxiety attack or something so my mom called the 24 hour pharmacy to see how much the Prevacid would be and they said $160. At that point she told me to call my doctor and ask her to prescribe me something else.
So I called my OB/GYN at about 4:30 am and woke her up. I felt terrible since she was 37 weeks pregnant and probably needed her sleep. I could not stop crying while I talked to her. That’s about all I could do at that point. She told me if I was feeling so badly to go to the emergency room. So I got off the phone and told my mom what she said. I think I was continuing to break down and I think I even told my mom I didn’t want to go back to the hospital. She went and woke Phil up and we both put some clothes on and drove down to the nearest hospital. I was still crying and I could barely walk into the ER. It was causing me to be so out of breath. We got inside and the nurse saw how much distress I was in and rushed me back right away. Phil stayed behind to fill out paperwork. She took my blood pressure and it was 171/116, my heart rate was 140, and my pulse oxygen level was down to 88%. She then rushed me to the back and had the nurse hook me up to an IV and then they took me for a chest x-ray immediately. I was surprised that everything was happening so quickly and didn’t realize I was so sick yet. I had thought when I was going in that I would probably be waiting for a couple hours and then be seen and go home.
After the chest x-ray they had a doctor come in and talk to me and he told me that they would take me for a CT scan next. He said they still didn’t have the chest x-ray back yet but they thought I might have fluid in my lungs. I started getting scared because things were definitely more serious than I thought. After the CT scan, they wheeled me back to the triage type area and the doctor came and said I did have fluid in my lungs. He told the nurse to go ahead and give me Lasix through my IV and told me the medication was a diuretic and that it would work almost immediately since they would be giving it to me through my IV. Seriously, it worked within like 2 minutes and I started having to pee every 4-5 minutes. They made me pee in a bed side potty thing and then the nurse would come empty it and measure how much output I was having. It was definitely traumatic since I was still having a ton of post partum bleeding.
The doctor came back and told me that they were going to do an echocardiogram of my heart. I was shocked and asked him if they thought there was something wrong with it and he said he didn’t know but they would like to check. A technician came into the triage area and proceeded to do the echo. She wasn’t talking much and I could tell she was focusing on one area a lot. At the end I asked her if everything was okay and she said she couldn’t say but that the doctor would come back and talk to me about it.
The doctor came in and said he didn’t have the results from the echo just yet but that they were going to go ahead and admit me to the hospital. The register person had told Phil that our insurance didn’t cover this hospital so I asked the doctor if I was being transferred to Good Sam (where I gave birth) and he told me no. He said that this was a qualified emergency and that my insurance would pay for it. Then they said they were admitting me to ICU, which totally freaked me out because I still didn’t think I was as sick as I really was. It was at this point that Phil and I looked at each other and I started asking him repeatedly if I was going to die. I asked the doctor, asked the nurses, and no one would give me an answer. They kept saying, “I don’t know.”
I was set up in my room and attached to a ton of monitors. The monitors checked my blood pressure every hour and constantly kept track of my pulse and pulse oxygen level. I had oxygen on 24/7. I had a cardiologist come in to see me pretty early on and he told me that he had my echo results and that my heart was very weak and enlarged. He told me that my heart was only working at 30% when a normal heart works above 55%.
After the cardiologist left, Phil kept asking me if I would call my mom and let her know what was happening. I kept crying and saying I couldn’t handle calling her just yet. I wasn’t handling the news very well. It didn’t help that no one would tell me if I was going to die or not. I couldn’t face talking to my mom because I knew I would just cry and cry and cry. Phil tried to call my mom but instead dialed his mom’s number. She answered and he said while he had her on the phone he would go ahead and tell her. He broke down and started crying really hard. I know his mom got really worried at this point. Phil managed to call my mom and let her know and my mom was just thankful that we went to the hospital and that I was getting help and to not worry about Marissa. We settled in and since the Lasix had gotten some of the fluid out of my lungs I was able to breathe a bit and started going in and out of sleep. I think at some points I was just delirious because I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. This was my third hospital stay in less than a month.
They also started me on antibiotics for the pneumonia. The antibiotics were so hard on my veins that I got a new IV at least twice a day.
