The Sick And The Recovering.

Yesterday, Wednesday June22, my wife P. had Gall Bladder surgery. Our son J. came on Tuesday evening to bring his mother to the hospital and back home after the surgery. They left for the hospital at 5:45. By 7:30 AM, P. was brought to the surgery suite. By 10:00 AM J. was talking to the surgeon who told him that P. was doing well and should be able to come home soon.. J. and P. walked in the front door shortly before noon.

Once J. and the lunch lady had P. settled in bed, J. decided to wash, wax and clean his car while his mother slept most of yesterday afternoon away. J. stayed and fixed supper for him and me. After supper and making certain that neither P. nor I needed anything, he took off to spend the evening with some friends watching the cross-town baseball classic, the White Sox playing the Cubs.

I the Sick and P. the Recovering are glad the busyness of the first part of June and that the surgery are behind us. Neither P. nor I are the type of people who neither want nor like to have a lot of attention when we aren’t feeling well, so we welcome the chance today to spend time by ourselves resting and recuperating, P. from having major surgery and I from all the fun and business of the first half of June.

I Almost Missed Father’s Day

Last Friday P. called my Pulmonologist asking if they had received the results of my latest sputum culture. While P was talking to the doctor she mentioned that I had started to suction bloody sputum. Because the Pulmonologist hadn’t received the final results of the sputum culture and because of the bleeding in my lungs, the decision was made to admit me to the hospital Saturday morning. So Saturday morning C. our oldest brought me to the hospital. After many phone calls and signing a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) form the hospital was able to get my final results of the sputum culture which showed I had no infection. After talking things over with my doctor, hospital nurse and the Respiratory Therapist it was decided that the bloody sputum was a result of being on Coumadin and Tobramycin Inhalation. So I was released and was home in time for supper. So I was home for Father’s Day. All of our children were here yesterday for dinner. A dinner they made so P. was able to just sit and visit as they prepared the meal.

About mid afternoon, our son C. daughter in-law K. and grandson L. left to go home. This means, that our grandson’s visit with us has come to an end. Now I will have no one to watch late afternoon TV with. L. and I had settled into a routine where I would be sitting in my bed and he would sit in my wheelchair and we would watch a couple of different “how do they make things” shows and discuss why they used those methods to manufacture the various products. However, before L. went home he wanted to drive my wheelchair out to the garage so his father could spray a lubricant on the hinges of my foot supports. The entire time L. has been here he has mentioned that the foot supports squeaked when moved up or down. So after our Father’s Day dinner, I sat in the wheelchair and he stood on the squeaky foot supports, with the wheelchair in the slowest speed, L. drove the chair through the house, up and out the garage door, around the tight corners and down the ramp so his dad could spray the lubricant silencing the annoying squeak. Then he drove the chair back up the ramp around those tight corners through the house into my bedroom so I could return to bed.

I will certainly miss spending time with our grandson L. I am not as certain if I will miss all the busyness a 6 ½, the ½ is extremely important, year.

Here L is making a cave.





And when L was bored with GrandPippy, he made a bag mask.

Busy Month

It has been an extremely busy month around here. On Friday June 3, 2011 my nephew I. and his fiancée came to stay for a couple days. They were here to attend I’s college roommate’s wedding. They headed home Sunday morning and shortly after lunch my college roommate H., who I haven’t seen in 38 years, and his wife C. came. H. and C., who live in Alberta, Canada had taken a month long vacation to attend a wedding on the east coast of Canada. On the way back they stopped by us for a couple of days.

H. has not changed much. He is still the same H. I remember from college. I remember all the many long discussions we had about all sorts of things. I also remember that he taught me how to play Cribbage and how he didn’t like to play as much once I caught on to the game and started to win. They left us Wednesday morning and that afternoon, P met our son and family and brought our 6 year old grandson home to stay with us until Sunday June 19 when his parents will come to pick him up.

