As stated in the Blog's outline, Carol's odyssey started in earnest early-to-mid-November. She found it increasingly painful to walk. Steroid injections around the sacroiliac joint (SI Joint) seemed to help so they performed a procedure where they used x-ray to guide "focused doses" of the steroid into the joint. I believe that was on the 18th of December.
It took a couple of weeks but the procedure seemed to be helping. During this time she wasn't able to walk and she spent a good bit of time sitting on the edge of a chair which is probably the reason for the next problem: The last five or six days of December she got very short of breath toward the end of the day. She went to the doctor a couple of times but they couldn't find a reason for this. About 2 AM on January 2nd I took her to the ER of Christiana Hospital where they discovered that she had a pulmonary embolism (a blood clot in her lung[s]).
She spent about a week and a half in the hospital for that. During that stay she opted for a stint in a rehab facility for her hip/pelvis/SI joint. She didn't gain a whole lot of improvement there but she did discover that she could walk with a specialized walker. It wasn't much of a silver lining but she could get some exercise and that would hopefully prevent another blood clot.
About six days after she got out of rehab I checked her temperature; it was 102.4. I took her to the emergency room. Because she took a pain pill that had Tylenol in it before we left the house, her temperature was just under 100 when we got to the hospital. They ran some tests and checked her over pretty good but didn't find a reason for the elevated temperature. They told her to come back if she felt worse and to make an appointment with her general practitioner (Dr. John O'Neil). That was early (very early) on a Tuesday. We got an appointment with Dr. O'Neil for Friday. He looked Carol over, found nothing, ordered some tests, listed several things that may have caused the spike in temperature, listed a set of things to watch out for, told us to keep a close eye on her temperature and told us to go to the ER if she had a change in her condition (the only symptom she had was the elevated temperature of Tuesday morning and a continued low-grade temperature). This was about 4 PM Friday, February 22nd.
Ten hours later she got up to use the restroom. She was experiencing abdominal pain and as I helped her get back in bed she complained of being cold. I gave her extra covers but she still felt cold and she was shivering. I placed a heating pad under her and another one on top of her. After 40 minutes I checked on her and she was still shivering. I quickly got her dressed and rushed her to the hospital. At 7:30 AM a doctor was explaining that a CAT scan revealed a perforated colon and likely drainage into the stomach cavity. Two hours after that they were performing emergency surgery. It would later be revealed that the surgeon wasn't very hopeful of a successful outcome- Carol was very sick.
She had a breathing tube in place and her breathing was assisted by a ventilator. Normally the breathing tube would be removed that Monday but they kept it inserted an extra day as a precaution to complications. About 12 hours after they removed it on Tuesday, they had to reinsert it because it was difficult for her to breathe and she wasn't getting enough oxygen into her system. They ran a CAT scan which revealed an enlarged heart, decreased blood flow to the lungs and fluid in the chest cavity. In other words she was sick in ways we didn't realize until that time. Other tests revealed blood flow obstructions to the heart and they wanted to do when angiogram the following day (Friday). This was just a couple of hours after they prepared to perform a tracheotomy to safeguard against complications in removing the breathing tube again, which they also wanted to do the following day (Friday). We canceled the tracheotomy schedule and scheduled for the angiogram which was canceled due to scheduling conflicts. In the end she received the tracheotomy on Tuesday and the angiogram was performed Wednesday, which is where we will rest this post.
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