home now
Previously...
https://wobblybear.uk/post/i-m-inside-again
Things can move quickly in the health service sometimes. The fastest it moves is when they've decided they need the bed you are taking up when they have someone much more ill to put in it instead.
Yesterday I found myself just finishing my breakfast cereal when the consultant visited with a junior doctor. He went through my charts, asked me to reiterate my heart health history story yet again, and then told me that they'd be taking a decision on the need for a further operation at a heart surgeons meeting, on the coming Thursday.
However, being as it was currently Tuesday, there was no point in hanging about in the hospital bed there when I could be at home instead.
Although my pulse still showed me to easily kicking up to 100 plus when I moved (my biggest regular journey being walking to the bathroom and back), now, with the power of the much increased beta-blocker dose, the resting rate had nearly stabilised at around 75-80, with a 65 being the lowest score when they did the observations round soon after waking. This, it had been deemed, was a safe enough level to sit at home being quiet, instead of sitting on a bed in their ward being quiet.
This was at about 10.30am. By 12 noon I was sat, dressed again and in a wheelchair, possessions organised ready on my lap in the backpack to go.
I didn't have much with me. I'd been living out of the go-bag rucksack I'd taken, plus some clean clothing I'd eked out that J had brought down for me on her last visit. I wasn't really expecting more than one night's stay to start off with, so her re-supply mission had been appreciated a couple of days previous.
I was waiting to be transported to the Discharge Lounge (pushed, not walking... I'd been a long time seriously off my feet), where I could be sat waiting for my uprated dosage beta blocker meds to be ready to take at home. J could then pick me up when she had made the hour and a half drive to come fetch me.
And that was it. Breakfast to travelling home along the A30 wth J in under three hours, which, as I say, is about as fast as things happen in the NHS. (Don't get me wrong.... we LOVE the NHS, and hope against hope that the already aggressively voracious US health interests can be fought off, now and forever).
It was weird being home at first. I felt detached from the world, deeper in my mind, a slight distance between connection and sensations. It was necessary to have a few hours period of reorientation before it all connected up again and felt like home.
And I was tired. Am tired. Very, very tired.
Which I think is amazing after more or less spending six days in bed.
The thing is though, as one of the nurses had said, the difference is that my heart was running at about the level you'd expect for a marathon runner most of the time, but while I was very much not running. As far as my heart was concerned, it was involved in some ultra marathon event, 24 hours a day.
Even now, it's still not in a regular sinus rhythm either, but it has settled down to around 75-85bpm now.
I had a long and good night's sleep at last – no waking to proffer my arm and ear for blood pressure, HR, and temperature checks at silly times of the night here! But I managed two hours awake for breakfast and a catch up this morning, then I was gone and asleep again.
Basically, I seem to just wake up to be fed and go out for a tinkle. Like my dog.
I'm home now, but it does feel like I might well be spending most of the time before going back in asleep anyway.
That's one way to make it feel like a shorter wait.
