We are home, and Amanda is doing good. She isn’t as far along as we’d anticipated but still doing relatively well for having her bone sawed off and metal parts hammered on!
I do have to say that was one of the worst hospital stays we’ve ever had, and we’ve had a lot. I’ll start with the thing we couldn’t change, our neighbor. Thank goodness for covid and just a new era, we weren’t sharing a room. Our start with hospitals was my stay when I was busted up pretty good ten days before our wedding and spent those ten days in a large room with four patients! We’ve come a long way since then. Back to our neighbor, she was the loudest, most annoying lady. She would moan in pain, which mostly seemed for attention because she could talk on the phone in a perfectly fine tone just after belting out in pain! Also, screaming the name of the nurses and tech constantly. I will say the staff handled it better than I would have; I’d have likely just rolled her out in the street!
That was out of the control of the hospital. Everything else they were privy to. When I say our stay was one of the worst we’ve had, that comes with weight. We’ve had well over 100 hospital stays. Besides the medication issues, the discharge was by far the worst. Not leaving the hospital till nearly 7 pm. Discharges never go quick, much less as quickly as you like once you get the hope of escaping. They never put in orders for the nerve block bulb. So our wait was consumed partially by a few hours waiting for the pharmacy to fill that. It put us so far behind we had to get a friend to pick up Amanda’s pain medication from a neighboring town before they closed. I’ll spare you all the rest of the details of how horrible this hospital trip was, but Amanda got fed up once we had been waiting forever. As we were getting ready right before we left, the old lady moaning sounds as the backdrop, Amanda said get a pillow. I asked to smother her, and she said yes!
The ride home was as brutal as you’d imagine, her knee feeling every bump. We’re heading to get some Chipotle as we left because we were both getting hangry, maybe just regular angry too! We hit the road straight to our friend’s house, a little over an hour away, to grab the meds she had secured. A quick stop at Dairy Queen to stretch Amanda’s leg to help prevent clots. I also took the occasion to grab their new churro-dipped cone. Then the final 45 minutes home.
The hospital called the next day to inform of Amanda’s rejection med levels. Initially, the hospitalist was waiting to discharge us until he received the levels. Little did he know we wouldn’t have let him adjust those meds anyway. Long story short, they didn’t draw the labs the first day at trough level, the lowest level of the med right before the next dose is taken. So it showed a high result; the next blood draw was at the correct time. Well, the nurse called and gave us a number that seemed high. Amanda questioned it and looked on her my chart app for the hospital, and the level the nurse gave her was the wrong level, not even the one they were waiting on. The level drawn at the correct time was within range. This is so dangerous because we were instructed to call the transplant team with the wrong level. Good things we checked ourselves.
The weekend went ok with the exercises we were given, and sometimes the pain would surge and be out of control. Our first PT appointment was the following Monday, a 30-minute drive away. We arrived at the scheduled time, but the receptionist didn’t put us on the therapist’s schedule, so we had to wait almost 2 hours before being seen. The therapist wasn’t the one we’d been recommended by friends that had been to the same center before. She was great, though, a younger lady that was the daughter of a retired railroader I used to work with. He is now having lung problems and is in the process of getting listed for a lung transplant, so it worked out, and we were able to offer advice.
After that first PT appointment, Amanda was hurting, and the swelling increased through the following days and the next PT session. With the swelling, the pain increased as well. It has since gone down a little better no still very noticeable. We’d expected she wouldn’t have progressed much. On the bendy machine, she’d gone backward, unable to get much bend. To our surprise, she’s gained 15 more degrees of bend, though.
Today we were off in the other direction to our primary doc 40 miles away. We needed to see him for surgery follow-up and to get another script for pain meds. We didn’t use our local pharmacy but the one in the same town as the doctor. When I picked up the medication, I couldn’t get it. As an opioid, it had only been halfway through the other prescription, so I wasn’t allowed to get it till Sunday. We won’t be going van to town, and it’s a nightmare transferring these types of prescriptions. She’ll be out Sunday night. We’ll be through Monday as we make our way for a follow-up with the surgeon, but she’d miss a dose. So I’ll have to make a special trip over Sunday, I guess.
Tomorrow we have our 3rd PT appointment. Then if Amanda’s up for it, we need to make our way south an hour to deliver paperwork for my mother. I’m still handling details for her following my fathers passing. Saturday will be a down day, but then the script run followed by PT or doctor visits every day next week.