After awhile my OB/GYN doctor came over to visit me. Her office is attached to the hospital so it was a quick walk over. She came to see how I was doing and I could tell she felt awful that she had sent me home the day before. She checked my c-section incision to make sure it was okay. Then she left since there wasn’t much she could do for me.
When I was first admitted, I couldn’t remember my family doctors name so they had to pick someone to come see me. I really liked her. She was nice and would tell me straight up what was happening. She told me I was in congestive heart failure. That I had a lot of fluid in my lungs and that I also had pneumonia. She said if I hadn’t come in when I did that I would have died. She also told me that due to the medications I was going to be on that I wouldn’t be allowed to breastfeed. I was really upset and started crying. Call it hormones or whatever you want but I broke down. I couldn’t stop crying. The doctor almost started crying. I could tell she felt really bad for me because I was so young and because I had just had a baby. She told me that I would be in the hospital for awhile. She said I would have a stream of doctors coming in to see me once a day to check up on me and see how I was doing.
The nurses would check me over each time a shift changed and at one point they noticed I had a really bad rash on my back. No one really knew where it came from so they decided to start putting antibiotics on it to see if it got better.
Later that first day my doctor came in and told me that they were going to do an ultrasound of my legs to make sure that I didn’t have a blood clot. When the technicians came in to do the ultrasound of my legs, they lowered the head of the bed and told me to lay down. The second I laid down I started feeling really nauseous. I told Phil to grab the garbage can and I started throwing up so hard into it. I couldn’t control my body and it was shaking so hard. I know I scared the shit out of Phil. The nurse came in immediately and gave me a shot of Phenergan into my IV and it started working immediately. I fell asleep and don’t even remember the ultrasound of my legs. I was out for the next several hours and people attempted to visit me but I was deeply asleep. My doctor came back and said the ultrasound was inconclusive. They started me on blood thinners just in case. I was on heparin with twice daily shots into my belly for the first 2 days and then on Lovenox for the rest. I’m still not certain of why they changed it.
The rest of the first day was a blur for me. Phil stayed by my side while my mom took care of Marissa. Phil had to go home around 8 because the ICU visiting hours were over.
The next morning I was told by a nurse that one of Phil’s cousins tried to visit me in the middle of the night but didn’t want to wake me up. I knew Jeff was a nurse but I didn’t know he was an ICU nurse at Mercy. He was there trying to check up on and get news about me to his family. (His dad is Phil’s boss at work) The second day was pretty boring. I started taking a ton of medications and was bored out of my mind. The hospital didn’t have internet access so I was completely relying on television to get me through the days. I had books with me but I couldn’t concentrate on reading, too many thoughts racing through my head.
Later that day around 8 pm they decided to move me down to one of the regular rooms. They thought I had stabilized enough to be down there. I definitely preferred the ICU treatment because they would give you a cell phone and you could call your nurse and they would be there right away. Downstairs it took forever for a nurse to come find out what you needed/wanted and they didn’t watch you as close. As the hours passed I started feeling shortness of breath again. I told myself it was nothing and tried to sleep. I told my nurse around midnight that I was having problems and she took my pulse oxygen level and it was down a bit but it wasn’t anything too worrisome. At 3am I called my nurse to tell her I couldn’t breathe and she decided to call my lung doctor. He told her to take me immediately back upstairs and they gave me more diuretics up in ICU. He told me that I would stay up in ICU until he felt I was better.
I stayed up in ICU until the 4th day and they finally thought that I was well enough to go downstairs. They moved me downstairs at around 5pm on the 4th day and I stayed there until 5pm on the 5th day when they finally let me go home. My doctor told me that if my lung doctor had his way I would have been there indefinitely. She said he was very overprotective of me and didn’t want to send me home yet. She talked him into it though and they let me go home. I remember getting to see Marissa as I was leaving was a huge emotional ordeal. I cried every single day I was in the hospital for a long time because I couldn’t see her. Mainly because I was in ICU and there were some very sick people nearby and she was only a couple days old. When they moved me downstairs they still wouldn’t let her in because my nurses were taking care of someone that had shingles. Bad luck, I guess.
I still have a bruise from where one of my IVs leaked fluid into my arm. 7 weeks later and it is still there and a horrible reminder of what I’ve been through. I’m starting to wonder if it will ever go away.
I am now on 4 different medications; Coreg, Lasix, Spironolactone, and Vasotec until further notice.