September 22, 2005, revisited

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting much. I decided to stop the hospital update stuff. While I think that sharing my ICU experiences may help some people, I don’t think that the minute details are that important. I’ll mention a few things here, and if anyone wants to know more just ask.

I want to say that I have great respect for the nurses who work in the ICU, the doctors as well, but they come and go and the nurses are there all shift. The environment is designed to facilitate caring for critically ill patients; it is not congenial to normal living. There is something called ICU psychosis that affects patients, and the nurses are not immune to all of the effects. One of the things that can get to the nurses in the ICU is that their patients are so bad off. By way of evidence, I offer the following.

This is the day I was moved from the ICU to a regular room. Now, I understood that this was significant, but all I was doing was lying in bed. The nurses on duty told me I was going to be moved, and then when everything was set they came in to get all my stuff together – cards, the electric razor my wife bought for me because I was on blood thinners and a regular razor was a big no-no, a special card that my wife had brought for me, and there was the Black Knight that was watching over me.

Other ICU nurses started stopping by to help, but there wasn’t room for them. I didn’t really understand why they were all so excited. When they wheeled me out of the ICU space and over to the elevator on the other side of the ICU, every nurse working there said hi and wished me luck and congratulated me on getting out of the ICU, and they were all smiling like crazy and everyone knew me. Even the guy cleaning the floor knew who I was and was smiling and wishing me luck and all. I did not understand what was going on.

OK, maybe I’m dense. I had been in that ICU for 6 weeks (the first week was at another hospital), and I had been almost dead. They all knew that. I had been there so long everyone knew who I was. They all knew how sick I had been. They all knew that I almost died. They don’t see people that sick get out of the ICU that often, and when they do, they end up back there again. I was getting out because I had recovered and they knew that I was going to make it. They were all happy to see that I had survived. They were happy to see me going to a regular room. It was a big deal.

I think I’m beginning to get it.*

In my defense, I was still pretty drugged up, which not only kept me from worrying too much – I just kind of accepted everything and took it as it came – but may have made me slow on the uptake. At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

And I still say that there was a cat in the ER.

*Yeah, I’m slow, I’ve had stuff on my mind.