For the first 6 days P. was on vacation from work so she and L. went and did a lot of things. However, yesterday P. was back at work so it was just L. and me home alone. Well not exactly home alone, the Home Health Nurse came, the lady came to clean my trach and get me lunch and do whatever else needed doing around here. Then a couple of hours after lunch the Home Aid came to help me shower. However, in the middle when there was no activity I think poor L. was a bit bored. At one point he said that he wished his Grandmother was still home. I don’t think it helped that I ended up having to take a nap after breakfast and again after lunch. However, L. did take a paper grocery bag and cut eye, nose, mouth and arm holed in it to wear as a mask.

Today L. is going over to some friends of ours who have a couple of kids his age. Tomorrow our daughter K. is coming to stay here with me and I am certain L. and his aunt will be able to find lots to do.

Right now as I am in bed writing this he is sitting in my wheelchair watching the Movie “Wallace & Grommit the Curse of the Were-Rabbit” waiting for our friends to come.

Our friends just came and it sounds like they will be going strawberry picking. Hopefully they manage to pick enough so we can have some fresh locally grown berries. Also hopefully, L. doesn’t get too muddy.

What A Yeasty Morning

This morning I woke up and discovered that all around my tracheotomy stoma itched really badly. When I looked in the mirror, I discovered that I have a yeast infection growing around the site. We have some medicine cream left from my last yeast infection around my tracheotomy stoma so I applied the cream. Tomorrow the home health nurse will stop by to test my Coumadin level and collect a sputum sample for culturing, so I will ask her to contact my doctor about this yeast infection. I have found that it is better to have the nurse contact the doctor for me. It seems that the doctors believe nurses better then they believe me.

I know that when on antibiotics, especially when I am on antibiotics for a long time, I tend to get a yeast infection. So as soon as the doctor orders antibiotic I start eating a yogurt with active cultures to prevent my getting a yeast infection. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t work. This is one of those times it didn’t work.

Hopefully the Tobramycin will clear up this nasty lung infection without having to be in the hospital for IV drugs. If I end up in the hospital I think I will try to talk the doctor into allowing me to have a PICC line which will allow me to stay home and administer the IV drug myself. However, there is one huge problem and that is the last time I had a PICC line I ended up with a blood clot which hasn’t clear up yet. Well if there is one thing I have learned it is not to borrow trouble so I will just pray that the Tobramycin clears up this nasty infection.

Time to Start Again

This past Saturday I received an email from L., the lady who over the past number of years has been my Home Bound Librarian, telling me that the time has arrived for her to retire. Over the years, I have always made it a habit to write a short email talking about what has happened in my life since the last time I sent in a list of books I would be interested in reading. One think L. mentioned in her retirement email was that she would be able to keep up with me by reading my Blog MyTippy. One of the original purposes of MyTippy was to document my experience with SpinoCerebellar Ataxia. Another reason was to give me something to keep busy at.

When L wrote that she would continue to follow me on my MyTippy Blog, I thought about why I decided to stop writing. Last October, 2010 I thought that MyTippy was beginning to be about all the lung infections and hospital stays I have been experiencing and that my life had become a life of doing the same thing day after day with my doctor visits every couple of weeks.

Another reason I decided to stop posting has to do with my right hand wrist. When I was younger I broke my right wrist, although I don’t remember breaking it. The Orthopedic doctor told me that the break has healed, but now the calcium that formed around the break is rubbing on a nerve. It was OK as long as I was on anti inflammatory medicine, but once I no longer could take that medicine it would start to hurt while typing.

After more thought, I decided that my life is more than lung infections and hospital stays and aching wrist. So I have decided to begin posting on MyTippy again.

So the first thing I will post is that for the past 4 weeks I have been, once again, fighting a lung infection. This one is a rather nasty infection; of course my doctor told P. that I always seem to get the more nasty/serious lung infections. I think my doctor would have hospitalized me only I really didn’t want to be in the hospital. I really hate being in the hospital I always feel so silly being in an ICU bed when I don’t feel sick enough to in ICU. Of course the hospital and my doctors have a different opinion and think I need to be in ICU because of being on a ventilator.

In my next post I will tell why I didn’t want to be hospitalized.