Here We Go Again

Journal Entry

Date: March 30, 2013 9:47 PM

Topic: Here We Go Again

Jeannie came home for the weekend.  She has been taking care of her dad all week and is exhausted. We both slept late this morning.

I got up around 10 AM and went into the kitchen to make my first cup of the day.  Pop tootled in a couple minutes after me.  As we were talking he mentioned he thought the morphine Dr. Lee put him on was making him dizzy.  My paranoia immediately kicked in.  We’d been down this road several times lately and it always started with Pop feeling dizzy.  I feared it wasn’t euphoria from the morphine making his head spin.  I asked him if he had checked his heart rate this morning.  He hadn’t.  I had given him a little finger style heart monitor after the first trip to the ER and we promptly went to his room to get it.  Yep, his heart rate was going up to over 130 bpm then down to into the 60’s then back up again.  We called his cardiologist, Doctor Din and confirmed we needed to take him to the ER.

We spent all afternoon in the Emergency Room at Dr. P. Phillips Hospital (again).  When the nurse, Zuleima, came in to setup Dad and get his information, I told her that his veins were really hard to hit.  They almost always have to stick him several times before they finally get an IV specialist to come and get the line in.  She told us they had to try at least twice before calling in the IV team.  However, next thing we know a guy comes in with a sonogram and quickly, almost painlessly, finds a vein in Dad’s arm and gets it first try.  No digging around, no pushing the needle back and forth, in and out.  The nurse had decided to go ahead and have a specialist put the IV in saving Dad a lot of extra pain.  Thanks Zuleima! Thanks Alex!

Dad finally was admitted to the hospital and moved to a room at around 7:30 PM.  We stuck around until we talked to the floor doctor and the nurse on duty.  Then we headed over to Jeannie’s mom and dad’s house for a few minutes to get some meds she forgot to bring home.  We finally got back to our house a little before 10 PM.  We are both wiped out.  My head is hurting so bad my eyes feel as if they are going to pop out.  Time for drugs and a bit of zone out time in front of the tube.   Then to bed…