*****Warning*****
This posting may contain adult language of the type I have always used before. If you are sensitive to profanity and/or bloody and gory medical language you should probably not read further.
The days we live in are truly miraculous. This past Tuesday I went into the hospital to undergo “Brain Coiling” This is where they go in through my femoral artery like a heart cath and snake a catheter up into my brain. They then place tiny coils made of platinum into the aneurysm to prevent it’s growth and eventual rupture. If one of these things blows (ruptures) in your head it’s good night nurse. It is the worst form of stroke there is. It’s what killed my mother 39 years ago. It is a really bad son of a bitch.
Unlike a heart cath, they completely knock you out for this procedure. The last thing they want his for you to snore or hiccup while they are snaking a tiny wire around in the arteries of your brain. A big dose of Fentanyl (Amazing shit!) and then Michael Jackson’s sleeping drug of choice Propofol. Bang you are snoozing in seconds. A tube is jammed in your trachea so you can breath on a machine and a tube is muscled up your pecker so that your pee can escape without you soaking the operating table.
Just wait it get’s better.
As the procedure was winding down, or so I am told, they were pulling out the catheter and my heart decided to slow down. I mean really slow. They saw this and gave me some atropine and epinephrine to speed me up. Well the drugs sent me into Atrial Fibrillation. The top half of my heart was quivering like Jello. When this happens there isn’t any blood pumped into the ventricles. The ventricles do the heavy lifting work of the heart by pumping the blood out to the body and brain. In response to this quivering, sometimes the ventricles go into overdrive to compensate and start beating REALLY fast. Sometimes upwards of 200+ beats per minute. At this point I am officially in big trouble. They slapped the defibrillator patches on to my hairy chest and back (Thanks for that guys!) and proceed to cardiovert me back into a stable rythem. Some more drugs and the breathing tube removed and I am whisked right up to the Neurological Intensive Care Unit (bypassing the normal post anesthesia care unit). Then the fun begins.
You see, I am a heart patient and heart patients need to be careful of their fluid intake. During all the fiddling around in my brain they used a lot of IV fluid like 3+ liters or so. When my heart started to loose pumping efficiency all this fluid came out of the blood stream and into my lungs. They saw this coming in the operating room and slapped a BIPAP machine on me to force air down my throat into my lungs since the endotracheal tube had been removed. I was awake and very aware that I was dying. I was breathing at about 50 breaths per minute and maybe getting a shot glass full of air at a time. When you go to the Dr. and he listens to your chest and tells you to breathe in deeply while he listens, he is looking for “crackles” to see if there is fluid in your lungs. Imagine you were crinkling up a potato chip bag in you hands. That's exactly what it sounds like Normally it's very faint and subtle. In my case you could hear it across the room without a stethoscope. Hell I could hear it and it scared the shit out of me. I was so bad off they wouldn’t let Wifey come and see me. Needless to say she was panicked.
What I had is called Pulmonary Flash Edema and it is one serious bitch. You hear the words a lot about fighting for your life and battling the disease and so forth, well let me tell you, when you can’t breathe and are coughing up your lungs and crying tears of agony from the pain in you chest while you are trying to get any air you can possibly get to stay alive, you take that saying much more seriously. You actually make the decision on wether to keep fighting or just drift away. When the darkness starts to come to your peripheral vision and things start closing in on you like a dark tunnel it’s that decision time.
I was given a pretty big dose of a drug called Lasix. It is a big gun diuretic. When I was a paramedic working on the ambulance we would make sure we only gave it to patients when we were less than about 5 minutes to the hospital as we surely didn’t want someone peeing all over our ambulance. It works that fast and it is vicious. After the Lasix was onboard my foley bag started filling with urine. One thousand CC (a little more than a quart) then two thousand then three thousand CCs all in under an hour. As the fluid was pouring out Caesar’s pee tube I was getting more and more air in my lungs and coughing less and less. After about 3 hours I had passed a little over 5,000 (five thousand) cc’s. That’s more than 10 pounds of liquid that was residing in my body and lungs.
I was exhausted and wish I could say that I slept well that night but I didn’t. I was still coughing up gobs of shit and could never drift completely off to sleep. To make matters worse, due to the asinine COVID restrictions they have in place, they threw Wifey out of the unit at 11:00pm as if she was going to become some sort of COVID threat after a certain time. She is a Masters Degree Registered Nurse on staff at that hospital and has had both of her Covid vaccinations already. I’m still pissed they wouldn’t let her stay the night with me. Such asshole policies they have put in place due to this fucking virus.
Wifey tells me to shut up and be grateful that there was such a talented and dedicated staff available to keep me alive. If it were not for her using her connections to get things done and calling in favors owed her you might not be reading this now. The whole event was terrifying and painful beyond anything I have ever imagined. I experienced drowning it it’s worst form. If you are drowning in a lake this agony lasts for a few minutes. For me it went on for hours. When I have chest pain from my heart problems I know that it will be over pretty quickly one way or another. Laying there coughing and drowning in my own fluids for what seemed like an eternity was infinitely worse.
Oh, That’s right, What about the haunted bed, I hear you cry. Well the fancy hospital bed I was in had a special therapeutic air mattress that would inflate ever so slightly every minute or so. It’s supposed to prevent you from getting bed sores or some such horse shit. All it did was freak me out and keep me from sleeping.
There you have it. How I spent the last two days. I am home now and relaxing comfortably. I am bruised beyond belief from the IVs, arterial lines and blood sugar jabs.
And I couldn’t care less.
Chuckie Cummins
2/11/21
