Officially Moved From ICU

Some good news for a change. They moved me from the ICU early this morning. They needed the room. I was ok with that. Since I’m improving, there’s no reason for me to stay there.

I owe a big thank you to Dr Chauhan. He’s now on the “team” of care. He was the cardiologist who did my surgery. He was very quick to get in, and address the clots in my heart. He made sure to stop by and see me 1-2 times a day. He would always answer any question, no matter how small.

But since I’ve moved from the ICU, I can only assume that I will be going home today, tonight, or tomorrow. I did tell the floor hospitalist that she needs to sync up with Dr. Kaufman to make sure they have dispensed the vancomycin, and that all the prior auth’s are done for the posaconazole. She did start to mention that Kaufman was going to give me Dalbavancin, but I told the hospitalist, that per my conversation with Kaufman yesterday, its vancomycin. Period. No substitutions.

I don’t want to leave the hospital, and have ANY holdups with getting the medications I need to have at home. I’m done jumping through the insurance hoops. I’ve had those surprises before, where auths weren’t done, and I’ve had to pay cash, or just return to the hospital because I was just going the other way. Because once I leave here, I’ll be going to the hotel that they put us up in while they deal with the mold. I have no plans to go anywhere for the next 3-4 weeks. I just want to be with my furbabies. I miss them. I’m pretty sure they think something serious happened to me (they aren’t wrong). When Athena would yell at me as of late, she would sniff me, and continually yell at me and keep sniffing. Maybe she was sensing this coming. Animals are well known for being able to have a heightened sense of smell.

The more I think about it, Athena became extremely vocal with me within the past 3 months. Always trying to get my attention. I always thought she was trying to just get more snacks, which I wouldn’t blame her, but when she would smell me, she would smell my face, my nose, and the top of my head. It just makes me wonder if she was sensing what was coming.

It’s really crazy to think that I am 43, and I’ve survived 5 heart attacks. All under 24 hours. I do look at myself and wonder how did I become this strong. This resilient. Anies is a big part of my life, she is one of the main things that keeps driving me forward. Gives me a reason to “stick around”. Same thing with my cats, all 3 of them are pretty special. They make going home something to look forward to.

I did contact Sedgwick 2 days ago, to reopen my STD claim. I only have a few weeks left. To my surprise, me returning back to work both times, gave me enough time to refill my FMLA.

FMLA is time given to you at the Federal level that is job protection. Having my FMLA back is a fucking godsend. All 8 weeks are back again. Part from that, the STD exhaustion issue I was facing, has reset. So what this means is I could be out again for another 6 months. 8 weeks of that, my job is protected through FMLA, if I need more time beyond that, I’ll have to do an ADA just like last time. I don’t think it will get that far, or that I’ll need that much time.

All I know is that this week, yes definitely I need to be out, but when I get home. From what I feel, what I’ve gone through, what I’ve had to endure, that I think 3-4 weeks when I return “home” will give me the time I need to heal, recover. All this is really doing, is just telling me to slow down. Take all the time I need so that I can just take the next 5-6 weeks, take my antibiotics, stay on the antifungal, take everything else that the cardio needs me to take. Sleep. Rest.

Hopefully the pus stops coming out of my mouth soon. That was one of the main reasons I started smoking again. To “erase” the taste. But now that maybe we have the infection under control now, the symptoms will just start going away. Everything I feel in my mouth feels like its getting smaller, less intense. Yes, I still taste it, but its not as bad as it was. So the other thing that I will need to do, is just start slowing down my nicotine intake. Ease off of it, and done. It’s been helpful with the nasty taste #1, and also taking the edge off of all this anxiety I’ve had to endure #2. I’ve missed it, but at the same time not. It’s definitely expensive. Anywhere from $60-70 a week. It will be nice to not spend this anymore either, I really need to get rid of this medical debt.

Nursing staff just came in, they started my vancomycin. This takes about an hour to go in. As long as it goes in slow, everything will be ok. I’m glad I did get the port placed, and I don’t have to have a PICC line. I’m pretty sure the PICC lines are part of the clotting problem anyway. We had to unclog them several times. So I’m sure thats where the real sources of the clots came from.