Two days after I started this blog, our world turned upside down. On Friday, 12/19 my husband, Brian, got dizzy and fainted outside our home. When he fell, he hit his face on the corner of the house and the drain pipe, cutting his face in three places. He was bleeding profusely from the cuts. I got him to the ER (with the help of the local police & EMS). The reason he passed out was a pulmonary embolism. The doctors told me the bad news was he had multiple clots in both lungs; the good news was they were all small. It was difficult for the doctors to find the balance between keeping more clots from forming and keeping him from bleeding to death. They told me he almost died and we weren't out of the woods yet. He was sedated and intubated, CT scanned, X-rayed and then moved to ICU. The chaplain took me up to the ICU waiting room.
By the time I saw Brian again, he had a naso-gastric tube, a breathing tube and about four IV's. They had tried to clean up his face but he was still bleeding. They also had him restrained because he was occasionally breaking through the sedation and would then try to remove the breathing tube. (He pulled it out once in the ER.) Someone came in and stitched two of the three cuts.
The first two days were touch and go. They gave him two units of blood on the second day. The afternoon of the third day he was completely weaned from the breathing tube and he was awake. He was moved out of ICU on the fifth day. After six more days of speech therapy, breathing treatments, blood draws and learning how to give himself a shot in the stomach, he came home on 12/30.
The first few days home were pretty hard for him but slowly he is improving. He has seen the pulmonologist, cardiologist, and Tues. sees his primary care physician to have his blood checked. He will be on Coumadin for at least six months. Next Monday (1/26) he hopes to return to work. Pretty good for a guy who almost died five weeks ago, huh?
P.S. he no longer smokes!! Yay!
To my scrapping friends especially Marie who left her family to get to the hospital that first day, Patti, Janet, Julie, and Susan, a huge THANK YOU for your prayers, support and helping to keep me calm; to my dear friend, Kathy who dropped everything and drove over from Conroe to stay with me, you are the epitome of a true friend, I can never thank you enough; to my sister Ruth who is always by my side, I don't know what I would do without you. This last year has been a medical adventure for us with Dad and now Brian. I hope 2009 is a year where we can catch our breath finally. Thanks to my niece Roxy and her boyfriend, Sam for being there whenever you could, for making Uncle Brian laugh even when he didn't think he could. Thanks to my big sister, Marj and my niece Heather (and Daniel for sharing her). More thank yous to my nephew, Alec and his wife, Crystal for helping me sort out the medical jargon and reassuring me that things were progressing as they should. Thanks to my cousin, Cathy and my lifelong friend, Winnie. Thanks to all the people that we don't even know who were out there praying for us.
